Most of the sterling silver chains we sell are light weight snake or curb chains. As with all silver jewellery, you’re paying more for the weight of the silver used, than you are for the design of the jewellery. For this reason, heavy chains do not always sell well, as buyers prefer to spend their money on the accompanying pendants.

During a recent stock take, we came across a small selection of weightier silver chains we thought we had sold out of. These chains can be worn independently, or with an accompanying pendant. Quantities are small, and they are all priced and sold individually, rather than as batches.

Unlike many jewellery wholesalers, our catalogue is divided almost equally between Sterling Silver Jewellery and Costume Jewellery. We already have a dedicated section devoted exclusively to the different types of costume jewellery (necklaces, bracelets, fashion rings, etc.), but up now our silver was scattered around the website, in various locations.

This works fine for customers who buy a little of everything, but not so well for those customers who are only shopping for sterling silver.

With that in mind, we’ve added a new category to our catalogue today - Wholesale Sterling Silver. All of our silver jewellery belongs in this category, and can be found via this page, regardless of whether the item is a ring, pendant, earring, bracelet, or chain. Links to these sub-categories can be found at the top of the new page, allowing you to easily ‘drill down‘ and browse through the type of silver jewellery that appeals to you.

We hope that this will make life just a little easier for our silver buyers.

Stocks of CZ Rings and heavy Sterling Silver Bracelets are now back up to decent levels.

Our large silver bracelets have always proven popular and we had been almost out of stock for a number of weeks. As usual, each bracelet is listed showing its dimensions and weight in grams. With the recent increases in the price of silver, it’s very important that you check the actual weight of items before purchase. A good photographer can easily give the impression that a light weight piece of jewellery is bigger, and heftier than it really is.

About 40 new lines of CZ (cubic zirconia) rings are now available. Unlike Costume Jewellery, popular lines of silver do not go out of fashion, but we still like to mix it up a little with new designs.

We’re expecting our latest range of body jewellery to be available within the next few days, so watch this space.

If you’ve been selling jewellery for any length of time, you will have noticed increases in silver prices across the board. This increase will have affected any jewellery with a sterling silver component: rings, pendants, chains, as well as bracelets. Changing suppliers or finding new wholesalers or importers will make little difference. Unlike Costume Jewellery, silver has a fixed price on world markets, so bargains are next to impossible to find.

Silver prices have increased 106% in the past two and a half years, and more significantly, a whopping 33% since mid December. The driving force behind these increases is not an upsurge in silver jewellery sales, but rather the alternate uses for silver such as in electrical conductors, photographic film and disinfectants. The emerging markets of China, India, Russia and Eastern Europe are key players in these industries, which show no signs of slowing down.

What does this mean for Sterling Silver Jewellery?

Unfortunately, it means that prices are rising, and that they will continue to rise. Manufacturers are paying more for the silver they use, and those costs are passed along the chain to importers, wholesalers, retailers, and the end customer.

We always list the weight in grams of each Sterling Silver item we sell, and try to price each item as reasonably as possible. Despite the recent price increases, we’re still very competitively priced, and are fully confident you won’t find our lines at such low prices elsewhere.

Going forward, we will endeavour to keep our sterling silver prices as low as possible.

Some of you may have noticed the new sterling silver lines that began appearing over the past few days. This is the result of Bob’s recent restocking trip, and we hope to have the majority of the new stock live by the end of the week.

It takes a little time to properly photograph each item, and transfer all the information to the website. This is being carried out right now, in between processing and shipping orders.

We have new items available in every one of our sterling silver categories, including Baltic Amber, Mother of Pearl, Plain Silver, and CZs. Our stock of silver snake chains is now back up to date, with batches of 16 and 20 inch chains ready for sale, and of course, our ever popular 18 inch chains.

Our regular customers will no doubt be aware that our Sterling Silver collection has been running a little low of late. Every day we are selling out of individual lines, and our collection of snake chains is down to only a single variety - the 18″ chains.

This situation will be rectified shortly. We expect to have a new collection available starting the second week in July. As always, we will have a number of new lines, as well as a return of some of our most popular items. This will include the heavy Sterling Silver Bangles that have recently sold out, varying lengths of snake chains, and a range of boxes of CZ earrings.

Bob will be jetting off to meet with suppliers at the beginning of July, and we anticipate the first of the new stock going live a few days after his return. Unlike previous restocking trips, we will not be shutting down for the duration, so you won’t need to adjust your buying habits to accommodate us.

We will be concentrating on Sterling Silver this trip, as our fashion jewellery lines are quite full and up to date.

Getting that display ‘just right‘ is not as easy as it sounds. Whether it’s the clashing colours of your bright necklaces, or the ocean of sterling silver casting a bit of a dampener on your tiny collection of cubic zirconia rings, it’s difficult to present your stock at its best without hours of work.

