Wholesale!

We had a question from a business customer about our prices and how we can just slash them in half for wholesale... and what does that say about our retail prices? After I answered, I realized all of our customers need those same answers, so here they are. After you read it, if you'd like to switch your account to wholesale, just fill out the form.

From the time we started this business, when sterling was $4 a troy ounce, until a few years ago when metals prices began climbing, our profit model was always the same: our cost to buy the materials and make the rings x 2. That gave us 50% profit to put back in the business, which is a healthy business model, and it worked well for us for all those years. We didn't have discounts then at all.

When metals costs began to climb and we had to adjust our prices accordingly, that 50% profit got bigger, too, and that's when we had the idea to begin offering discounts for quantity to make it easier for our business customers to get by without a wholesale option. So for years now, we've had quantity discounts: hit the first quantity and get 25% off, hit the second quantity and get 50% off. That 50% off was just a little bit over our cost with no profit to put back in the business, but working in higher quantities saves time and scrap, so it worked out and we were happy to be able give discounts for those bigger orders.

So for years now, that same 50% off we're offering through wholesale has been available as a quantity discount for ordering a certain number of rings at a time. That isn't new. What's new with wholesale is that we're now offering 50% off your whole order of rings, whether or not you hit the quantity minimums on individual ring sizes, as long as the order as a whole reaches a minimum of $500. If your orders are usually large, it's a good fit for you... but that same 50% discount has been available for years now, it was just ring size by ring size rather than off the order as a whole.

What's happening now is that precious metals prices are so high that almost the only people still buying precious metals are business people. Our original focus was hobbyists learning to make chainmaille, but people can't afford to learn on precious metals anymore. Our customers now are much fewer and almost all business people, for whom wholesale works better than ring size quantity discounts because you always get the best price, and only have a minimum to meet in the total. So we're switching our business model to wholesale in hopes of finding more jewelry business and bead shop people to make rings for.

Making such a big switch is scary but our original business model can't scale all the way up to current precious metals prices, so we're going all in. We're slashing our prices to the bone and taking no profit, in hopes we get enough orders from our business customers -- with extra breathing room from those no profit prices to maybe grow your own businesses -- plus new wholesale customers we hope to attract on Faire, to make the wholesale model viable for us.

It either will or it won't. We really hope it will... and we really hope you'll still be with us.

-- Aislyn