Episode Details

This week on Keep Going I talked with Nelly Mendoza, the founder of Nelly Creative Studios. She has been making jewelry for about ten years, and her story is not a clean startup arc. It starts with her walking into a class in the basement of her college art center, kind of by accident, and finding the one thing she kept coming back to, even while she was majoring in economics.

The part that stuck with me was how practical she is about an “impractical” career. She did not raise outside money. She took a few fellowships, one was about $5,000 after graduation, and used it to buy materials, mainly gold, and get herself set up. After that, she kept the loop tight, money from projects went back into materials and equipment. There is no magic here. It is repetition, reinvestment, and staying alive long enough to get better.

She also talked about the part people skip when they say “follow your passion.” In a creative business there is no set path. There is no job ladder. It is trial and error, and it can be lonely. She described those stretches where sales slow down and you start asking if you should turn around and do something safer. She had those moments. She also knew that if she took the safe route too early, she might never leave it. So she learned to measure progress in small wins, one new client, one new piece, one new idea, and keep moving.

On the growth side, she did the work that actually gets attention. She built a consistent online presence, wrote blogs, kept a “jewelry journal,” and made her brand for both men and women, not just women. She leaned on word of mouth because jewelry is visual, people see it, ask about it, and that conversation sells better than an ad. Then she added something a lot of online brands miss, physical experiences. Last year she rented a gallery, invited people she trusted, and let them handle the pieces in person. No storefront, so she created the moment herself. She is planning another pop-up, and she is careful about safety and about building a real community around the work.

One more choice mattered. She took a job at Tiffany, in their innovation studio, for four years. Not to quit her business, but to buy time and learn. She called it a kind of second degree. It gave her skills, contacts, and more confidence in how the industry works. Then she left when she felt the job was taking too much time away from the thing she wanted to own. That is a hard call, and she made it without pretending it was romantic. It was about control and focus.

Her economics degree shows up in how she thinks about pricing and tradeoffs. She does not price from feelings. She prices from materials, opportunity cost, and the reality that gold has gotten expensive enough that old prices do not work anymore. She is now thinking about entry-level pieces for younger followers, using different materials, without turning the work into disposable trend-chasing.

If you want the lesson from this episode, it is this. Making your own way is slow and it is messy. You do not need a dramatic leap. You need enough runway to learn, enough discipline to reinvest, and enough patience to stick with the lonely parts. Allie built her business the old-fashioned way, one piece at a time, one customer at a time, and one decision at a time. That is still how it works.

Transcript:

Welcome back to Keep Going, podcast about success and failure. I’m John Biggs. The other show we have Nelly Mendoza. She’s the founder of Nelly Creative Studios, your jewelry maker. Nelly, welcome. Yeah, so you’ve been doing this for 10 years. I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to who is actually making jewelry or some kind of like

Nelly (00:58.162)

Thank you.

Nelly (01:02.184)

I have closed ears now, yep.

John Biggs (01:09.728)

or accessories, etc. So this is a this is a new one for me. So why don’t y