And it’s even more difficult when you have to do it every morning, only to pack it all away again at the end of the day. For many of us, the retail side of the business is not a cosy little high street shop or a corner of a fashionable shopping centre, and we don’t all have the luxury of hiring a 17 year and paying them a minimum wage to pack and unpack for us.

Back in our retail days - not that long ago - we made setting up our stock in as presentable a manner as possible into a fine art. And one of the most important tools in our arsenal was the humble paint brush.

Now, it’s true that you could spend cart loads of money buying professional equipment to polish your rings and pendants to gleaming perfection, but we learned early on that a basic paint brush purchased from B&Q would do the job just fine. Tiffany’s may disagree, but then their prices are just a little higher than ours, so I’m prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.

It was our Sterling Silver necklaces that caused most of the problems. All that packing and unpacking, not to mention the strange locations we found ourselves setting up in over the years, made the dust and dirt pile up. Take the heart shaped pendant pictured below for example.

Sterling silver necklaces of this type were amongst our top sellers for some time. Every morning we’d be faced with the daunting task of unpacking, opening, and setting up a few hundred of these, and every morning we had to de-dust them before the public descended upon us. The paint brush is the perfect tool for this. A couple of quick swipes with a two inch brush and they’re ready to face the world.

It’s worth remembering that many of the professional tools used by jewelers for centuries are merely variations of existing tools used in everyday life, and like an artist who is just starting out, you don’t need to be spending vast amounts of money on expensive brushes and canvases when the cheaper varieties will get the job done just fine.

Our web presence is centred around our wholesale business, which aims to deliver fashion jewellery at the lowest possible prices. As such, we tend to focus on smaller items - first of all because they weigh less, and as such the purchase price and delivery costs are low, and secondly because many of our buyers like to pass on these low prices to their customers.

With expensive, heavy items such as large sterling silver bracelets or heavy amber pendants, this would simply not be possible.

When it comes to retail, we sell a number of bulkier items that have proven very popular to buyers looking for something a little beyond the normal. Though we do not sell these wholesale, I thought I’d introduce you to few lines just to give you a taste of what’s out there.

The first is a very large Baltic Amber pendant that weighs almost 12 grams. It’s a sizable piece as you can see, coming in at just under 5cm in length. We sold a number of similar pendants in the weeks coming up to Christmas last year.

Crosses have always sold well for us in Ireland, whether of traditional Celtic design in sterling silver or the more glamorous cubic zirconia pictured below. Though not to everybody’s taste, large CZ pieces such as this never go completely out of fashion and certainly add to any shop window display.

Smaller items, with their lower price tags will always outsell the more expensive pieces, but you should bear in mind that having a few larger ‘out of price‘ pieces may have an impact on how much your customers are willing to spend.

Have you ever bought a new business shirt at Marks & Spencers? All their men’s shirts are positioned side by side, from the cheapest to the most expensive. Most people choose a shirt somewhere in the middle. But would they buy the same shirt if all the expensive ones were in another part of the shop? Or would they pick a cheaper shirt, chosen from the middle of the few that remain?

It’s a sales tactic that’s been around forever, and there’s no reason you can’t use it too.

As part of our recent site redesign, we’ve added a new section for Celtic Jewellery. Celtic designs have proven very popular over the past few months, with our American as well as our UK buyers, but until recently we simply didn’t have the volume to warrant a separate section.

Malene and Bob picked up a number of interesting Celtic themed pendants and rings on their buying trip a couple of weeks ago, all of which can now be accessed from the Celtic Jewellery page. We have 29 individual pendants and 14 rings available, all sterling silver, and all unique designs.

We hope to add to this in the future, building our collection to a more sizeable level. In the meantime, buyers particularly interested in Celtic designs might want to take a look at some of our plainer sterling silver rings and pendants, as there is a lot of crossover and many similarities between the different categories.

The new stock went live late yesterday evening, and we’re very pleased with the results. It took a few days longer than we anticipated - so apologies for that - but we wanted everything to be just right. The volume of new stock, coupled with the changes we made to allow all of our Baltic Amber and Sterling Silver pieces to be selected individually, meant that a complete overhaul of the website was needed.

Your first port of call should be the Catalogue page, which breaks everything down for you, and helps you quickly find what you’re looking for. We’ve broken the catalogue down into eight sections:

• Rings
• Pendants
• Earrings
• Fashion Jewellery
• Celtic Jewellery
• Ladies Watches
• Bracelets
• Chains

Each of these categories is further broken down. For example, the Rings category lists Sterling Silver, Baltic Amber, Cubic Zirconia, Marcasite, Shell and Celtic. A new set of navigation links are positioned at the bottom of every page listing all of these same categories, making it very difficult to get lost.

We’re not quite finished yet, as a number of late arrivals are still sitting in warehouses around the world gathering dust, but we thought it more important to get the bulk of the new stock out as quickly as possible.

As always, any questions of comments you have, please get in touch, and we’ll do whatever we can to help.