Interview With Anika Of WPJewels

I had the opportunity to get in touch with Anika who is the marketing director for WPJewels.com which is on it’s way to being relaunched.

What inspired you to create a shop that sells WordPress Jewelry?
The short answer is our love for WordPress, the long answer would be the fact that I really wanted a WordPress pendant. I searched around and didn’t find anyone who already makes anything like that, and a simple W pendant definitely wasn’t ok for me. So me and my friends(Shelly and Gaby) decided to make them ourselves. The earrings idea came from another friend of ours who usually does server maintenance. He was like: “well if you have pendants why don’t you make earrings also?”. So we did.

What are some of the difficulties involved with getting a supplier?
Since none of us three are in the jewelry business, the search for someone to make the pendants and earrings was kind of hard, let me rephrase that, it was really hard.

We didn’t know anything about how jewels are made or any technical terms or even what to search on google for that matter, imagine that. We probably emailed about 30 companies and got an answer from only 3 or 4. Our emails wore were like: hey, we want to make pendants and earring that look like that logo. We didn’t even know how many we wanted to produce because we didn’t know how much it would cost. Maybe the email sounded childish and that is why we didn’t get an answer from most of them. We ended up reading a lot of stuff about jewelery making and the different techniques so we could be more prepared in case we wore asked what kind of mold we wanted for example. From those 3 or 4 replies we found out that some companies wore too expensive. They charged like $250 just for the molds. That meant that the final price of the jewels would have been far too expensive. So didn’t accept those offers.

In the end we found a great company in Bali, Indonesia who works with 925 Indonesian silver and I was really surprised by how kind they were in explaining to us the process and asked us every step of the way how the final product should look like. We are very pleased with how the jewels end up. They look great.

You mention the square pendant will not be made? Is this for production reasons?
Yes, the cube pendant will not be made. There wasn’t really a demand for it like there was for the circular pendant and the earrings so we decided to not manufacture it at this time. If people will want new designs then we will put a poll or something and maybe we will release new designs in the future, but I guess simple is better and nothing beats a pendant that is like the WordPress logo.

Have you contacted Matt Mullenweg or anyone from Automattic regarding this business? If so, what did they have to say about the use of the WordPress logo in this fashion?
Yes, we contacted Matt and told him about the site. From what I understood, he liked the idea and we even offered to send him some pendants and earrings for free, after all, he is the father of WordPress, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable to charge him.

Where is the store located or where is WPJewels based?
We don’t have a store, everything is on online. The miracle of web 2.0. You could say that we are based in California, USA because that is where we ship the jewels from. Shelly is helping us with that. But you could also say that we are located in Nijmegen, The Netherlands because that is where I am from. And at the same time you could say we are located in… well who knows where Gaby is now. He is always traveling.

Will you be attending WordCamps to sell these or perhaps, give WordCamp Organizers a special rate to buy in bulk?
We will definitely contact some people from WordCamps. Its not all about the money here, we just want to get as many pendants and earrings out there so discount prices for WordCamps is one of our plans.

Other than the pendants and earrings, are there plans to expand the product offering?
If people really like the idea then yes, sure we will.

Special thanks goes out to Anika for answering my questions and all the best to you with WPJewels. I’ll be getting a few pendants once they’re available.