What''s the best way to become a bench jeweler?

[micah]

Hi everyone,
A while back I thought about becoming a bench jeweler. I did some research on schools, but ended up forgetting about it and nothing ever came out of it. Then, this summer I bought a ring after a couple months of learning tons about diamonds and rings here on PS (I found a great diamond at Excel diamonds and got it set in a Legato sleekline from Whiteflash by the way).

It got me thinking again about going to a jeweler school. I''ve been thinking about this for a while now and I have made up my mind that this is what I want to do.

My question is this: I know there are plenty of jewelers on this site; what school did you go to and where would you recommend for someone with no experience to go to school? Most of the ones I''ve seen have 3-4 month programs; would this be enough for me to get a job right after school without having any other previous experience in jewelry? Thanks in advance!

 

[Garry H (Cut Nut)]

Have a lobotomy

 

[Regular Guy]

Garry,

That''s a hilarious response that''s calling for some background.

Surely you employ some of these guys or gals?

Hopefully, they''re not reading here?

 

[denverappraiser]

I’ve actually written articles on this topic elsewhere and a search may be able to drum up a link. I’ll put together something on the journal section about it. I’m a recovering bench jeweler. I’ve trained many and I’ve employed many more so I guess that makes me reasonably qualified to address this.

Making jewelry can be remarkably rewarding. When you’re done, you’ve got something wonderful and that someone will treasure for a lifetime that you can point to with pride and say ‘I made that!’. It’s a feeling of accomplishment that few people ever get to experience and it’s the driving force that leads most people to become professional bench jewelers. Oh yeah, and you get to play with fire. The problem is that it takes a ton of practice to get good at it and, if you don’t have customers, it’s a terribly expensive hobby to just make things you like when the materials run you upwards $600/oz.

Back in the day, the way someone became a jeweler was through apprenticeship. You would find a master craftsman (yup, they were almost always men) and you would agree to work for them cleaning the floors, polishing things and other ‘menial’ tasks in exchange for the opportunity to get an up close view about how to do the work. No pay. After a few years of this, the master would start to let you do some of the billable work, still for no pay, and they would make some money off of your efforts. Eventually you would set out on your own and perhaps take on an apprentice of your own to learn from you. The system worked pretty well and it produced some seriously skilled workers. Look at the craftsmanship of some of the antique pieces made by anonymous goldsmiths that are still in the marketplace and you’ll be amazed. Some of these guys were GOOD.

That was then, this is now. Nobody wants to be an apprentice, nobody wants to take the time to train one, nobody is willing to work for free while the master reaps the profits for their training time and the potential masters won’t trust that the apprentices will stick around after the training period long enough to be worth their efforts. Now it happens at schools, trade shops and design studios.

Schools:
There are some fundamental skills as a jeweler that you simply must learn. Torch control, filing, graver work and polishing are examples of things that are essential and that aren’t nearly as easy as people think. There are quite a few schools that have appeared that teach these skills and, at the risk of omitting someone important, I’m not going to give any names. Use referrals from your friends in the jewelry business to find one. A good school will take about 4-6 months in residency to get you up to an adequate skill level. A weekend program isn’t going to do it. After you graduate from one of the schools, you are ready to get a job. Try to find a shop with several other jewelers in it that you can learn from and you’ll be on the road.

Tradeshops:
Most jewelry stores don’t have an onsite jeweler. This is for a couple of reasons. First, it’s hard to hire capable bench workers. Lot’s of people want to be a jeweler when they grow up, not so many already are. Secondly, jewelry stores tend to be in very high rent areas and they have a certain ‘look’ to them with clean glass, smiling people in suits, velvet boxes and other things that aren’t really compatible with the mess and noise of a working shop. Instead, they job out the repair and custom type work to outside vendors called tradeshops. These are independent shops that do the support work for several different stores and have someone running a pickup and delivery service to their clients. Tradeshops usually have several jewelers of varying skills so they can give the more difficult jobs to the more experienced workers and they are able to invest more in equipment and space than most in-store shops can afford. This is where most new grad jewelers start out and this is where most REALLY learn their craft. Find them by talking with the jewelers supply stores in your town or even the national suppliers of tools and supplies. Show up and show them your stuff. Make sure to seek out a shop that does good work! If you learn bad habits or you get associated with the cheapo places, you’ll find it difficult to advance in the future. It’s a small industry and everybody knows everybody. When you apply for a job at the jewelry store where you really want to work and you mention a 4 year stint at XYZ, trust me, they will know who that is and they will judge you accordingly.

