Jewelry Business Forum
Research, Branding, & Design | 2020-2023
Jewelry Business Forum
One of Halstead’s main goals is to provide jewelers with education related to jewelry making, studio operations, and business resources so that they can run a successful business.
Much like the Jewelry Business Plan Toolkit, the Jewelry Business Forum (JBF) was created to fill in a gap in business education Halstead has noticed in the industry.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Research & Prototyping
Logo & Branding
Social Media Design
Print & Event Graphics
Swag Design
Content Creation
Presentation Design
Webinar Creation
Photography & Videography
PROGRAMS UTILIZED
Zoom Events
InDesign
Illustrator
Photoshop
Premiere Pro
After Effects
COLLABORATORS
Janelle Hinesley – Sr. Graphic Designer
Kelli Greene – Manager
Ashley Maldonado – Digital & Email Marketing Specialist
Sylvie Alusitz – Studio Coordinator
ABOUT
HALSTEAD
Halstead is an eCommerce jewelry supply firm that caters to both large and small studios in every facet of the jewelry industry (pun intended). Halstead believes in the power of small businesses to support hard-working families who want to live life on their own terms. Small business drives our economy and the American dream for many entrepreneurs. We know how tough it is and we respect the tenacity it takes to build a jewelry studio. We endeavor to be an advocate and indispensable supply chain partner for small jewelry businesses around the world.
MY ROLE
In the beginning my main role was to design a logo and graphics to advertise the new conference. This year my role was expanded as we migrated platforms and thus had to essentially build the conference from the ground up. In addition to designing the social media content, print media, and event graphics, I spent several months researching and setting up the conference through Zoom Events.
RESEARCH & PROTOTYPING
The first two conferences were hosted on a platform called WebinarJam. The main part of my job when we used this platform was to create a logo, a conference guide, and social media graphics to promote. The webinars themselves ran smoothly, but there were several issues we had with the platform:
- People had to register for every session individually instead of the event as a whole
- There was no central page on the host platform
- Replay videos didn’t support scrubbing
In the third year, Halstead switched over to ZoomEvents as the host platform. There were many benefits to this move, including a centralized event page, a sponsor section, and more interactive features for attendees. The main downside is that we now had to recreate the event from scratch, including graphics, setup, and writing new FAQs for attendees.
EXPO ISSUES
Our marketing team had to make some adjustments to our planned forum due to limitations in our on-line platform. For example, we couldn’t fix and, hence, eliminated the expo area. Zoom designed the expo area to be where attendees could interact with sponsors, but there were two main issues with the expo that made the space unusable for our needs.
The first issue was that the expo area was created to be too much like physical booths at a conference, leaning heavily towards needing a representative from the sponsors being present to interact with attendees. The other major flaw was the attendee navigation of the space. Navigation was not intuitive and given that the majority of our clientele tended to be older, we felt that it would lead to the possibility of a lot of complaints. Management agreed with my assessment and decided not to use the expo area.
HYPERLINK ISSUES
With the expo out of the question, the next major flaw was the lack of ability to add links to the bios of sponsors and speakers. This was no doubt Zoom’s attempt at forcing conferences and events to utilize their Expo space, but we found that to be a hindrance in trying to promote those involved with JBF.
Our workaround was twofold: First we included an unlinked url to the sponsor’s sites. Second since each sponsor was allowed at least one image, I created a QR code graphic that linked to the sponsors’ sites. While this was not a perfect solution, especially for those on mobile devices, it at least allowed us to properly promote our sponsors.
PLACEHOLDER IMAGES
Our last issue was yet another sponsor related problem. We offered three tiers of support to our sponsors which was in line with the three level options on Zoom. While the top two tiers allowed them to post images, the bottom tier only supported their logo. This wouldn’t have been an issue except the bottom tier kept the placeholder image (one of bouncing blue balls) instead of removing all images.
We contacted Zoom support. Their response was that they couldn’t do anything and to create a new ticket with their developers. Since that wasn’t going to resolve the issue before the forum, we checked out an event Zoom was holding at the time to see how it addressed the defect. Zoom seemed to also have a problem with this issue, opting not to use the bottom tier and use only the top two tiers instead. To make this work Zoom hid the tier names, and indicated what tier each sponsor was via icons on the images.
GRAPHICS
LOGO CONCEPT & DESIGN
Since the conference was for the jewelry industry, naturally we wanted a logo that was easily recognizable to jewelers. Each concept heavily featured jewelry related items, including tools and gems. Halstead really liked the look from the map pin and the speech bubble logos but wanted a more simplistic design, so I removed the points and went with just the diamond icon that would reflect another sub-brand of Halstead – the Halstead Grant.
Original concept designs for the Jewelry Business Forum.
PRINT GRAPHICS
While not as necessary for this year’s conference with the centralized event page, we felt our customers would appreciate a PDF version of our schedule in addition to the event page.
Since I am used to working with large catalogs that contain hundreds of items, I always make sure any inDesign document I create is as responsive and smart as possible with character & paragraph styles, inlining headers & subheaders, and using grep styles where needed. This way, even in a smaller document, there is no need to manually adjust the different elements.
SWAG
For the Jewelry Business Forum swag we wanted a variety of items. We wanted most to be mainly useful (pen, sticky notes) we also wanted some items that were fun for the attendees (stickers, buttons).
VIDEOGRAPHY
In addition to creating webinar presentations, I helped out with setting up, shooting, and editing some pre-recorded webinars.
For the demo videos I was in charge of multiple aspects of the shooting process: Pre-Production (setting up studio lighting, cameras, and audio), Production (shooting A & B roll, adjusting lighting as needed), & Post-Production (organizing files, editing video & audio, creating & adding in motion graphics & lower thirds).
Liver of Sulfur: Add Dimension to Your Jewelry
In this demo Sylvie will explain how adding a dark patina to your jewelry can enhance the design and add dimension. We’ll go through the proper way to apply patina so it is long lasting, and compare the effects on a piece with and without liver of sulfur. Sylvie will demonstrate the effects on a floral embelished cuff bracelet.
Role: Pre-Production | Production | Post-Production
JBF: JEWELRY SUMMER CAMP
After the success of running the Jewelry Business Forum on Zoom Events and the great feedback, Halstead decided to host a secondary, demo-based conference during the summer as an offshoot of JBF. The new conference, titled JBF: Jewelry Summer Camp, showcases jewelry making projects and techniques by industry experts.
LOGO CONCEPT & DESIGN
Halstead wanted the logo to be similar enough to the original Jewelry Business Forum logo that it would be recognizable to attendees with some form of a summer camp flare and a nod to the fact that this conference would be more demo-based than presentation-based. As I was researching logos, I found many summer camps used a setting sun on the horizon with trees or mountains and realized I could do something similar with the JBF logo and a jeweler’s hammer, covering all of the bases that Halstead wanted.
SUMMER CAMP GRAPHICS
Just like the logo, the graphics were designed to have a similar theme, but not match, the graphics for the Jewelry Business Forum.
RESULTS
Thanks to the collaborative efforts of the marketing team and my ability to work around the issues presented by our platform, the Jewelry Business Forum was an extremely successful event with over 2400 attendees watching from all over the world.
