Finding Satisfaction

How to choose the right components for your needs

They may often be the smallest parts on a piece of jewelry—the spring rings, the crimp beads, the eye pins and ear nuts—but findings perform a big job: they keep the jewelry intact and securely in place. Which means that when you purchase these component parts, you should apply the same level of consideration as you would when buying your metal, gemstones, or any other material.

So beyond matching metal to metal, what should a jeweler consider when selecting findings? Below are a few suggestions; by posing these questions to both yourself and your suppliers before making a final decision, you’ll better ensure that your decision is the right one for your needs.

1. What’s your price point? Before you get into such specifics as weight, style, and durability, you need to focus on an elemental business decision: How much do you want your jewelry to cost? Is it a high-end piece that requires quality components? Is it a unique design that needs a customized component, but whose selling price justifies the extra investment? Or are you targeting a lower-end market, and need to ensure you keep your expenses to a minimum?

“Price point is key,” says Russ Nobbs, owner of Rings & Things in Spokane, Washington. “We carry a pin back, for example, in three different qualities—superior, good, and adequate. Sure, you could go with the cheapest pin back, but if you’re going to sell it in a department store, will they require the better quality?”

“Cost isn’t everything,” says Nathan Button, director of findings at Stuller in Lafayette, Louisiana, who adds another factor to weigh: “If you go with the cheapest product, you might find you’re spending more time on the back end removing mold lines, straightening prongs, and fixing other details. Buyers sometimes become too focused on pricing, and sacrifice quality or the usage of their time.”

Of course, sometimes it does come down to which part costs the least. If you are shopping around for the least expensive component, make sure you’re making the right comparisons. For instance, you might find two suppliers offering the exact same component at different prices—until you realize that the pack sizes are different, and the per-unit price is actually identical.

“Many times buyers won’t be comparing apples to apples,” says Dawn Nials, the product manager in charge of findings at Rio Grande in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “You have to compare market to market, weight to weight, size to size.”

2. How much should the finding weigh, and how big should it be? A finding’s size and weight has to be chosen in relation to the weight of the piece and the amount of wear. Many findings manufacturers offer their goods in a variety of weights—light, medium, and heavy. “You don’t want to put a 3-gram clasp on a chain that only weighs 1 gram,” says Dick Blake of Grassmann-Blake Inc. in Millburn, New Jersey. If it’s too heavy, the clasp will drag the chain back; too light, and it may not bear the weight at the front.

It’s also crucial to note how the component will work within the design, Nobbs says. “If you order a split ring, for example, it will need to open up and work with another part [that passes] through it, like a miniature key ring. If the design is so large that it will deform the shape of the split ring, maybe you should use two jump rings instead—it will look nicer.” By the same token, if the design calls for a very small ring, “the harder it will be to wind another part through it,” he adds. “You might need special tools.”

And if you are choosing a component that must integrate with another part—for example, if you need a setting for a specific stone—then follow these three rules: measure; measure; and measure again.

“Many times problems come about because of ill preparation,” Button says. “A jeweler may not measure a customer’s stone correctly, for instance. You don’t want to find out on the day before a piece is due that you need a 6.5 mm setting, not 6 mm.”

3. Should the finding be stamped or cast? This ties in directly to the issue of weight, since die-struck findings can weigh less than castings—but that can’t be your only consideration. Die-struck findings tend to have better durability; since they are struck from sheet and rolled, they have a finer grain structure and, as a consequence, a better life span. Parts typically subjected to more wear, such as heads, are often die-struck.

However, cast findings offer a better depth of detail, as well as a better variety of sizes and shapes. When you’re stamping out a piece, you’re limited by geometry—there’s not a lot of freeform or undercut work that you can do—and the high cost of tooling is a barrier to customization. The downside is that the metals used to cast the parts are likely to contain additives such as deoxidizers, which can promote brittleness.

4. Do you need many findings of equal consistency? If you’re doing a limited edition of a one-off design, this may not be a priority. But if you’re planning to produce a piece in any volume, this must be factored into your choice.

“What you are buying today should be what you get tomorrow,” says Graham Kidson, director of sales and marketing for W.R. Cobb in East Providence, Rhode Island. “If you are manufacturing for a high-quality store, you don’t want halfway through to have different quality findings. It’s such a small portion of the finished piece, to be saving a couple cents on it can often be very false economy. The backing to an ear post, or a clasp—you want to make sure those products stay consistent.

“It’s also important a company meets the requirements on nickel [based on the EU Nickel Directive] and on lead and cadmium [for children’s jewelry, as regulated by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, for lead, and by various state laws for cadmium], and has the right karatage,” he adds. “Often people are fooled by what seems to be a good value, particularly if they’re sourcing from overseas to lower costs. You’ve got to know weights and the alloy and be prepared to spend time and just check it.”

Generally, because they don’t rely on metal fills or a properly built mold, struck findings will offer more consistency, piece to piece, than their cast counterparts. But that doesn’t mean you should accept irregularity if your design needs the flexibility of a cast part. Discuss this with your supplier, and make sure you can get what you need.

