At Seba Dizajn we know who sewed on our sequins and knitted our hats, we are proud to be supporting Fair Trade producers in Nepal. We have had quite a lot of customers commenting on our scarves and bags not being made in Croatia. It is hard to keep everyone happy! We are yet to find Croatian made textiles to stock in our shop, but we only opened our store in June and our search for fabulous Croatian made products continues.
My previous job was based in the highlands of Scotland where I managed a small Fair Trade company that sourced, and continues to source, all of its products in Nepal. Doka and I had talked about stocking only Croatian made goods alongside of the stunning filigree jewellery that he is producing in the store, it was a joint decision to support Nepal and Fair Trade and stock products from Nepal.
Nanu, Pemela & Mango Shobu, Kathmandu November 2009
We stand by our decision and hope that in time there will be growth in awareness of Fair Trade here in Croatia. I have seen Fair Trade candles in the Kozmo store here but no other ‘Fair Trade’ recognised products – yet…
This has been social media summer for me: rather than soaking up the sun, frolicking in the waves and dancing the sultry nights away with an eye to where the next Mojito is coming from, I’ve been soaking up the tweets, floundering in Facebook and blogging the grey days away, with an eye to my Search Engine Optimisation.
It’s been a steep learning curve – and an exciting one. I would never have believed I’d get so excited about being e-mailed with notice of a re-tweet, or get such a kick from a comment on the blog. It’s become all about the visibility, the reach, the influence, the followers…
I have to confess to getting quite hard-nosed and outcome-driven about it all. But I was stopped short when
talking to my highly valued friend and coaching colleague, Elaine Burke (find her at http://www.linkedin.com/in/elaineburke). Elaine started to talk about generosity and the importance of being generous with your materials and your knowledge. I immediately jumped in with, “oh, yes, of course, as a loss-leader” thinking in terms of growing a following and a market by getting your materials known. “No,” said Elaine, “I meant just being generous for its
own sake.”
I felt abashed and yet also excited. Connections started to be made in my mind, dominoes started to fall and cogwheels turn as I thought of all the material I had looked at in the last few weeks: words, diagrams, videos, ideas, reviews and tools that others had been generous enough to share with their online communities.
Links emerged for me between this generosity, so apparent within social media, and the idea of each of us as a curator of our own creative worlds. With iPods, we know longer rely on someone deciding on which music goes with which other music: we decide, we curate our own musical space. Then we share it for others to enjoy and adapt and make their own. With Flickr and InstaGram, we are all capable of curating and sharing an exhibition of our lives and passions for others to view, pass on and critique; we curate our own aesthetic space.
And with social media, and its inherent democratisation of so much knowledge, we can each curate our own libraries of information, picking what is relevant, and organising it in such a way as to make sense within our own unique workflow and social patterns.
This must influence us as artists and makers, as we look for inspiration within our social media communities as well as within our physical and inner worlds. How exciting to see others curate our work, incorporating it into their own lives and spaces.
Thanks to Elaine, I will seek to practise generosity for its own sake in my social media dealings – just as I take for granted that I can benefit from the generosity of others – and I will look with curiosity to see whether and how others curate my ideas into their worlds.
I know Michele would appreciate your feedback on her post, please leave your comments below.
10 days ago we had a customer request a special ring made for her, of course this is no problem for us and something that we really enjoy. It is nice to make something special for a customer and to share their delight and joy when they collect the piece or when we ship it to them.
The customer that I am writing about was from Poland and wore some unusual and large pieces of jewellery and to make something to suit her was no problem. She told us what she would like, discussed the details with Doka and left us with her ring size and these words ‘if I like it I will buy it’. We discussed a price with her at the start and gave her an approximate price as to be 100% accurate at this stage was a little hard, we did not know how much silver the piece would use or how many hours it would take to complete the ring.
Our Polish lady said she would come back in two days and see how the work was progressing.
Two days later she came back to see us and admired the work in progress and brought herself a beautiful filigree bracelet from our display.
Again we talked about the price of the ring and unfortunately communications broke down a little here, I insisted that the price we had originally quoted was very reasonable for the amount of work that had gone into the ring. Where she said she did not understand why the bracelet she had just brought would be cheaper than the ring as the bracelet required a lot more work than the ring. Although this was not the case as the bracelet was a less complex piece that took less hours to make, but she insisted the price for the ring was too high and she has not been back for her ring.
The XL bling ring is finished now and it is a stunning piece as you can see but I am sure it is not to everyone’s taste and I wonder how long it will sit in the store before someone else comes along that will like it?!
