The price of precious metal
Posted by Leah on Apr 19, 2006
The price of precious metals has skyrocketed in recent months - in fact, silver is almost twice as expensive per ounce than it was a year or two ago. Gold and platinum are also much higher than they were a few months ago, but since I work in silver more, I’m mostly concerned about the price of silver.
Jewelers have many different approaches for dealing with this - some are simply raising prices, particularly the ones who manufacture large quantities. Others are starting to experiment with alternative metals - copper, brass, titanium, niobium, and stainless steel, to name a few.
I think the rising price of precious metals is a great excuse to experiment with some even more alternative materials - found objects, resin, fibers, hardware bits and pieces, etc. I’m hanging pendants on rubber cords, and stringing beads on memory wire that’s been sitting unused in my studio for months, and I’ve been incorporating rocks and shells that I recently found at the beach into my work. I also have plans to start using resin to incorporate some of my husband’s images (he paints acrylic paintings, www.southwesternvoodoo.com) into my jewelry.
What all of this means for the jewelry buyer is that you will likely see jewelers innovating more than ever, in order to create products that are unique and beautiful and worth owning - but hopefully still at a price people can afford to pay. Even the high-end designers are affected by this - maybe not in terms of what their clients are willing to pay for jewelry, but because increasingly, consumers want a product that is unique - something that not all of their friends own.
