THE BIRTH OF THE BAILEY CLASP
We love working with Design Futures at Sheffield Hallam University!
It is with great pride that Bailey of Sheffield can talk about the excellent work undertaken by the Design Futures team at Sheffield Hallam University, and in particular their stirling work advancing the now patent pending clasp design from a simple sketched concept to a fully working market ready product.
Scott Bailey, founder of Bailey of Sheffield, spent many evenings sketching and developing ideas as early as 2005 for the Bailey engineered stainless steel jewellery range. The coming years saw him researching the jewellery industry but more specifically clasps that already existed within the industry, and this confirmed the need to design a unique clasp which would represent the high quality standards Bailey set himself. The clasp design also specifically needed to be focussed on being taken on and off with one hand, as this was something lacking with anything currently available on the market.
The clasp design Bailey launched with as part of the incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign in early 2016 took three years, and three major re-designs with the incredible Design Futures team at Sheffield Hallam University at the helm.
After many meetings and brainstorming sessions between Scott, the Bailey team and the team at Design Futures the bespoke patent pending design for the clasp was finalised by Anthony Jones, Principal Industrial Designer and Nick Dulake, Senior Industrial Designer. Much of the initial effort to get the CABLE stainless steel bracelet onto the market was in the development stage. There was a lot of research and working closely with the team to develop the clasp design and then a lot of discussions with the manufacturers in the city to iron out any last CNC machining issues.
The clasp design you see now took multiple drawings, tweaks and prototypes to finalise. The Bailey clasp is totally unique to the company and has never been seen before in the jewellery industry. The patent pending spring loaded mechanisms are hand built by the team in the Bailey workshop at Portland Works, and consist of nine separate parts.
We work with the Design Futures team closely on an ongoing basis, whereby they are helping us to finalise more incredibly innovative collectable bead designs or the Bailey range. Even more complicated kinetic designs, beads with embedded NFC chips and beads with incredible built in functional features - there is no end to the amazing ideas these very talented people come up with. These are just some of the ongoing development work being undertaken with the team, the future is looking very bright!
Here at Bailey we certainly don’t think we have the monopoly on good ideas, we love working with people cleverer than us! Some of the latest innovations and developments already being undertaken have been driven by customers and those around us in our wider network. If you feel you have a design idea around innovative materials, manufacturing processes or new shapes and forms, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you….
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We have also introduced a new Facebook Group for past, present and future collectors of Bailey CABLE™ stainless steel bracelets, beads and accessories to come together, share and discuss your stories, photographs, suggestions and more. Join in the conversation at the 'Friends of Bailey of Sheffield' group.
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