In the first quarter of 2011, Marco Polo Designs is opening a new frontier in our innovative design work: wedding-party jewelry, including lovely sets of matching necklaces and earrings! We’ve had a strong show of interest in this new direction from many of our valued customers, especially from fine jewelers. We’re bringing an innovative design
One of the jewelry-industry mavens that I follow, Michael Schechter (Digital Marketing Director of Honora Pearls, and founder of the thought-provoking Gen-Next Jewelers industry forum), recently published a blog post that solicits artists’ descriptions of how they do their design work. Many thanks to Michael for an opportunity to provide Marco Polo Designs’ perspective. (We recommend that our
It’s hard to believe that January of the no-longer-New Year is gone already— and it has been a busy one for Marco Polo Designs! In early January, the MPD “brain trust”— Penny, Claude, Inside Sales Manager Najela, our Customer Service torch-bearer Rocky, and our capable Outside Sales Manager Doug— met to chart out our year.
We’re (rapidly) nearing the end of our road here in Venice. Yesterday was another nice mix of productive business and enjoyable personal time. During the day, we spent more time on Murano, finalizing our designs. Since we recall that one of our readers (Tamra) had wished for more info about the interesting glass sculpture on the
Claude’s turn at the keyboard! We had an over-full day today, with four extended supplier visits. As luck would have it, our first appointment (in the area of Venice called Guglie, meaning “hunchback”) was slated for the height of one of the incidents of “acqua alta” (“high water”, flooding due to coincident high tides and
Last time I talked about the B&B Venezia where we stay. Today I want to talk about a favorite subject of mine – food! Because we come twice a year for business and stay for 2 weeks at a time, we do try to stretch our food budget. So we don’t eat in the fancy
Buon giorno! This is Penny, finally taking a turn at writing from Venice. While Claude’s writing has been more focused on the new bead designs, I am going to write more about our experiences in Venice itself – a bit more of a travelogue, as we have had friends and followers who have asked about
Today has been a bit quiet, as we wait to receive some of our sample perle (beads) on Monday. We visited one of our two primary partners and suppliers on Murano, to pick up some samples from them. We were VERY pleased with what we got – very much what we had envisioned. Our Spring
We had a busy and productive day today. We spent the day with two of our beadmakers, one on Murano and the other in the city of Mestre at the opposite end of the causeway that links the island of Venice with the mainland. On our Vaporetto ride to Murano, we saw workers changing a
Last Sunday (9/19/10), Marco Polo Designs fielded a team to participate in the Portland Oregon 2010 Race for the Cure. Penny and Claude, and staff members Liya and Xue Mei, joined many others in walking to show their support for the great work done by the Komen Foundation. As you probably know, the Foundation sponsors
