Making wearable art accessible to all – Ochre Handmade

In August 2019 Lauren Quinn started her small business “purely as a creative outlet”. She never could have imagined that amid a global pandemic her sales would “skyrocket” and she would find herself a young entrepreneur.

From ochre to aqua Lauren’s designs angle into shapes that make 3D jewellery stand out and remind the viewer of something along the lines of a Picasso painting come-to-life; circles bending into rectangles and marble ovals.

Lauren creates polymer clay earrings which, while seeming to be big, bold and heavy are very light to touch.

“People would pick them up and get shocked as to how light to the touch they are,” Lauren says laughing, her arms flailing about in a motion of picking something up. She sits comfortably and smiles warmly parading a pair of her own earrings herself – like a true professional.

“My jewellery seems to be popular at the moment,” she admits, “because when people are attending zoom meetings, they want something to make themselves stand out or dress up a little bit and statement earrings are a really good way to do that.”

Advertising her business through Instagram, Lauren has gained 16.1 thousand followers in the span of three years.

“My business was born out of being able to make wearable art,” she says, “this was a way to get things out of my head and turn them into something I could present to people and say: ‘Look at this pretty thing that I have made, would you like to wear it?’”

With a background in the film industry, which Lauren describes to be a “relatively creative” outlet, she says she has always wanted to create something she could “put her own stamp on”.

Pre-pandemic, Lauren heavily relied on markets and human contact to get her brand noticed where people could touch and fidget with her jewellery which would “always spark conversation”.

She explains a time, when her friend wore a pair of her earrings to her job at a publishing company which sparked the idea of a collaborative pr campaign with an author. Lauren created earrings matching the book’s theme and they were sent out to various book influencers as small gifts.

"That went down extremely well,” she gushes.

But even so, COVID-19 had a positive effect on her sales.

Lauren admits that her handmade jewellery start-up is not her full-time job, but it brings her “an extra 60% - 70% of [her] income, which is a lot for something that [she is] making with [her] hands.”

The pandemic seems to have introduced a new trend; a drive in active support of small, up and coming businesses and start-ups similar in many ways to Lauren’s.

American e-commerce platform Etsy, which focuses on sales of handmade and vintage products, has seen a surge in 71% of new sellers in the first six months of 2020 alone, says Veeqo.

While Lauren is not part of that figure, she admits to using social media, especially Instagram, as a means to drive her online presence: “People are living through their phones so it’s a good way to target that audience. I like to get people involved in my brand; making posts that they can relate to and share on their page for example.”

She goes on to say that even though her online sales “have grown enormously since pre-pandemic” she suspects that would have been the trend “anyway in regards to the lifespan of [her] business”.

“Building up sales online can take so much time with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), getting the name out there and getting that digital footprint,” she adds.

Recalling her past baking [clay] disasters, Lauren says she has “created monsters … but it is all about the problem solving where time, clarity and grace all come in.”

In her last words of advice Lauren stresses the importance of being humble. She brings up that ideally, in the next two to three years she would love to make this her full-time job and believes it will be, but so far, she stays doing what she loves the most and sees where the current will take her.