Make your business card work for your jewellery business

During our last Business Bootcamp week, there was an interesting discussion about business cards.

It grew out of a session about elevator pitches and how if you do get the opportunity to pitch to someone in the lift, at an event or anywhere else, it is important to be able to hand over a business card as a call to action.

We then took a look at our own business cards and those of other people we had collected and came up with some interesting points that we thought would be useful with other jewellery makers.

Having the right business card can make a big difference to your jewellery business

On the face of it, it is obvious what a business card should do:

• Say who you are and what you do
• Provide a web address or other means of finding more information
• Provide contact details
• Be consistent with your other branding in terms of colours, logos and fonts.

But when we looked at some of the cards, they didn’t always achieve all these points – especially as a business card needs to work weeks after you meet someone not just when you and your business are fresh in their mind.

One of the biggest failings was point one – or rather the second half of it. We looked at some super smart cards for jewellery businesses that didn’t include the word “jewellery” or similar. For example a card with a smart logo, the person’s names and the job title “creative director”. It looked lovely but once that card had kicked about in my bag for a week, would I still remember this was the card for the lady who designs beautiful pendants?

There was one card which included a name, email, web contacts and an arty black and white image. Unfortunately it gave no clue as to what the person did or why we would check the website. Not surprisingly, the person who had found the card in their wallet, had no idea why they had it or where it had come from.

Think carefully about the information you need to include on your card

Other cards didn’t include a web address. Because jewellery relies on great visuals, it is a lost opportunity not to include a link to an online gallery or shop as an opportunity for people to follow up and find out more about your work.

And if you have great images of your work, you could also think about including theses on your cards. Online printing companies such as Moo.com now allow you to have photographs on one side of your card and logos and information of the other. You can even have selection of different images which means you can offer someone a choice of card which can help them remember you.

That said, don’t over complicate your cards. You want them to be clear and help someone remember you, prompting action in the future. So look take a critical look at your cards and decide whether a stranger would be able to glean the critical information about you and what you do from it. If they couldn’t it may be time to bite the bullet and redesign.

If you do need to redesign your card, take a look through that pile of other people’s you have on a shelf somewhere and pick out the one’s that really work – ie, you still remember why you have them – as well as browsing the design templates on Moo and Vistaprint etc. Then think about the key information you need on the card and stick with that.

Then make sure you never leave home without a stack of cards, you never know when you might get an opportunity to market yourself and the beast card in the world is no use if it hasn’t reached someone else’s pocket