Giving Preloved Jewellery a Second Chance to Sparkle with Sarah Hutchison

When your clothes no longer suit or fit you, there are many ways to move them on responsibly. But what do you do when your designer-made jewellery no longer works for you?  

Sarah Hutchison has the solution. She is the founder and owner of Sarah Hutchison Jewellery in Edinburgh’s Morningside, which opened in 2011 and sells covetable new work by more than 40 independent designer-makers. Sarah says, “Looking at all the platforms there are now for preloved and preowned clothes, shoes, bags – literally everything – I wondered why this didn’t exist for contemporary jewellery…Jewellery, when treated properly, often looks like new. It was a light bulb moment”.  

Image: Sarah Hutchison /  Photographer unknown

Sarah didn’t just wonder at the gap: she acted. In September 2023, she launched an online selling platform for preloved jewellery on Instagram, with the handle SH_chance_to_sparkle. The name reflects her determination to give beautiful, preloved jewellery a second opportunity to ‘sparkle’ by finding new owners longing to wear it.  

Sarah was regularly asked by clients “where to sell items, and I had never had the answer before. Now, I feel it’s an additional service I can offer. I was blown away when five [of the first six items] sold within the first 24 hours”. This marked the start of her innovative Preloved Service for handmade and contemporary jewellery. 

Many of us must have items of jewellery languishing unworn in our homes. Our tastes evolve, our bodies change, and so may our personal circumstances. The Preloved Service lets sellers turn these unworn pieces back into cash or trade them in for something that works better for them. Buyers benefit too, through the chance to acquire beautiful pieces at less than new prices, bringing good handmade jewellery within the reach of more people. 
 

Image via SH Jewellery

At the same time, we are finally realising the earth’s resources are precious and finite, recognising the need to embrace sustainability by rehoming and recycling wherever possible. Valuable materials can be locked into contemporary jewellery; much energy may have been expended in making it; considerable skill and thought will have gone into creating it. Rehoming makes perfect sense. Preloved jewellery has found its moment. 

Awareness of Sarah’s Preloved Service has largely spread by word of mouth alongside a pleasing amount of media interest, bringing new clients to her social channels, website and physical store. This, in turn, is raising the profile of work by contemporary jewellers in general. 

As a highly regarded jeweller and silversmith herself, Sarah is well qualified to act as a broker for preloved contemporary jewellery. Trained at Edinburgh College of Art under the legendary Dorothy Hogg, she ran her own practice for several years, making exquisite, distinctive jewellery and silverwork. One of her best-known pieces is a striking silver and gilt fringed teapot with matching cups. This was made for Sharleen Spiteri as part of Silver of the Stars, a collection commissioned in 2007 from ten of Scotland’s finest silversmiths by Edinburgh’s Incorporation of Goldsmiths. 

Sarah relocated soon after, running a high-end jewellery gallery in London’s prestigious Hatton Garden for two years, before returning to Edinburgh and establishing her elegant Morningside shop. Its collections of new, beautifully crafted jewellery by makers in Scotland and beyond focus on precious metals, and often gemstones. She now runs both this thriving physical shop and a demanding online business, alongside caring for a young child and three dogs at home. A skilled multi-tasker, energy and enthusiasm radiate from her. This is fortunate, as the Preloved Service alone involves a considerable amount of work.  
 

Image via SH Jewellery

Sarah cleans each piece before photographing it meticulously from different angles and on her person, to show its scale and how it works. Using her long experience of the market and her assessment of its desirability, she prices each item before describing it and posting it on the Instagram grid. She monitors the grid constantly, ensuring buyers and sellers receive prompt service. For this, she charges the seller a modest commission. This is demonstrably a passion project: a labour of love. 

How have jewellers reacted to seeing their work appearing for sale at second-hand prices? As a maker herself, Sarah well understands the potential sensitivity around this issue and contacts each jeweller to explain her project before their work appears on the grid. Almost all have responded with encouragement, often adding supportive comments to the post and recirculating it to their networks. Several have taken the opportunity to acquire other makers’ work for their own collections. 

Their encouragement makes sense. Contemporary handmade jewellery has always lacked a secondary market, a gap impacting makers and buyers alike. Until recently, only the highest of high-end designer-made jewellery reached a secondary market. This has been mainly through auction houses whose principal interest is in work marketable as ‘collectable’ rather than simply ‘wearable’. Yet handmade jewellery’s value lies in the creativity, craftsmanship, labour and sentiment invested in it, not just its materials or its association with a famous name. 

Most of us buy jewellery to wear, at whatever level we can afford. The Preloved Service presents a remarkably varied group of pieces at a wide range of prices, from an accessible £12 up to the low thousands. Many pieces cost under £100. At the top end, a gem-set ring has sold for £3200. An exceptional piece has recently appeared at £5995; it would probably have sold for around £9000 new. 

Since the launch, Sarah has offered over 800 items for sale, finding new homes for about 600 so far: an astonishing 75% success rate. Some ‘vintage’ pieces were bought as far back as 1988; others were made within the last couple of years. Items may eventually migrate to Sarah’s main website, but everything appears on Instagram first.  

Many Scotland-based jewellers have had work featured on the Preloved grid. They include well-known names like Marianne Anderson, Donna Barry, Jenny Deans, Grace Girvan, Anna Gordon, Hannah Louise Lamb, Lynne MacLachlan, Roger Morris, Grainne Morton, Kaz Robertson, Misun Won and Cristina Zani.  

Sarah finds it hard to predict what will sell well, though “rings are always appealing” and are “what people tend to fall in love with”. Her own favourites (now in her personal collection) include a pair of Heather McDermott earrings and a ring and earrings by Eileen Gatt.  

If you are a jewellery enthusiast, be warned: SH_chance_to_sparkle becomes addictive. What treasure will appear on the Preloved grid next…?