We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Allie Perry a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Allie, we’re so appreciative of you taking the time to share your nuggets of wisdom with our community. One of the topics we think is most important for folks looking to level up their lives is building up their self-confidence and self-esteem. Can you share how you developed your confidence?
I’ve always been pretty comfortable in my own skin. I also had the good luck to grow up with a dad who is not only very handy but who has always been willing to teach me how to do the things he was doing. He always encouraged me to approach a problem logically to see if I could come up with a solution, and then try to implement that solution. I carried those skills into adulthood.
When I was studying jewelry making in my senior year of college, I needed to find a way to shift my academic career to a professional one. The solution I came up with was to create an internship in my area of specialty, and I implemented it by convincing the school to allow me to do it, and by convincing a local business that they should hire me. I didn’t know if any of it was going to work, but the answer is always “no” if you never ask for things.
When my husband and I bought our first home, it was a fixer-upper that needed lots of updating. We didn’t do any of the plumbing or electrical work, because we didn’t want to flood the house or burn it down. But we did everything else! We gutted the sad little kitchen down to the studs and rebuilt the whole thing; we added a bathroom; and perhaps the scariest thing, we installed two skylights in that new bathroom. To be very clear, cutting two holes in the roof of your recently purchased first home is not for the faint of heart! But it turned out great!
That’s definitely not to say everything always turns out great…when we went to install our lower cabinets, we discovered a discrepancy in our measurements and ended up having to reframe a small part of a wall. And when we went to put the dowels in our plate cabinet, we discovered we’d installed the whole thing upside down! It was less funny then than it is now, but it was a quick fix.
My theory of trying new things boils down to the fact that I can either a) hire a professional to do something for me, or b) try it myself and only have to hire a professional if things go sideways. Option A doesn’t teach me anything, and I feel like it’s only a good fit for me if my errors could prove dangerous. But option B allows me the opportunity to learn a new skill and understand the way things around me work! And so far, I’ve never had to hire a professional to fix my mistakes- I learned from them and corrected them myself!
This confidence in my own abilities came in clutch when the Covid changed all of our lives. I decided, at the height of the pandemic, that I needed to take my future, my health, and my safety into my own hands and go into business for myself.
I made plenty of mistakes and learned more than a few things the hard way, but I really believe I’m better off for it. I’ve always felt the best way to learn something is to try it, and that mistakes absolutely do NOT mean failure!
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’ve loved making things my entire life.
Whether it was little flowers out of clay, dollhouse furniture out of paper, or jewelry out of paperclips, I’ve always loved working with my hands to make tiny pieces of art. When I was a senior in high school, I took a real jewelry-making class where I learned basic techniques like sawing and soldering, and I absolutely loved it!
I went on to get my Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art with a specialization in jewelry and Silversmithing, and have worked in the field ever since. I’ve gained invaluable experience working in manufacturing, repair, custom design, and hand fabrication. I’ve been on teams that designed and produced jewelry items by the thousands, and I’ve delicately hand-crafted one-of-a-kind bridal sets and heirloom pieces. I’ve sold entire jewelry lines to buyers for Fortune 500 companies, and I’ve done local trade and craft shows selling to people just like you. I spent years working solely on repair, learning all of the different ways jewelry might fail so I could design around and eliminate some of those shortfalls. Every step of the way, I’ve taken advantage of the tricks and hints offered to me to hone my craft, tossing the bad and keeping the good so I can build quality pieces of jewelry for my customers.
Now, I’m the one-woman show behind Allie Perry Designs!
After spending so many years bringing my clients’ designs to life, I now spend my time designing and hand-fabricating one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces in themed collections. A lot of my inspiration comes from my love of the ocean and nature in general, but I’ve also explored themes like traditional tattoo art. birds and feathers, or using non-traditional materials like typewriter keys.
I manage my own e-commerce site and share a lot of my processes on social media. There are so many people out there who love jewelry but may not know how it’s built, or what it means to properly maintain it. I want to help people understand jewelry and jewelry making!
As I grow my business, I’m also hoping to expand into course creation so I can help other aspiring jewelers learn the tricks of the trade, and share with other small business owners some of the things I’ve done to improve my own business.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
I think the three most important things in my journey have been my willingness to try new things without fear, my ability to fight for myself, and my willingness to put in the amount of work necessary to master the skills of my craft.
When I say that I tried new things without fear, I certainly don’t mean I was never nervous. I think having the right amount of nerves helps me avoid making reckless decisions. I simply mean I learned, worked, and experimented without the fear that failure would end my career. We have to be willing to not regret our failures, but learn from them and let them mold us into who will will become.
We all know how challenging it can be to make progress, especially when we’re new at something, so my ability and willingness to fight for myself may be one of the most important skills I’ve used in both my personal and professional life. It’s a whole lot easier for people to tell us “no” when we ask for help than it is for them to teach us or foster our growth. I’m a female, and I worked in a male-dominated industry when I was at least 20 years younger than the next employee, so there were countless times I had to fight hard to be seen and heard. I was never too shy or afraid to stand up for myself.
Lastly, I put in the work. I started at the bottom. I worked jobs I didn’t want in sectors of the field that weren’t my end goal. I sacrificed jobs I loved to take jobs that were void of joy but chock full of opportunities to learn and increase my technical ability. I’m human, so I complained about some of those choices…a lot. But each of those choices brought me one step closer to who I am and what I can do today.
We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I work in a skilled trade, so I think it’s incredibly important to be well-rounded.
I love hand-fabrication. But when I started my career, I worked in sales (both wholesale and retail), casting, mass production, and jewelry repair- specialty areas all across the field. Knowing how those other parts of the industry worked gave me a really solid foundation for when I settled into doing hand fabrication full-time. Learning sales techniques for massive wholesale accounts as well as direct sales at small shows and retail shops taught me the kinds of questions consumers would ask so I could design pieces to fill their needs. Casting and mass production taught me how to streamline my working processes. Becoming proficient at jewelry repair taught me all of the ways jewelry can wear down, break, or fail, so I could design heirloom quality jewelry that was strong and long-lasting.
If I’d spent the early part of my career focusing solely on the areas I was already strong in, I would have missed out on all of those opportunites to understand my overall trade better. And now that I own my own business, my decisions are well-informed by my extensive experience in the field.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.allieperrydesigns.com
- Instagram: @allieperrydesigns
- Facebook: @allieperrydesigns
- Other: TikTok: @allieperrydesigns Pinterest: @allieperrydesigns Threads: @allieperrydesigns
Image Credits
Allie Perry
