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Looking ahead: Tom Blake has learned that preparation is key when it comes to pitching his jewellery. Photograph: National Trust/Rex
Looking ahead: Tom Blake has learned that preparation is key when it comes to pitching his jewellery. Photograph: National Trust/Rex

How to learn from rejection when starting a business

This article is more than 9 years old
Tom Blake has been blogging about the highs and lows of his startup adventure. Here he explains how he has moved on from negative encounters

In my first blog entry I said that I would be writing about the highs and lows of starting a business. You can definitely feel elated at one moment and dispirited the next. One of the major lows for me so far has been rejection. I have been working on keep me for nearly three years and it is very dear to me. If I'm not working on it I am thinking about it, but not everybody is going to feel the same way as I do and I have had to learn that that is OK.

From the start I have thought that keep me is a good idea with commercial potential but I have met, and will continue to meet, people who don't agree. As upsetting as this is, it has actually strengthened the product and made me more determined to make it succeed. A good example of this happened at the beginning of 2013. Every year a well-known department store in London holds an open day for designers/makers to present their work with the aim of having their products stocked in the shop. I saw this as a great opportunity to get some much-needed feedback from retail professionals. Looking back I gave myself too much work to do for the presentation and I was up until 4am trying to finish my pieces. I just about did it but had left myself no time to prepare any kind of presentation or pitch and I was exhausted. Key things that I learned from the experience were to be realistic with what you can achieve in the time you have, and most importantly be thoroughly prepared.

By the time I got to show my product I was shaking with nerves and exhaustion. I didn't sell myself or my product and to be honest I just wanted it to be over as quickly as possible. I was told my product wasn't something for their store and that was that. I came away feeling disappointed and disheartened. However, in the following days I started to reflect and I began to realise I had actually learned a lot from the experience. I concluded that my product needed to change.

At the time I had been working on keep me for just over a year and had completed only four examples from a range of 10. As I was presenting them I wished that I had the whole range to show as it makes far more impact. I also had the wrong idea about the market I was aiming at. The jewellery was far more high end with precious metals and precious stones and therefore priced a lot higher. As I was going through the costs with the buyers I realised that the product was priced far too high. In the following days I decided to redesign the jewellery to bring the costs right down and to aim at a different market.

Although I was only in the meeting for three or four minutes, I learned a great deal from the experience. Most importantly, how I needed to develop my product further, but also how thoroughly prepared you need to be for such encounters.

Tom Blake is a sculptor and designer and the founder of keep me jewellery.

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