Alan Ardiff's Millennium Bug brooch isn't just a cute little silver fella aching for a lapel. It's also an example of how the Dublin-born jeweller has made a business success of his craft. The brooch is a production piece made in the 33-year-old's studio by one of his four employees and it couldn't be more marketable given our obsession with Y2K. "I always said there was a suit under this woolly jumper," says Ardiff. "Three years ago I decided it was time to take off the woolly jumper." The NCAD-trained jeweller decided it was time to get serious. He changed from one-off craft pieces to a highly streamlined small-scale production.
The turning point came not with a visit to some enormous production line but when his work was taken up by the Electrum Gallery in London. Ardiff had already established a name in Ireland and the exclusive gallery invited him to be the first Irish jeweller to show alongside highly collectable jewellers from all over the world.
Prices for his work started at £800 for a brooch. "After a while I realised I was making pieces I couldn't afford," he says, "and, despite the high prices, I wasn't really making a living." He did what few contemporary Irish jewellers have done - he developed a range of production pieces which he could train people to make in his whimsical style. He designs the master model; then individual pieces are made. He is in the process of moving his retail outlet and studio to larger premises in the Craft Tower in Pearse Street, Dublin.
"There's still a great deal of hand finishing on each piece," says Ardiff. "I bring out several new designs a year, so there will be only a limited run on each design which keeps them fairly exclusive." It also helps bring the prices down. His Millennium Bug, with a £70 price tag, sold out last week on its first outing at his new exhibition in Temple Bar's Design Yard, which runs for a month.
There are now 50 pieces in his range and it's a tribute to his creativity that all are recognisably his. Most pieces are kinetic in some way, from a brooch featuring a fish that flies over a man's head to a bird that swings on a wire balanced underneath by a brightly coloured semi-precious stone. They're also highly sculptural - his large, new, jewel-tipped rocket pendants that would look as good hanging in a frame as they do around someone's neck.
Another common thread is the line of humorous titles. One of his new silver brooches is a cartoon type figure of a man with an anvil on his head entitled Things On My Mind; another called Lightheaded features the same man with a lightbulb.
When reviewing production methods, he took a hard look at the overall package and that meant quite literally his packaging. Never a fan of the velvet box, he started to work with graphic designer Garret Stokes at Visual Communications to develop a new range of branded packaging which would not only make his jewellery easier to display but would also mean that each piece from the least expensive brooch to the the most expensive necklace was presented in a simple, stylish way.
His new business-like approach has allowed him to take on jobs that simply would not have been possible if he was still a one-man operation. Thanks to a commission from Tyrone Productions, 400 of his brooches were flown out to Japan as gifts for the Riverdance cast, crew and friends and he has recently designed a pendant for Kylemore Abbey, which intends selling them to raise funds.
Ardiff, who has just heard he's on the shortlist to design the millennium pound coin, has again commissioned Stokes to come up with entirely new packaging. Then there's his website which Visual Communications are designing - it will be up and running before his first New York show in July. Nothing woolly jumper about all that.