What do they do?
Beginning jewelers do a lot of simple repair and new sale support work. This means ring sizing, chain repairs, setting stones in earrings and the like. Pretty much every ring that gets sold needs to be sized and a busy shop will do dozens or even hundreds a day. As you get more experienced, you’ll be doing the more difficult setting work and the custom manufacturing. You’ll also develop a following of customers who want to speak personally with the jeweler who will be making their special piece. This is a sales role but it’s really fun because people tend to speak to you with respect and even awe (unless you screw it up).

What’s it pay?
Starting bench jewelers make about $10/hr in most markets and it goes up to about $20/hr while they are working for somebody else if they get decently good at it. Master craftsmen can actually do pretty well but be prepared to spend years or even decades honing your skills. If you go out on your own and can build a clientele, you can make some really good money but you'll find that what you're really doing with most of your time is buying and selling things, hiring and managing workers, and generally running a business. Presto, you're not really a benchie any more. If you go out on your own and can't build a clientelle, you can always land back at a tradeshop or find new work in the fast food industry.

Neil Beaty
GG(GIA) ICGA(AGS) NAJA
Professional Appraisals in Denver

 

[Garry H (Cut Nut)]

Date: 8/10/2007 5:29:09 AM
Author: Regular Guy
Garry,

That''s a hilarious response that''s calling for some background.

Surely you employ some of these guys or gals?

Hopefully, they''re not reading here?

Probably only one, maybe 2 are reading this, but I have them booked in - you get a better price on 2 than one lobotomy. The others have already become completely happy and would not bother reading this stuff.

Actually my general experiance of about 40 jewellers over 30 years is they tended i(n Australia) to have left school early and ''got a trade''. 90% of them are very very nice feely touchy people. The ''arteests'' who start out with idealistic expectations do not last - they tend not to like getting dirty fingers.

I need to know more about you micah if i am to advise you. Skype me from my ideal-scope email address. If you can not find it, then you are smart enough to be a jeweller. If you can then i will talk you out of it

 

[denverappraiser]

Date: 8/10/2007 8:51:47 AM
Author: Garry H (Cut Nut)
they tend not to like getting dirty fingers.

Perpetually dirty fingers and 2mm thick calluses with no fingerprints are a badge of honor for a master jeweler. I agree, not everyone seems to get this.

Neil Beaty
GG(GIA) ICGA(AGS) NAJA
Professional Appraisals in Denver

 

[micah]

Thanks for all the info Denverappraiser. I hadn''t even heard of tradeshops before. I did do a search for this on PS but I didn''t find anything.

Garry, just to let you know; I did find your ideal-scope email address. I''ll have to download skype later though. I just got home from working a 12 hour night shift so I''m going to go pass out.

 

[strmrdr]

If your serious getting really good at cad will give you a huge leg up.
That takes far longer than 6months and a lot of skilled benchies dont have the time too do it and it will give them a leg up in todays market so they are more likely to consider you.

 

[denverappraiser]

Date: 8/10/2007 10:03:19 AM
Author: strmrdr
If your serious getting really good at cad will give you a huge leg up.

That takes far longer than 6months and a lot of skilled benchies dont have the time too do it and it will give them a leg up in todays market so they are more likely to consider you.

