Custom Design 101: What We Cover in Your First Design Appointment
So, you booked your first design appointment with Alexandria & Company - congratulations! You just made a huge step in moving your design idea forward. We know it can take a lot of research, referrals, and thinking to get here so first, allow us to say thank you for considering us for your project. We are very different from the traditional fine jewelry story experience, so you may be wondering what to expect from the process at this point. While every job is different, here are some basic elements we will hope to cover during your first consultation…
You will meet with your lead designer, face-to-face (or, virtually, if you’re remote) in one of our private showrooms. Hopefully, we will chat a bit about you to learn more about your goals for the piece and how you see it fitting into your lifestyle. I like to ask clients questions like, how often do you plan to wear this piece, what type of job do you have, i.e., do you work in a job that requires a lot of manual labor or are you more of a behind-the-desk role, do you have any non-negotiable elements to the design, etc. This is an opportunity for your lead designer to get to know you and understand what you want to achieve from the process.
We’ll chat about how we work at Alx&Co. Your lead designer will cover our design process, the difference between our Streamlined and Creative options, how we conduct our gemstone sourcing, our production methods, and our guarantee. You will have every opportunity to ask questions specific to your design, and your lead designer can advise you as to which options would work best for your particular idea.
We’ll discuss your budget goals (if you want to cover this - we can always follow up directly with you after the meeting if you do not want to discuss your budget in front of your partner). We encourage you to review our Experience page before your meeting so that you can get a sense of our general pricing expectations and timeline elements, but remember that all these details are contingent upon your actual design specifications.
Your lead designer will walk you through our Collection designs as needed. You may know exactly what you want and not need to review much in person, or you might appreciate a more open-ended design discussion - it’s totally up to you. You’ll have the chance to try on our designs and get a sense of proportion, scale, color, and other more granular details. We may also show you photos of pieces we have created in order to get a better sense of your preferences, or do some google searching to cast a wider net of inspiration.
If you are planning to source a gemstone (or multiple gemstones) for your design, we’ll talk through whether you’ll need to do a Gemstone Consultation or if you would prefer to do an Expedited Diamond Selection. We can discuss your sourcing preferences and any parameters you want us to keep in mind for the selection. Knowing your budget will be extremely important to get the most out of this conversation but again, we can always talk about this directly with you if you prefer not to go through pricing details with your partner.
If we have a good idea of our design direction, your lead designer will probably sketch a preliminary design concept and walk you through certain details. If you need to source a center stone for the design, we will cover these details again before initiating the actual CAD design process so that we can confirm these elements with the center stone in mind; otherwise, if we have a really solid understanding of your design as a whole, your next step could be to sit back and wait for the initial renderings from your design lead.
At the end of the discussion, you’ll tell your lead designer how you want to proceed. If you want to think about what we reviewed before committing to working with us, that’s totally fine. You’ll have your lead designer’s contact information and can follow up directly with them if and when you are ready to move forward. Remember: we totally understand that we might not be the best fit for every single job, and we don’t expect you to feel committed just because you had one design consultation with us! No hard feelings, just let us know. Hopefully, though, you’ll be so excited about what we have discussed that you’ll be inspired to move forward with the next steps of the design process, whether that means picking out your center stone or engaging our design services. We’ll have more on those steps in our follow-up posts!