Meet Melissa Tyson

We recently connected with Melissa Tyson and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Melissa, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

Since I was a young kid I was always creating and crafting things with my hands. I knew from a young age that I loved making jewelry among other arts, but jewelry was always, my favorite. When it was time for college I have a rare ability to be right and left brained and was very good at math too. My family encouraged me to go to school for accounting for the good and stable career. After one year of college, I called my parents to say “I’m either dropping out of college or I’m going to art school!” They said don’t drop out. Go to art school. After a year of the beginning design classes, my professor said you should take my intro to metals class next semester. The minute my hands touched metal I knew that’s what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

So I get to create joy for peoples hands. I work with couples in the most joyful moments of their relationship, making the step to get engaged, it’s a very exciting time for them and we get to share in that season by bringing their love story to life in the form on an engagement ring. It’s such an honor to be trusted by our clients to see their vision into reality, it’s getting to mark milestone moments with an heirloom treasure that will be likely passed down for generations. We work with free spirited couples that want an artisan engagement ring, handcrafted, unique and a perfect representation of their style and aesthetic. Gone are the days that people want an engagement ring that looks like everyone else’s, our clients want and engagement ring that is one of a kind and we get the privilege to design with them and make the process fun and enjoyable!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Don’t quit your day job, what I mean by this, is that when I was fresh out of college with a degree in jewelry design, I was working 3 jobs, waitressing, working with a special needs boy and making jewelry that I was selling at festival and shows on the weekends. Point is, do what you love never stop creating for the love of it, but be wise, it takes time, keep you day job until your jewelry income exceeds that and you can support yourself in making jewelry or whatever your art form is. It takes time, it was 3 years before I went full time into making jewelry for a living and that was 25 years ago!
My other thing is that I was very grassroots, slow growth and reinvesting into the business, I never took a loan out ever. And I’m very proud of that, we are a debt free company to this day. And always create because you love it and it’s your passion, if you just do it for the money you will get burned out, you have to do it for the love of it always!

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?

Currently rebuilding our organic SEO after a huge hit last year. We had been building our organic SEO for 20 years. We had a very high profile diamond vendor selling diamonds through our website, they decided one day that their app wasn’t profitable so they shut it down and essentially pulled 200 live pages off our website and Google penalized us greatly from 20,000 organic visitors a month to literally zero! It cut our revenue by 40% and affected everything from our organic traffic to our ads to our social media. Rebuilding our traffic from a very unforseen event has been a long uphill road, but when you know what it possible you can always rebuild, even from things that were totally out of your control.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Headshot Drewe & Kate Branding Co.
Ring photos Matt Ray Photography

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