Guest blogger Paul Haywood from the Haywood Life offers suggestions on best digital tools for building on online jewellery business.

Not too long ago a web service called 2Shapes was brought to my attention. Its premise is an interesting one - remote interactive bespoke design directly with a client. See what I have to think about it.

As a follow up to my recent Dark Side of New Technology article, I discovered an article detailing experiences dealing with Amazon Handmade versus Etsy. Definitely worth a read.

Not too long ago, In Detail magazine released an article about the effect of new Instagram-based digital PR and marketing strategies on jewellery retail. It's quite a good read.

For my second article in the "Dark Side of New Technology" series, I'm going to discuss the problems with online retail platforms like Etsy and Shapeways, and what can be done to improve them.

For these next few articles, I'm going to examine the negative side-effects of many of these innovations, and what we as jewellery businesses can do about it to protect ourselves. I shall call this new series “The Dark Side of New Technology”. This first article will be about the side effects of social media marketing’s continuous growth.

As part of James Allen's recently launched but absolutely brilliant marketing push for millennial grooms, they teamed up with Buzzfeed to create the Engagement Ring Challenge, where both partners separately design an engagement ring using James Allen's online bespoke design tools, and then compare. The end results and reactions are cute, and only half predictable:

Previously we've talked about the different ways in which CAD is being used by jewellers to interact with their customers. Now I wanted to look at the ways in which jewellery CAD designers can offer their skills to the wider market.

For this month's Something Beautiful in Jewellery, I present Artur Dabrowski and his architectural rings.

The launch of luxury 3D printed product boutique website Bre and Co marks an interesting change in the perception of CAD and 3D printed products by consumers. In this article, I explore 4 different emerging business strategies for using CAD and 3D printing when marketing and presenting retail jewellery.