Storm,

I disagree with this. To be sure, CAD is an important skill but most of the jewelry CAD programs are actually pretty easy to get along with and are getting easier with every new release and new product. Where the CAD drivers screw it up is things like prong placement, metal thicknesses and similar tolerances that tend to bite you in the ass when it finally arrives in the ''real world''. You learn these things by working with metal and real stones, not with pixels.

It’s sort of like learning to use a word processor. Getting really good at MS Word is quite a bit more difficult than most people give it credit for and all the good writers use it but this is not the key skill that makes for a skilled writer.

Neil Beaty
GG(GIA) ICGA(AGS) NAJA
Professional Appraisals in Denver

 

[strmrdr]

Date: 8/10/2007 10:52:47 AM
Author: denverappraiser

Date: 8/10/2007 10:03:19 AM
Author: strmrdr
If your serious getting really good at cad will give you a huge leg up.

That takes far longer than 6months and a lot of skilled benchies dont have the time too do it and it will give them a leg up in todays market so they are more likely to consider you.

Storm,

I disagree with this. To be sure, CAD is an important skill but most of the jewelry CAD programs are actually pretty easy to get along with and are getting easier with every new release and new product. Where the CAD drivers screw it up is things like prong placement, metal thicknesses and similar tolerances that tend to bite you in the ass when it finally arrives in the ''real world''. You learn these things by working with metal and real stones, not with pixels.

It’s sort of like learning to use a word processor. Getting really good at MS Word is quite a bit more difficult than most people give it credit for and all the good writers use it but this is not the key skill that makes for a skilled writer.

Neil Beaty
GG(GIA) ICGA(AGS) NAJA
Professional Appraisals in Denver

What im saying is that take 2 people who went too the same school and got the same grades, one has great cad skills one doesnt, the person with the cad skills is going to get in the door first.
I know of one local place that has someone just too do cad, he couldnt make the actual ring if he wanted too but he can design them.

 

[denverappraiser]

Highly capable setters and metal workers (not that the schools produce these but school is a good place to start) are much more difficult to find and hire than capable CAD people, at least around here. Truly skilled workers in any field are well situated for future employment but new grads and hobbyists who think they’re skilled are a dime a dozen.

Neil Beaty
GG(GIA) ICGA(AGS) NAJA
Professional Appraisals in Denver

 

[Garry H (Cut Nut)]

Date: 8/10/2007 9:18:20 AM
Author: micah
Thanks for all the info Denverappraiser. I hadn''t even heard of tradeshops before. I did do a search for this on PS but I didn''t find anything.

Garry, just to let you know; I did find your ideal-scope email address. I''ll have to download skype later though. I just got home from working a 12 hour night shift so I''m going to go pass out.

Storm has given good advice.

We have 1 very smart jeweller who has learned CAD and probably does 1/2 his work that way - everyone else directs the cad type jobs to him

 

[sera]

You could always take a short jewelry design class to see if you really want to venture in that direction.

I took a class and loved it! Unfortunately, time constraints only allowed me one class; I will take more when my schedule allows it. The piece I did was a band with multi-colored, scattered, bead set stones. It was really fun though bead setting might not have been the easiest choice for a first project.

This non-committal avenue might help you decide if it''s something you want to pursue as a career, a hobby, or not at all.

 

[denverappraiser]

A lot of this boils down to predicting how the future of such things are going to go. I’m no psychic but I do have a few thoughts on general trends.

1) CAD will get easier as computers get better and as the software publishers get better at including the tools that people want. There is tremendous pressure on the publishers to make the process of producing a piece to be fast and to not require much in the way of skill on the part of the operator. This leads to fewer workers required and a lower skill requirement means lower pay for the ones that are left. It’s going to go the way of all of those web design skills from the 90’s. There’s some people doing very well as web designers but there are far more who thought that learning a few templates in frontpage was a ticket to easy street who are finding themselves without a useful skill and wondering what happened.