It’s a size 14 if you’re interested!
Filigree XL Bling with Coral feature
In hindsight we should have insisted on a deposit for the ring we had been commissioned to make.
What other advice can anyone offer to help with future situations like this?
“A friend is one who walks in when others walk out”
-Walter Winchell
I have been contemplating what to write that might appeal to our readers; jewellery or something else?
To date my ‘something else’ posts have been the most popular so I am going to go with another one of those today and maybe try to alternate jewellery:non jewellery posts after this. Let’s see what happens!
So, I have decided to write something to thank all our friends who have been so supportive of our endeavours to date, be it a LIKE on our facebook page and feedback on photos there, a jewellery purchase or a voice on the phone/Skype. Thanks! It means a lot to both Doka and I to know we have the support of our friends and families.
Having recently moved to Croatia to start a new business with my husband and still knowing very little Croatian, I am finding myself spending more time on-line than ever before. The majority of this time has been focused on this blog or our new facebook page, (SebaDizajn) and learning about how I can use social media to promote our business. Most recently I have opened a Twitter account to help spread the Seba Dizajn word on a new level – you can click on the links at the side of the blog to join us on Twitter or Facebook if you are interested.
I have found a strong and supportive network of on-line friends, many of whom I have not yet met but their help and encouragement warms my heart. How nice to find people so willing to help when they don’t even know us.
I grew up in New Zealand and although I left home 12 years ago I still have many good friends there, we may not get to see each other but when we do it’s the best thing. The internet allows some of us to catch up more often than others, yet there are many who I have no regular contact with and that’s ok too. We will and do meet again and pick up right where we left off, magic!
This is a group of friends from my University years who gathered together in March this year to help us celebrate our recent wedding in Croatia – this is at the NZ version of the celebrations.
I have lived away from NZ for 12 years, although I am not sure how this happened! I left in 1999 for a year or two, with a visa to work in Canada and an onwards ticket to the UK to and a visa to work there for two years. Now I’m married and living in Croatia! The latter two pieces were not part of the puzzle when I left home – I am not even sure I would have been able to locate Croatia on the map when I left NZ in 1999.
My two years in the UK somehow turned in 10 part time years, managing a Fair Trade business based in the highlands of Scotland where my passion for Fair Trade grew and flourished with the opportunity to travel regularly to Nepal and meet artisans there.
I feel so blessed to have been able to meet so many wonderful people in my travels and know that I now have friends scattered around the globe who mean so much to me. You are constantly in my thoughts, this short piece is dedicated to all of
you.
Thanks for being a part of my life, can’t wait to meet with you again!
It is my pleasure to welcome Helen Bogun of Helz-Design, http://helz-design.com/ as a guest to our blog site.
Helen is a graphic designer based in Berlin and has written a great piece about creativity for us;
LET FANTASY IN
Do we really lose our creativity when we get older?
I really doubt this, but many of my friends claim that it is exactly this way.
Remember the good old days being a little child just taking a colorful pencil or a brush and your watercolors and just starting to paint?
Or the feeling of finger painting colors on your skin?
Very sensual experiences I know, and very important.
And these experiences can still offer great benefits, even if you have passed the twenty year mark!
Just give it a chance, your children will love you for it.
We usually rip ourselves away from dealing with paints, wool, fabrics, modeling clay and other stuff. We think it is no longer appropriate because we are adults.
Adults don’t do that.
No way.
We also tend to think that creativity is something for real artists.
We are not artists; at least that is what we have been told.
And that makes us think that we lost our creativity while growing up.
We never lost it and we will never lose it.
Actually you need to be creative many times a day, when solving a problem, for example.
Only a creative mind is able to solve problems.
Being creative just means to give your fantasy a chance to manage the process, to allow your mind to think in a way you have never thought before. See things from a different angle.
Creativity does not mean to re-invent the wheel, just to find a different way to deal with it.
Think about the jewelry of Seba Dizajn. Some of us might think, that it is simple silver mixed with some gems. It is more; it is the imagination & creativity behind it. The imagination that is able to create something new out of simple and well-known things.
I know you can do it too.
You can see the flower in the colors you are painting.
You can see the bread in the flour you are putting in the bowl.
You can see the sweater in the wool you are going to knit.
Just take a brush, remember the child you have been and start painting.
Creativity is in each of us.
It makes live worth living, but it also means to step aside from the used path in life.
This may require stepping out of your comfort zone and feeling insecure, but this insecurity can be overcome.
Just do it!
Step aside, and open the door to a new adventure in life.
Experiment with anything you can get – clay, colors, wool even the computer …
