The Client
Philippa Roberts Jewelry specializes in contemporary and organic jewelry designs. Founded in 1996, the company originally sold jewelry at various street fairs. As their brand increased and company began to grow, Philippa Roberts opened up a combined retail store/studio shop in Oakland in 2006. They eventually began selling wholesale to galleries, boutiques and museum stores across the country and internationally.
Philippa’s signature look is simple, organic shapes combined with beautifully cut gemstones. Her creativity stems from the nature around her, yet she also incorporates a feeling of the urban, with lines and patterns that imitate architecture and design seen around the city. These unique designs have resulted in Philippa Roberts Jewelry being featured in esteemed galleries such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Art and Design in New York City.
The Challenge
As both a retailer and wholesaler, Philippa Roberts creates 300 to 800 pieces of jewelry a month that are sold in store, to different retailers, or showcased at various trade shows. With inventory constantly moving, Philippa Roberts devised a labeling system to identify each piece of jewelry and to separate the retail products from wholesale. These labels were handwritten and had an unprofessional look about them.
Philippa Roberts eventually realized that this process wasn’t working. “The time we spent handwriting different labels was very time consuming and inefficient,” said Adam Evans, Philippa Roberts jewelry production manager. “Meanwhile, the jewelry products we saw at other trade shows and retailers all had nice, professional looking labels.”
The Solution
Evans realized a change to their labeling system needed to happen and decided to research different barcode printers and labelers. Their search kept leading them back to Wasp, who they selected because of Wasp’s barcode printer’s user-friendly interface and its compatibility with LabeLink.
“We were already using LabeLink, which pulled all our codes from QuickBooks®,” said Evans. “LabeLink suggested both Wasp and Bartender, but we found Wasp’s interface to be much more user-friendly and also a perfect compliment with LabeLink.”
The Result
Since deploying Wasp’s barcode printer a year ago, Philippa Roberts has seen instant results. Not only do their labels look more clean and professional, but production and packaging now take significantly less time, making their work more efficient. “Wasp is very versatile in what it can do, making it easy to change logos, style numbers, locations, etc,” said Evans. “Our production and packaging times were greatly expedited by about 30 percent, and we have also been able to organize our products better. Before, we had to cross-reference each item with different store numbers, which was a tedious process. Now, the store number prints directly on the label.”
In addition, Philippa Roberts has seen a 20 percent increase in time saved preparing for tradeshows. Before they had to handwrite the prices for each piece of jewelry by copying the info from an Excel spreadsheet. Now they can store the prices and print them easily, greatly reducing the amount of time spent preparing for trade shows.
