My Career: ‘Creativity is served up in many different forms on a daily basis’

Name: Tuula Harrington

Age: 50

Lives: Cork

Job title: Goldsmith and business owner

Salary bracket: €45,000-60,000

Education background:

Three-year goldsmithing apprenticeship in Assisi, Italy, and BA in Metalwork and Jewellery, Sheffield Hallam, UK

Hobbies: I don’t have enough time for a hobby these days.

Describe your job in five words:

Jewellery designer/maker and business owner.

Describe yourself in five words:

Irish/Finnish hybrid, multi-faceted.

Personality needed for this kind of work?

Creative, determined, genuine, trustworthy.

How long are you doing this job? It’s over 30 years since I started my apprentice and I’ve pretty much stuck with it ever since.

How did you get this job? I always laugh a little to myself when I remember being in school and thinking to myself that I’m going to have a creative career and not a 9-5 office job.

Little did I know then that to maintain my creative career, I’d have to learn to run a business.

I fell in love with my craft the moment I was introduced to it as a teenager on a student exchange to Italy. The materials, the tools, the method, the skills, all of it just seemed an ideal combination.

I was fortunate enough to be offered an apprenticeship by the lady master-goldsmith, Gabrielle Muller-Heffter, who introduced me to the craft after my first year of Art College in Galway Technical College in 1993 at the age of 18.

This opportunity, you could say, shaped my future. I grabbed it with both hands and thought to myself, I’m going to do everything it takes to make her proud of me.

After three years in Italy, I spent some time in Finland before returning to Ireland and getting my first official job with a jeweller in Waterford. However, I felt I needed more training and experience, so after only six months, I then went to do a BA in Metalwork and Jewellery at Sheffield Hallam University, which was a bit of a culture shock after Italy, but a valuable experience all the same.

In 2000, I returned to Ireland and took up work with Irene Brennan in Cork. I worked with her for a few years until she told me, in order for me to progress in my career, I’d have to go out on my own, and so that’s what I did.

I opened my first studio on the Grand Parade in 2004 and later my first retail outlet in the Winthrop Arcade in 2007. It was a great experience, I muddled my way through and gradually began to build up a clientele, some of whom are customers to this day.

Then the recession hit, it felt like it happened overnight, suddenly there were no customers, nothing was selling, and I had to reinvent my business model pretty quickly in order to survive. I made a bold choice to relocate and start a bigger project as a limited company. When I went to view the premises we are now located in, on Cornmarket Street, I remember being almost overwhelmed by the ideas that rushed into my mind, it was just the antidote I needed to the hopelessness of the recession.

I opened Designworks Studio on April 4, 2011, and now it seems crazy to imagine we have been here for over 14 years. Initially, I opened the studio showcasing different types of crafts, including glass, woodturning, and ceramics alongside jewellery by various Irish-based designer makers. However, over the course of the first few years, I quickly began to realise my passion and interest mainly remained with jewellery, and I was much better at selling what I knew about, and was doing the other artists an injustice by trying to do anything else.

The business has continued to grow and evolve over the years, and we have endeavoured to develop not just our product range but also the quality and integrity of the design process and materials we use.

During the pandemic, we had the challenge of having to adapt to a better online service. My partner Cal, did this by building an interactive design platform on our website, called MyUnique Ring (currently under refurbishment) which allows you to play with our ring designs to suit your wants and needs. Our current innovation is creating traceability certificates for our high-end products, using the information we have on the sourcing of our materials and in addition to our design and making processes. We are the first jewellers in Ireland to collaborate with iTraceiT, a block-chain digital ledger designed and dedicated to bringing traceability and transparency to the jewellery industry.

This was all sparked off by the challenge of how to navigate the huge shift in the market by lab-grown diamonds. Our decision was not to get involved with them, but rather to highlight the overlooked and unknown positives that natural diamonds bring to countries such as Botswana, which is why all our diamonds are now sourced from there.

We are also actively working with other gemstone suppliers who provide ethical sourcing and traceability.

Do you need particular qualifications or experience?

Goldsmithing does require specific skills training and ability, as well as experience. In this trade, you never stop learning. Some are self-taught and some are not.

Describe a day at work: My most frequent daily activity is problem-solving, whether it’s a design that needs figuring out, or how to work to a budget, or quantify the material you need, there are lots of variables, including working with different individual clients with different requests.

I will sit with a customer for a design consultation and decipher what they are looking for, and that’s everything from the style of what they want, sometimes discovering that what they think they want isn’t what they want at all. I then need to take that information and come up with the right answers and put those elements together in a design to create something that they are going to love.

On the days I get to work on our in-house designs, I need to unlock my own imagination and style. Creativity is served up in many different forms on a daily basis.

I would also like to mention that I have an incredible team here in Designworks Studio who keep me in check and keep the show on the road, and make the whole experience enjoyable and professional.

My fellow goldsmith Paula O’Callaghan is helping us create beautiful pieces, Chloe Cuthbert, our wonderful and diligent front of house, who keeps so much of the administration and social media flowing, as well as being a top sales person. And last but not least, my partner Callum Shaw, whose CAD skills are an integral part of the business, he is a vital cog in the operations of the business.

How many hours do you work a week? 35 hours in the studio, but that doesn’t account for the hours of discussion and decision-making around the kitchen table, and time goes in elsewhere.

Is your job stressful? How? Rate it on a scale of 1-10:

No, 4. If it is still stressful at this stage, it’s because of bigger outside factors that we have no control over.

Do you work with others or on your own? We currently have a team of four.

When do you plan to retire or give up working?

Eventually, but not in the near future.

Best bits: Satisfied, happy customers.

Worst bits: Pandemic, recession, take your pick. But that’s life, it’s not plain sailing for any of us.

Advice to those who want your job? Experience only comes with experience. They won’t want my job, what they will actually want is to carve out their own path, it’s a very personal journey and you make it what it is.