The Museletter: July 2020

Hello Jewelry Lovers!

With cases creeping up again, I wanted to talk through Covid a bit and some of the precautions we are taking to make sure our employees are isolated. Right now we have a single employee in the warehouse at any given time, washing their hands frequently, wearing a mask and shipping orders. The rest of our staff is working from home and will be until this all blows over a bit. We've had no incidents of employees contracting Covid-19 and want to keep it that way.

Like many of you its given me a bit of cabin fever to work from home for months on end, but it has allowed me to focus on getting new products online, updating our website and otherwise trying to improve your shopping experience.

Last month was a productive one as we introduced over 100 new designs, expanded our presence with hundreds of new items on our Amazon, Etsy and eBay stores, and added quite a few antiques to our website. Below are some of the highlights.

Tian-Tsui Takeover

Shashi has manufactured jewelry for some fifty years and in that time he's grown a large collection of antique jewelry. Housed within this collection are a few boxes of art nouveau style pieces from the early 1900's, which use a lost Chinese technique called tian-tsui. Gilded silver is embellished with kingfisher feather for a beautiful iridescent blue finish.

We've blogged about these unique antiques a bit and have showcased a handful of these wonderful pieces on the website and on our social media before, but this month we spent a week putting 30 new pieces online. Our selection available for purchase right now is unparalleled.

Free Shipping

Ya'll have asked us about free shipping about 14 million times, and we've not been super receptive, but starting in early June we decided to test drive offering free shipping on every order. The results have been a resounding success, so we're going to keep it up. Domestic shipping is on us and International shipping is $10 through the end of July (and maybe longer if ya'll keep ordering a lot).

Scaling BoneNE

I've been hesitant to talk about BoneNE Artifacts, my made to order line, in the last few months. Covid impacted my supply chain and slowed down shipments which was embarrassing and sometimes frustrating. With adversity sometimes comes a chance to learn, and the lesson I took away was I needed to start scaling and carrying silver and brass pieces in inventory, which has the happy side effect of making them a bit more affordable.

Above and below are videos of the inaugural pieces in this effort, the Sienamun Ring and Nefertiti's ring - both based on Met Museum artifacts.

New Designs

We got over a hundred new designs online in June but I covered many of them in the June 15th Museletter (Summer Solstice Savings). Here are some of the designs added in the last two weeks, as always you can see all our designs sorted by the freshest stuff here and everything featured below is on sale.

Website Updates

Old Products, New Photography

While I've done a good job highlighting never before seen products with professional photography, in the last few months we've also been updating dozens of classic items to get rid of potato photos. You'll be pleased to know we've added many professional photos to some of our perennial favorites and catalog designs. The eventual goal is for every product on the website to have fresh photos to make your shopping experience more pleasurable.
 

More Laurel Burch Items - Coming Soon

When doing photos on our vintage Shashi and Laurel Inc by Laurel Burch lines I made it about halfway through, but for months now I have been unable to travel to capture the rest. We have some of these collections queued up for professional photos, new designs in the Laurel Inc line should be coming later in July.