The global market for watches & jewelry is expected to reach $366 billion by 2025. If you’ve got a passion for jewelry, you can easily claim a piece of that billion-dollar market by starting your own jewelry line. This post is a complete guide for anyone who wants to start a lucrative business and sell wholesale jewelry.
How to Start Your Own Jewelry Line
Let’s start with the basics.
Do you have a knack for designing and creating jewelry? If yes, a jewelry business can be a great opportunity for you.
But before you try to step into the market, it’s good to know about the market size, competition, niches, and all the nitty-gritty of making jewelry.
Stats and Facts to Keep Your Pulse On
- The Accessories market consists of two segments: Watches & Jewelry and Luggage & Bags.
- The Watches & Jewelry segment is rapidly growing and is generating more sales than the other.
- In 2019, people of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Switzerland spent the highest share of their income on Accessories.
- The market for affordable fashion jewelry is expected to grow with an increase in online sales
Types of Jewelry and Which One to Choose
Although lucrative, the jewelry market is really competitive with big players dominating every niche. To stand out, the more niche you go, the better. Here are the two distinct types of jewelry out there.
To pick your niche, you first need to choose which type of jewelry you’ll specialize in and then go deeper and pick a certain style in that category and dominate it.
Fashion Jewelry
Fashion jewelry uses affordable materials and lower costs and is meant for everyday use. A single piece is usually priced between $1 – 100. If you’re thinking to start your jewelry line and sell wholesale in bulk, this is the category to choose. However, your pricing needs to be in the affordable range to get success with your brand.
Fine Jewelry
Fine jewelry is high-end luxury jewelry made with precious materials like gold, silver, diamond, gemstones, etc.
The prices of fine jewelry pieces lie between $100 – 10,000 per item and they’re usually worn on special occasions.
To start a business in fine jewelry, you need a huge investment in getting the materials needed. Plus, fine jewelry is usually made in singles rather than in bulk and at scale. You also don’t sell fine jewelry wholesale.
Since most customers like to customize their designs, it’s normal for fine jewelry designers to have a catalog of designs from which the customer can pick and choose when ordering his own design.
Manufacturing – Handmade vs Outsourcing
Handmade Jewelry
Are crafts your kind of thing? If yes, making handmade jewelry can get you started.
There are plenty of jewelry tutorials and jewelry-making courses that can help. When it comes to DIY, you can make anything from funky fashion jewelry like those tassel earrings to fine jewelry pieces like a gold ring. However, the gold ring would take a lot more time and advanced skills to create by hand than the tassel earring.
Plus, fine jewelry is mostly made-on-order rather than produced at scale as a single piece can cost thousands of dollars.
So, if you want to sell wholesale, keep your eyes set on the latest trends in fashion jewelry and try to capture a share of that market.
Outsourcing Production
Want to take your jewelry business to the next level?
Run a search on Google for ‘jewelry manufacturers’ and try to find a local factory. The ‘Made Locally’ has its own charm and will give you an instant edge.
But if local factories are too costly, don’t be afraid to strike a deal with a factory located overseas like China or Thailand.
All jewelry factories have a Minimum Order Requirement for each design of jewelry and a Minimum Order Value. So, you’ll need to invest a considerable amount upfront.
Many factories have ready-made designs that you can order from. But they also have an option of custom designs. If you’re good at designing, use a software to create a 3D model of the jewelry piece you want. You can then ask the manufacturer to create that custom piece. This approach is highly recommended as it will give a personality to your jewelry line and make it stand out.
The Jewelry Manufacturing Process – How It’s Done
This infographic clearly explains the jewelry manufacturing process. It’s important to understand this process before getting into jewelry manufacturing – whether you do it in-house or outsource production.
Create Cohesive Jewelry Designs
When designing your jewelry line to sell wholesale, make sure your collection looks cohesive. Consumers may be interested in a variety of different designs but when retailers stock up their shops, they usually look for jewelry ‘collections’ that have a cohesive look and feel.
Hence, keep this important point in mind when designing and producing your jewelry line.
Having a cohesive collection will also work best for your business. Instead of experimenting with different designs, come up with one design and create a whole collection from it in different styles and colors.
Take Care of the Paperwork
Before you start selling your jewelry, take care of the legalities in your area. Legal requirements vary, depending on where you live but generally you require these two to get started:
Business License: This is required for all businesses and it allows you to deduct business expenses when filing taxes. A sole proprietor license is good to go for a small business with a few employees.
Seller’s Permit: Getting a seller’s permit allows you to avoid paying sales taxes when buying supplies for your jewelry. Plus, without a seller’s permit, you might have a hard time buying supplies from wholesalers since most businesses don’t sell unless you have a seller’s permit.
Where to Sell Your Jewelry – DTC or Wholesale?
Now that you have rolled out your own jewelry line, the next step is to sell it. You have two options here: sell directly to consumers or sell wholesale to other retailers.
While you should essentially be doing both, it’s recommended to start with wholesale.
Why to Sell Wholesale Jewelry
These points summarize the benefits of selling wholesale jewelry over DTC:
- Retail businesses will buy in bulk from you so you don’t need as many buyers to earn a decent revenue as opposed to when you sell to consumers
- Consumers are more demanding than business buyers when it comes to customer service, which means your overhead will increase in DTC
- When you sell wholesale to other shops, the visibility of your products increases and you can widen the reach of your products. Getting your jewelry pieces in a shop means all of that shop’s visitors get to know about your brand. Even when you start selling DTC later on, you won’t need to invest as much in marketing to create brand awareness.
Factors To Consider when Selling Wholesale Jewelry
Selling wholesale is very different from selling to consumers. Consider the following factors before putting out your products on sale.