2) Custom design will hit the downmarket stores even more than it has because it’s so easy to open up a CAD file, tweak it a little bit and call the results custom. Shops will get even better at selling things that they don’t actually have and customers will learn to love buying one-off jewelry designs that can be punched out quickly and efficiently with low skill workers. Expect to see pretty good ‘custom’ design available at the flea market, at Walmart and, of course, online.

3) Setters will get MORE important and more of a bottleneck than they already are. CAD makes it easy to produce designs with lots of stones in interesting places and this makes a lot of flash for not so much stone weight but someone still has to do it, especially for stones other than diamonds where casting in place is usually not an option. Automatic casting equipment works pretty well and allows workers to produce superb results with remarkably little training but this still leaves the finishers and the setters. For production designs the manufacturers can set up a shop overseas to make things but if your working custom and especially if you’re using some or all customer supplied materials, there is a huge incentive to do the job locally.

4) Fabrication will grow in popularity with the high end consumers. ‘Handmade’ pieces from wire and sheets is the way that the old masters did it and the new masters, if they want to command master’s prices, will need to use it, as a selling tool if nothing else. CAD is pretty cool right now and people rather like the idea of it but as it becomes more ordinary this will fade quickly.

5) Consumers will get in on the act. They will want to do their own design with a home CAD system and to provide the jeweler with a file that they are then expected to deal with in terms of casting, assembly, finishing and setting.

6) The skill level of jewelers is deteriorating and I see it getting worse before it gets better. I’m a fairly common visitor at career days the local high schools because what I do is unusual, techie, and fairly interesting. They seem to like to hear me talk but maybe it''s just that I''m available for free (to schools) so the price is right. That phenomena of wishing to avoid dirty fingers was a problem when I was a kid but it’s far worse now. Ask kids what they want to be when they grow up and you’ll get a lot of marine biologists, baseball players, software zillionaires and even a few firefighters but no auto mechanics, plumbers, dry cleaners or electricians. There are no appraisers either but that’ just because they never thought of it. Wood shop and home economics, the primary hands-on programs when I went to school have all but completely vanished. They’ve been replaced with cultural sensitivity training. Even the art classes are being canceled. The supply of capable bench jewelers, at least in my neighborhood, is laughably low and consists almost entirely of immigrants who come from manufacturing backgrounds overseas. Making tennis bracelets and other jewelry in a factory involves a very different skill set from working the bench at a local jeweler and a complete retraining is often required to get them up to snuff.

Neil Beaty
GG(GIA) ICGA(AGS) NAJA
Professional Appraisals in Denver

 

[Garry H (Cut Nut)]

well written Neil. Agree with every bit of it

 

[strmrdr]

Well said Neil.

I think we can both agree that someone right out of a 6 month school isn''t ready to be a benchman it takes years of training after that.
Being skilled at CAD gives the employer some value while you are learning and gives you a leg up on someone who don''t know it.
applicant 1:
What can you do for me: Well I took this 6 month class on making jewelery.
applicant 2:
What can you do for me: I took a 6 month class on making jewelery and I know CAD so I can also add value too your company by doing CAD ring design.

Both show samples of their work and both are equally good.

Which would you hire?

 

[mausketeer]

I''m going to jump in here as it goes along with the question I posted earlier about taking a gemmology program in Vancouver, Canada.......

My ex-boyfriend lived in Boston and when I visited there last summer I took an intensive two week course in jewellery fabrication at the North Bennet Street school. I was going to move there and take the two year bench jewellers course. It was VERY expensive (at least from my Canadian perspective.) $1,500 a month plus of course you have to pay for all your tools and materials. We figured it would end up costing about $50,000 for the whole thing.

The North Bennet Street school is the oldest trade school in the United States though, and I was under the impression that you were getting a VERY high-quality education. Just in the two-week course I took, they had EXTREMELY high expectations of quality. I am very proud of this little ring I made where I have to hunt for the solder mark with my loupe (even the TEACHER had a hard time finding it!)

Maybe I''ll win the lottery and I can still take this course some day....... alas, I need to keep my day job so I can eat and stuff.......