Week 4: Telling Your Story

How to Tell your Story

This week we delved into the art of storytelling, brand attraction, and how to market our own jewellery collection.We explored how crafting compelling narratives can breathe life into seemingly inanimate objects, how people connect their audience with their products and how to creatively tell one’s own story through simple things like colour and tone of 

We travelled with the cohort for the first time this week to the Goldsmiths’ Centre in Farringdon! Joined by the fabulous Bella who is head of branding & marketing for Pivot, she led the session with her expertise and keen eye for design.

Bingo!

To settle into the new space we found ourselves in, we kicked off with a quick fire round of ‘Logo Bingo’. It’s exactly what it says on the tin! In just 15 minutes, we jumped into the world of brand symbols and imagery, trying to match logos to the branded names. Not as easy as you might think! From there, we then went around the group to share a brand that resonated with us and explain why, using three descriptive words. 

The Grand Tour

Chris, the Goldsmiths’ Centre’s Head of Professional Training, gave the cohort a light-hearted tour around the incredible Goldsmiths’ Centre site to welcome and introduce them to the spaces they’d be working and exhibiting in over the coming weeks. The participants were able to ask questions about specialist jewellery equipment, what type of people become jewellers, and how they could get further training from them! One participant in particular was intrigued by the buffing and shining jobs…

Returning to our session space, we delved into the case studies of four London-based jewellery brands where we matched up their collections with the brand's core values and identity. It was an eye-opening experience to see how branding influences jewellery design and marketing and how the participants responded to it.

Hatton Garden 

After a quick lunch, we explored the world-famous streets of Hatton Garden. As we strolled through the heart of London's jewellery district, we considered how jewellery stores were marketing their jewellery pieces, what colours they were using, if displays felt current or old-fashioned, who their target audiences were and if they used marketing tools like big vibrant screens in the window (a few did!). Finding more and more jewellers who specialise in lab-grown diamonds was very interesting to see - a welcome move to a sustainable and ethical way of being glam!

Applying Our Knowledge

We returned to the Goldsmiths’ Centre session space for the final hour and as a group we put our newfound learnings of the jewellery industry into practice. We brainstormed who their target audiences would be, how their customers would feel wearing their jewellery and finally landed on a collection name! (We’ll keep that under wraps for a smidge longer…)

Today’s journey gave the group a fresh perspective on what it takes to create and market a jewellery brand - it’s no easy feat!

Breathing

As always, we drew our session to a close with a grounding group exercise of taking 3 deep breaths together, noticing how our bodies felt, and sharing a one-word answer to how we felt after a few breaths - ‘calm’, ‘centred’, and ‘relaxed’.