A Rhode Island School of Design graduate, Johanna Fisher launched her first line of costume jewelry in January 1999. A year later, she is exporting more than 40 percent of her product to Japan and has had her work displayed in a variety of fashion magazines including Elle and Style. But Fisher said her education at RISD is only a small part of the reason her business has become successful.
”I had an internship in costume jewelry my first year at RISD,” she said. “But it’s not a course they teach. If I hadn’t had that experience, I wouldn’t have seen it as an option.”
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Still, she credits the school for providing her with the option to meet and make connections, as well as understand the importance of being able to freely design her own line.
”At the graduate level you aren’t just there for an education,” she said. “You are building a network for when you leave. They focus mainly on making art pieces that are uncommon looking and sell in the gallery circuit. I saw the limitations of having that kind of a business, the value of sales is not as high but you have a higher price point and I wanted to be able to make new product lines as often as possible.”
Louis Mueller, a jewelry design professor at RISD, said the school’s focus is on pieces constructed with sheet metal, wire, and precious stones — all aspects of fine jewelry.
”It’s quite a specific curriculum,” he said. “We don’t do anything with white metal and we aren’t really involved with the costume industry.”
According to Mueller, the program’s structure is based on what students are looking for and the demand of the industry.
”Now that the tuition here is around $22,000 a year, students aren’t really looking for jobs within the (costume jewelry) industry,” he said. “Fine jewelry is really booming now and people are going for the high-end kind of stuff. Here, I hear that the costume jewelry business is declining.”
But according to the Manufacturing Jewelers & Suppliers of America, based in Providence, that’s not true and the state is still the heart of the fashion or costume jewelry industry.
”Rhode Island still has the most fashion jewelers in one place of any other place in the nation,” said John Harvey, MJSA spokesman. “There has been some damage done to the industry primarily due to foreign competition and mergers, but the industry itself remains strong.”
Lynn Ramsey, president of the Jewelry Information Center in New York, said costume jewelry is coming back, and that many people associate the fashion jewelry industry with Rhode Island.
”The fashion industry was hit a couple of years ago,” she said. “But like the fine jewelry industry there is growth.”
Part of that resurgence, Harvey said, is the industry’s ability to adapt to current fashion trends, an idea that wasn’t always embraced by some in the industry.
”For a long time manufacturers were putting out the same thing,” he said. “Now they are upgrading product lines. There are very few other manufacturing industries where fashion trends influence the manufacturer, the caster and the finisher and they have begun to really keep up.”
Harvey said another thing helping the Rhode Island fashion jewelry industry is the number of skilled workers in the state. Even during a record low-unemployment period, Harvey said the state still has a talented labor force and MJSA is working to expand that educated workforce through programs like the Swarovski Jewelry Center at Rhode Island College.
”This is not like any other assembly line job,” he said. “These workers have a good eye for detail, and we are constantly upgrading and bringing new people into those skilled areas.”
Harvey said the future success of Rhode Island’s fashion jewelry industry is dependent on a younger generation becoming involved, something he thinks the center will be important for.
”There is some idea that the jewelry industry is an old, dirty industry,” he said. “But there are a lot of high-tech jobs out there in this industry, jobs with various skills and educational levels. We are beginning to frame it as both manufacturing and art and that is appealing to young people.”