Wholesale Pricing
Your wholesale price will take into account the cost of materials, labor, time, and your profit. Even if you’re making handmade jewelry yourself, factor in the labor and time cost. This is the cost someone would charge to create that jewelry piece for you.
The amount calculated will be your wholesale price – the price you’ll quote to the retailer you sell to. The retailer would then mark up this cost – usually between 2-3% – when selling to its customers. If you sell DTC alongside wholesale, you’ll use this marked-up cost as well.
Set a Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ)
The margins in wholesale are pretty slim. But since most retailers buy in bulk, you can make up for the lower prices. This means you need to set a Minimum Order Quantity to make an order worthwhile for you. However, the MOQ you set should also make sense for the store buying from you.
Most jewelry suppliers have a per-piece minimum instead of a dollar amount like $1000. You’ll also need to set a per-piece MOQ for each style or color of a particular product – for example, 4 minimum pieces in one color of earrings.
Instead of setting a flat MOQ that’s globally applied to all the products in your store, you can also set different minimums for individual products in your store.
Creating an Online Store with B2BWoo to Sell Wholesale Jewelry
With all things considered, taken care of, and your jewelry ready to sell now’s the time to showcase and sell it.
Usually, when you sell wholesale to retailers, you have a PDF sheet called a ‘line sheet’ with your SKUs listed along with their pictures and some description. Jewelry brands use this line sheet when pitching to retailers.
However, times have changed. The retailers you’re going to pitch are all digital natives who like shopping and browsing online. They prefer self-service experiences over calls and meetings.
Hence, creating an online catalog will provide a much better experience to these buyers. Plus, you can display higher resolution images on an online catalog and have better chances of getting orders.
With B2BWoo wholesale platform, you can do both: create an online catalog and also offer an online ordering experience for your wholesale buyers. So, if your buyers like your products, they can just create an account instantly, discuss their requirements over the phone or via email, and place an order online. The next time they want to reorder, they can log in to their account and place their order without even picking up the phone.
Since B2BWoo is specially made for wholesale selling, it takes care of all the nuances of wholesaling like custom pricing, MOQs, MOVs, custom payment methods, etc.
Here are some features of B2BWoo that will make it easy for you to sell wholesale jewelry.
Sign up Form for Wholesale Customers
B2BWoo allows you to easily embed a signup form for first time site visitors. You can also enable an Approval Required feature that will send the sign-up request to the admin for approval. This ensures only retail brands you have had a deal with can access your catalog and pricing. By getting store visitors to sign in or sign up before accessing your store, you can also personalize their experience like display custom pricing instead of generic prices.
Price and Catalog Gating
If you want your store visitors to sign up before accessing your store, it’s important to gate some features of your store so that prospects sign up to get full access. With B2BWoo, you can gate either or both your store’s pricing and/or catalog. If you gate the pricing, it shows a “SIGN UP TO VIEW PRICING” button with your store products.
Custom Pricing
Every retailer you work with will be different and each will have a different ‘deal’ with you. When you sell wholesale, you rarely quote a flat price to all of your buyers. Market conditions fluctuate and you need to adjust prices to ensure profitability. Hence, with custom pricing feature, you can display a different price for each of your buyers.
MOQ
To ensure profitability when selling wholesale jewelry, you need to set a Minimum Order Quantity. However, it’s rarely a flat number that can be applied to all of your buyers. The MOQ depends on various factors like the Shipping location, individual buyers, type of jewelry item ordered, etc. With B2BWoo, you can set MOQ rules using all of these rules and personalize the buying experience.
MOV
Like MOQ, Minimum Order Value also depends on various factors. For example, you might want to set a higher MOV for low-margin jewelry items but a lower MOV for certain items that have high margins. With B2BWoo, you can set MOV rules using different factors and conditions.
Request a Sample
Sampling is another common practice when buying and selling wholesale. B2BWoo allows you to sell or give away free samples to your buyers.
Custom Catalogs
You may have 1000s of SKUs in your store but displaying all of those to everyone may just clutter their buying experience. A retailer that’s only interested in buying earrings from you will find all your other items irrelevant. With B2BWoo, you can personalize the experience by displaying only products your buyers are interested in.
Quick Order
The Quick Order feature of B2BWoo allows your repeat buyers to place orders quickly by uploading a CSV sheet or using the search bar.
Request for Quote
RFQs are commonly used when buying wholesale. Customers usually want to a custom quote based on their order quantity, location, etc. B2BWoo has a robust RFQ feature that allows you to correspond with customers with built-in messaging, email triggers, and quote approval processes.
How to Get Started with B2BWoo
Built for small-to-medium-sized manufacturers and wholesalers, B2BWoo offers several options for getting started with selling online.
Managed B2B eCommerce Platform
Want to get started without any development hassles? If you want to stay focused only on the business side of things without getting your hands dirty with the backend, contact us to get a quote for Managed B2B eCommerce Platform. In this solution, everything – from hosting to your store maintenance is on us. You can focus on what matters – acquiring customers and selling.
B2BWoo Plugin Bundle
Want all the benefits of B2BWoo for an affordable cost? We have a solution for you! B2BWoo offers a complete B2BWoo Plugin Bundle. You can just purchase it and then install the whole plugin pack on your existing WooCommerce store. For this option, you do need some technical and WordPress skills and also someone in-house to regularly maintain your store.
Buy the B2BWoo Plugin Bundle.
Implementation Service
In this Done-for-You service, we set up a WooCommerce store for you and install all the plugins needed to get you rolling with your wholesale selling. This one-time service doesn’t include regular maintenance; hence, you need someone in-house or outsourced to regularly maintain your store.
If you’re a WooCommerce B2B store owner and want to enhance your productivity, then B2BWoo is the best option for you. It’s a one-stop-shop for your every WooCommerce B2B eCommerce solutions.