Geek chic: Vivian Cheng, BID/05

“I didn’t think jewelry needed to come with a user guide, but really, you need to take the disc pendant off your neck before you use it to open a bottle,” says Vivian Cheng, BID/05, designer of multi-purpose accessories.

Now that the industrial design grad’s contemporary stainless steel jewelry collection includes dual-function pieces—like disc bottle opener necklaces decorated with maps of the birthplaces of Canadian brews, a honeycomb pendant that works as a hex wrench, and cufflinks engraved with personal QR codes—instructions have expanded beyond “wear me”.

A departure from pieces based around Japanese paper, bamboo and coral inlays that Blend Creations has been known for since 2005, the expanded product line is Cheng’s response to a changing market and growing confidence.

“There’s a quirky niche that wants Twitter necklaces and emoticon cufflinks, but I didn’t think they fit the style of Blend Creations,” says Cheng, who founded the Ottawa-based company with husband Eric Jean-Louis. “Then I realized, we’re the boss—we can do what we want.”

Being the boss was the appeal of starting the company. Fresh out of Carleton and feeling a little burnt out from an intense final year, Cheng wanted some time off.

“It wasn’t that I wanted to start a business, really. I just didn’t want to answer to anyone else,” she says. “I took accounting 101 and one marketing class while I was at Carleton, and everything else I’ve learned about business has been at the school of hard knocks.”

Cheng figured she could take the small-scale manufacturing business at an easy pace, try it out for a year and see where it went. It went straight to the holiday issue of Real Simple magazine. When an intern emailed Cheng to be sure Blend Creations could meet the demand for a thousand orders, she thought it was spam. By the time the issue hit newsstands, Cheng and Jean-Louis had a three-month-old baby and more than a thousand Christmas orders to fill.

“When I said yes to Real Simple, I hadn’t thought of how we were going to do it, just that we had to. I thought business was like design—you learn it by doing it, and it works or it doesn’t,” she says.

That decision changed the business. With the influx of revenue, Cheng was able to invest in a laser cutter and CNC router—“Suddenly we could make circles!”—and Jean-Louis took the plunge, leaving his agency job to work with Cheng full time in their home studio.

“Eric was coming home from work as Jack was being put to bed. We wanted more family time, so Eric quit his job. And then the economy tanked.”

In 2008, Cheng saw her U.S. client base disappear. Online shopping in Canada wasn’t as popular, so Blend Creations had focused its efforts south of the border, targeting shoppers through print advertising.

“The last thing people need when times are tight is jewelry,” Cheng says. “People might splurge on a gourmet coffee, but not a hundred-dollar necklace. Eric and I started discussing which one of us was going to get a paper route.”

Instead, Cheng made a fundamental marketing shift. She left traditional print advertising behind and moved online, leveraging blogs, local networks and social media to promote Blend Creations.

“When we started, Facebook was for college students, Twitter didn’t exist. When the crisis hit, we had to figure out how to use the new tools to market ourselves,” says Cheng, who maintains a corporate presence on Facebook and Twitter, is available for online chats on the Blend Creations site, and sends a monthly e-newsletter to customers. “Attention moves fast on the Web, so we’re being a little more innovative to get noticed. We’ve added some designs that are a little more out there.”

Unique designs like the hex wrench pendant got Blend Creations noticed outside of design and “mommy” blogs, landing them on ThinkGeek and gadget sites, and drawing the attention of Wired. Free monthly giveaways to newsletter subscribers help spread word of mouth, and sneak peeks at design prototypes keep customers coming back to Facebook.

“Designing is the fun part, but you wear so many hats as an entrepreneur, from PR and marketing, to sourcing materials and filling orders. You have to be able and willing to turn thinking on its head, to adapt and respond,” says Cheng. “Studying industrial design gave me the skills to look at the whole process, understand function, design for the market, and be creative in problem solving.”