Happy Birthday to Us!

Spring has sprung, silver and gold prices are down, and Urban Maille is 23 yrs old today!

First, we want to thank our loyal customers while we celebrate Urban Maille’s 23^rd anniversary. We made our first online sale on March 23^rd, 2003 when silver was $4.40 an ounce and gold was $333. Looking at today’s precious metal prices, it’s kind of hard to believe, and we never would have made it this far without all of you. So, sincerely, from the heart: Thank You!

Although Google Ad Words was around in 2003, almost no one in the craft industry was using it or understood it. Our first first print ads starting running around then in mostly beading and wire jewelry magazines like Bead & Button, Belle Armoire and Creative Wire Jewelry.

Today, the silver prices have skyrocketed to over $100/oz and gold over $5000/oz in just the past few weeks. The current metals prices are down a good bit from those highs and we’ve lowered prices across the board on silver and gold items.

This year, a good deal of our technical time has been spent on building a new website that allows us to raise and lower prices more quickly to keep in line with the changing markets. Also, we’ve brought back some of the more affordable metals like silver filled, bronze and copper.

This weekend, Aislyn and I started doing some spring cleaning and found a box of treasures that somehow got swallowed by time. In the box is a whole cache of weaves and other components that never made it to the website. As we go through the box, we’re going to complete many of these never-listed weaves, new sizes and new shapes to release over the spring and summer.

The first thing we’re putting out are these beautiful celtic design elements (which we previously called propellers). Over the years our ring catalog has expanded from just a few dozen sizes in sterling only, to 1,387 sizes of rings in 7 different metals, for a total of 9,709 options which allow us to supply rings for almost any project you can imagine. Even though the prices are higher, it’s still amazing what you can make with just a handful of rings.

In this new world where almost everything is digital, it’s really so satisfying to make something real with your hands. Many of our customers have talked to us about the difficulty of how high prices are these days, but the good news is that when you sell your work, you have the opportunity to raise your prices to keep pace with the markets. If you are a hobbyist or just like to make things for yourself, you have the choice of putting your money into something more beautiful and useful than gold and silver bars just sitting in a safe.

When customers ask us what to charge for their work, I often suggest going to look at retail jewelry sites and department stores to see what they are charging for machine made chains of similar weight to get an idea of what others are currently paying. Keep in mind that most retail jewelry is marked up 400% or higher.

Again, our big thanks to everyone and we're really excited about looking through the box of forgotten goodies and posting some new weaves, findings and projects over the coming weeks.

-- Gary