5. Must the finding offer maximum reliability and durability? This question, along with the previous one, touches on the aspect of quality: How well made is the part? “A finding must be made to last,” Blake says. “It’s got to come up to a certain amount of weight to be durable. Proper temper is also important.” Once a finding is on, the customer should take it for granted that it’s going stay on.

Special attention must also be paid to this aspect if you are purchasing functional findings, such as lever backs, lobster claws, and spring rings, which have moveable parts subject to daily wear and tear.

“The easiest way to lose a customer is if parts fail in their function,” Kidson says. “I can imagine there is nothing worse than getting ready to go out and the clasp on your necklace doesn’t work. Very often the customer won’t go back and complain—often they vote with their feet.”

If consistency, reliability, and durability are priorities, then it’s all the more important that you do homework on your findings supplier. Ask colleagues, check out jeweler’s forums, and get a feel for the company’s reputation. “You want someone who stands by their name,” Kidson says.

6. Do you need findings to be modified or custom made? Does your design call for a very specific type of finding? Some jewelers may opt to fabricate their own, but that can get time-consuming and expensive if you plan to produce the design in volume.

“There’s a difference between ’Can I’ and ’Should I,’” Button says. “You have to ask yourself, ’What’s my time worth?’ Jewelers should be optimizing their time and talent and putting them toward what’s most profitable. You can go to your bench and make a cup setting out of sheet and form it up, but is that really the best use of your time?”

Another alternative is to order findings from a supplier, and then modify them as needed. “When you’re in a volume manufacturing position, you need to always balance cost to the customer and how long you want to tie up your craftsman,” says Jeff Johnson, owner of Jeffrey S. Johnson Ltd. in Columbus, Ohio, and retired president of the Columbus-based Diamond Cellar retail store. “You need to ask if full custom is really what your customer needs or wants, and ask yourself how many you can do in a year. You can work with manufactured findings, have just as good of a job, and save the customer money.”

For example, Johnson says that you can easily alter a bail. “Let’s say we want it a little thinner in the profile; you simply file it down. If it has straight sides and you want a little curve for more sex appeal, curve it. The craftsman can use stock parts to come up with custom designs, but this knowledge comes with experience.”

You can also ask the supplier to modify a stock item for you. “With some items, it just takes a bit of tweaking on an existing die and we’ve come up with a new item for the customer,” Blake says. “We’ve designed many of our findings so that they can be altered or interchanged easily.” These findings, he notes, are most often used for making logo clasps. In Blake’s opinion, most of the findings that jewelry makers need already exist in one form or another. It’s just a question of selecting the finding that most closely matches.

A third option, if your design calls for a totally unique component, is to ask your supplier to create a customized finding specifically for you. A supplier will probably do this only if you want the component in volume. But if it meets that criteria and you want to go this route, make sure you give your supplier as much information as possible: weight, dimensions, price point, everything. If you have an example of what you want, whether it’s a drawing, a prototype, or even images of existing parts that resemble the component you want, so much the better.

“We need a clear idea of how you want a part to work, what the other parts are in a piece, how you are going to attach it (gluing, riveting, swaging, soldering?), the exact size, and the reason why it needs to be that exact size,” Nobbs says. “The more detailed you can be, the better.”

“We would need all of the specifications for an item,” Nials echoes. “We’d also need time to analyze a prototype, agree on a delivery schedule, and agree on final quality. For example, does the customer want [the part to have] a high polish, a matte finish, or to be oxidized? How important is consistency? If it’s a little charm, it may not matter if each item varies ever so slightly, but if it’s a mechanical piece that has to hold something in place, consistency is important. And if the customer wants a single component to attach to handmade chains that vary in dimension, then we’ll need to build a part with some tolerance for that variation. We need to consider everything.”

As you can imagine, custom pieces take time, so don’t expect them overnight. Depending on the time of year, a part can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to complete, depending on its complexity as well as the manufacturing period. Don’t go to your findings company in the late fall, for example, hoping to get a component in time for the Christmas rush.

7. When do you need it? Rush orders don’t just come at Christmas. If you have a specific deadline to meet, keep that in mind as you make your selection—and make sure your supplier knows it, as well.

8. What does your supplier know that you don’t? As the old saying goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” and you could go along thinking you’ve covered all of your bases and have chosen the right finding—until it becomes clear you haven’t.

“There are so many things customers may not be aware of,” Nials says. “For example, you wouldn’t want to put a magnetic clasp on a bracelet. If you walk past a metal cabinet or hook it on a door handle, the clasp can pull open and your bracelet is gone.”

The moral: Ask your supplier for advice. More times than not, you’ll be glad you did.

9. After asking all of your questions, are you still at your price point? After running through all of your considerations and discussing various options with your supplier, you should circle back and make sure you haven’t added unnecessary costs that are now putting you at a competitive disadvantage. It all comes down to priorities—with the main priority being to have a great piece of jewelry that customers want. Apply the same rigor to choosing your components as you do to everything else, and you’ll be on your way to achieving that goal.