Jewelry Business Plan Toolkit
Logo Design, Interactive Ebook Design, Print Design | 2020-2023
Jewelry Business Plan Toolkit
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.
One of Halstead’s largest contributions to the jewelry community is the Halstead Grant – a business development grant for small jewelry businesses that are less than 5 years old. While the Grant is a great resource for new jewelers, Halstead wanted a resource that could be used by businesses at any stage, and so the Jewelry Business Plan Toolkit was born.
CONTRIBUTIONS
Research & Prototyping
Logo Design
Interactive Ebook Design
Print Design
Icon Design
PROGRAMS UTILIZED
InDesign
Illustrator
Photoshop
COLLABORATORS
Janelle Hinesley – Sr. Graphic Designer
Kelli Greene – Manager
Hilary Halstead Scott – Halstead President
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
Halstead wanted the Toolkit to be highly useful to jeweler’s, so my main task was to turn a plain word document into an interactive PDF that any jeweler could use. To round out the design, I needed to create a logo and icons to really bring the Toolkit to life.
RESEARCH
The purpose of the toolkit is that it is a step-by-step guidance to start/grow a jewelry business. To make the overall project less daunting for jewelers, each step is split into weekly tasks for them to do. The steps cover things such as business structure, marketing, sales, safety, milestones, and much more.
The end result needed to meet these criteria:
- Clean, easy to follow design
- Ebook & print versions needed to be as condensed as possible
- A way to include links to resources (including in print)
- Include other interactive elements that would have to work for print
- Be designed in such a way that jewelers would not be overwhelmed by the process
There was not much design direction given for this project, only a word document that contained all the copy and that it needed to be an interactive PDF that jewelers could download. Never having designed an interactive workbook before, I spent a good amount of time researching different things such as ebooks, planners, and workbooks to see what designs and layouts would work best for our vision.
Once the rough draft was made, there was a cycle of feedback and updates until management and I were happy with the results.
Provided document
Inspiration
GRAPHICS
LOGO CONCEPT & DESIGN
Since this was a Jewelry Business Plan Toolkit, the logo obviously had to tie in somehow with the jewelry industry. I mocked up several designs that worked in jeweler’s tools, because what better way to represent a Jewelry Toolkit than with a Jeweler’s Tool.
The designs included a jeweler’s bench pin, using the negative space of an open pair of pliers to make a pen tip, a toolbox, and then using a riveting hammer to replace one or more of the T’s in toolkit.
Halstead went with one of the riveting hammer designs, liking the more simplistic approach that would still be recognizable to the jewelry community.
Original concept designs for the Jewelry Business Plan Toolkit
HEADER DESIGN
After the image idea was scrapped, we knew we wanted to use the jeweler tool graphics. The next issue was how exactly could I implement the wildly different sizes and shapes of the tools across the entirety of the toolkit.
By using a fine line style look, the finalized header design showed off the tools without being overpowering to the rest of the page.
Header drafts
Header final
INTERACTIVE EBOOK
The interactive ebook was the first version of the Toolkit that I was asked to design. In addition to including links and areas to take notes in, I wanted to make the Toolkit as user friendly as possible. Since the tasks were already split into weekly assignments, I wanted to color code them to make them easier to find via the table of contents and to utilize the psychology of color and memory.
Layout draft
Layout final
PRINT BOOK
As most of Halstead’s customer base is older and still prefers print products over digital, we decided it would be beneficial to offer a print version of the Toolkit. There were a couple of challenges that arose out of converting the Toolkit into print:
- How to make the all of the resources available via hyperlink in the interactive ebook available in the print version
- How to turn the single page design into spreads for print
INTERACTIVITY
Whereas some of the interactivity (i.e., the notes areas and the checkboxes) had no issues converting over to print design, we needed to figure out a way to include all of the hyperlinks from the original design. Instead of writing out the URLs, we chose to utilize QR codes. Because some customers may not be familiar with QR codes and how to use them, we added in a section on what QR codes were and how to use them.
The QR codes were staggered to make them easier to capture as most resource areas had multiple links on one page.
Several sizes of QR codes were printed to see what the smallest size was that could still be picked up by cameras and we made sure to make the final size just slightly larger than the smallest. I noticed during this process that the QR code complexity was based off of how long the URL was, with longer URLs leading to more complex QR codes with tinier boxes used to make them up. To make doubly sure the codes would be easily read at their small size, I went through and shortened every URL.
Regular URL
Shortened URL
PAGE SPREADS
The next challenge was turning a single page design into spreads. The marketing team wanted to have only one weekly task per spread which worked easily with the multi-page steps already. The question was what to add to the weeks that only needed a single page in the interactive PDF? Since we considered the Toolkit a workbook, I decided the best option was to include things like planners and templates for the jewelers to fill out.
RESULTS
The Jewelry Business Plan Toolkit has accomplished exactly what we set out for it to do. Jewelers at all stages of their careers have absolutely loved the Toolkit and used it to help plan out what they need to accomplish for their businesses. At this time it has been downloaded over 1000 times and has been extremely popular on Halstead’s social media.
