Jewelry Making

Whew! Can you say gem-mania??! We have been meaning to pay a visit to the International Gem and Jewelry Show and finally got a chance to last week. The show is a massive bazaar of gems, minerals and jewelry from all different stores and shops from around the area and abroad. It was developed 37 years ago (by Herbert A Duke, Sr.) and has grown to about 80 shows per year in 30 cities in the U.S.

OK, so attending this show was a long time coming and we thought we knew what to expect. However, the sheer amount of gems and beads available was staggering. We have previously attended the one-room Rings -n- Things special travelling gem shows before and thought there was a pretty decent selection. The IGJS was about 30 times bigger!

Walking into the show floor (our show was held at the Pasadena Convention Center in Southern Cal) is somewhat of a sensory overload, and we actually had to do a “first-pass” around the room before even picking anything up.

There are a ton of folks selling jewelry making items like gemstones, beads, findings, wire and chain. But interestingly, there are also quite a few stores selling items that are already assembled or ready-for-purchase jewelry. I guess that is because a lot of the people who come in aren’t looking for bargains on supplies but actually want to pick up jewelry for their own use. Even though we could safely ignore those particular booths, the number of vendors was still daunting.

The prices were pretty good all around, but we hadn’t really prepared lists of items we needed or done research on exactly how much things cost. So it was a bit difficult to do smart shopping. We overheard one vendor say to someone that a booth at the show costs over a thousand dollars for the 3 day show. Still, even at those show prices many vendors had nearly all their items marked down. You just had to know what to look for.

We found a few places that sold jewelry chain for cheap and it was good to look at the pearls since you could see the quality before buying. An interesting item that we seemed to see a lot were different shaped dyed Mother of Pearl “donuts”… we hadn’t seen a ton of these before but they seemed to be everywhere at the show. We bought a few strands of the “square” variety of donuts (they will be featured in an upcoming post).

Many of the booths were local businesses which wasn’t surprising, though a few came from out of state. A large number were actually “internet-only” outfits; we asked some if they had physical stores because we were interested in visiting them, but they said that it was cheaper not to have an actual store and just do jewelry shows like this!

I should probably mention that there are 2 “sections” to the show, a public and a wholesale gallery. Now, we have our resale license, so we were able to get into the wholesale gallery. I have to say I was disappointed as I expected some deep discounts and “specials”, but the annex was simply a cordoned off section of the underground parking lot. I actually think it may have hurt those vendors who were in there because they missed out on the majority of the crowd. The prices were pretty much the same as well.

Overall, this was a very impressive show and we’ll definitely be going every year. But I think we’ll “prepare” better so we won’t be so gem-shocked!

The cost to get in is $7 which isn’t all that bad considering the amount of supplies that you’ll probably end up buying. One tip - there is a printable coupon on their website that lets you get a dollar off. Also, if your show is in the downtown area of a larger city, they get you on the parking (ours was $6 for a day), so it might be wise to investigate other parking options before going to the show.

Visit the International Gem and Jewelry Show website for more info.