All Wrapped up for Christmas

We’ve always been keen to confine Christmas to the month of December, so it’s no accident we’ve only just finished dressing the shop in its Christmas clothes, and we’re only just dipping our toes in the dulcet tones of the Christmas playlist. No Slade and Roy Wood here mind – the spectrum starts at Monteverdi and stops at Sinatra. Some might call it staid, but it keeps our staff (reasonably) sane and offers an oasis of relative calm for our customers. We’ll be open every day now till Christmas, so it’s a long haul. Anyway, we’re rather proud of our creative efforts in festive shop-dressing this year, so we thought we’d share these pics with you.

Phew!

We’ve just come up for air after what started as a few design tweaks to the jwl Contemporary Jewellery website, but perhaps inevitably grew into a bit of a redesign.  The plan started with widening the page layout to make browsing easier – the original design was designed for an 800 pixel width screen, but with the majority of users working on screens at least 1024 pixels wide, many people were getting a thin strip of jwl sparkle flanked by acres of white space.

Of course widening the layout had a number of side effects.  So we set about reworking the header and footer, revitalising the original logo we had designed by branches design when the shop in Clitheroe was opened.  It had been in our minds for a while to harmonise the branding for the shop and the online store, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. We also added a set of ‘designer’ pages to tell you a bit more about the designers and to offer a different way to browse the jwl collections – another idea we had been toying with for a while.

This all started with the flippant suggestion that a ‘gallery’ presentation of the jewellery in the store pages would look better and be easier to browse than the single-column list layout.  So we set about working out how to configure our ecommerce platform to do this.  After a couple of hours of trial and error changing options and some tweaks to the CSS code we had a 4-column layout.  Hurrah!  One slight problem – it looked horrid.  Cluttered and ugly.  So we’d move all the text from the product list to the product ‘extended info’ pages.  On several hundred items of jewellery.  One solid week of cut-and-paste purgatory.  Then a couple of days of checking, tweaking and proofreading. before pushing the ‘publish’ button  While we get over our goggle-eyed grumpiness the fruit of our labours can now be delivered to the world.  Take a look.  We’d love to know what you think.

Hello!

Welcome to Silver Findings, jwl contemporary jewellery’s blog. No doubt you’re wondering who on earth we are are and what we do.

We specialise in silver contemporary jewellery, although a few pieces of gold have slipped into our collection and we have also developed a bit of a penchant for steel and titanium. We opened up jwl contemporary jewellery in June 2003, taking over an old clothes shop in Clitheroe. With lots of help from friends we tackled what seemed at the time like a gargantuan task of refurbishing the premises to transform it into the array of reflective glass and shiny delights it is today. It’s amazing how well suited inexpensive Ikea cabinets can be for jewellery display!

Since then we have expanded with more cabinets, more jewellery boxes than strictly necessary and more exciting jewellery. We spend a lot of time hunting for designs that are different but wearable, making sure our range doesn’t become run-of-the-mill. It’s a fascinating challenge for us to keep the collection fresh while maintaining the jwl style, quality and value our customers have come to love. We launched our website bjwl.co.uk a couple of years ago, where you can browse and buy a selection of the jewellery available in the shop online.

We’re planning to use this blog to bring you a personal perspective on the running of jwl, including practical advice, opinion and commentary on our quest for new designs.

Hopefully you’ll find our posts interesting, informative and if we’re lucky perhaps even entertaining.

Hope you enjoyed this one – we’ll catch up with you again soon.