Jewelry Network Badge
The member badge, discontinued with the 2013 sale
This page offered the Jewelry Network badge - the emblem members of the Jewelry Network could add to their own websites. It opens with the ending: sorry, the badges no longer exist. The JewelryNetwork.org website was sold in September 2013, and the rest of the page is, in its own words, for historical purposes only.
While the network ran, the badge worked the way badges work everywhere in the company's community family: if you were interested, you could add the Jewelry Network badge to your own website, finding the code to create the badge from the Jewelry Network site - and if you had any difficulty finding the code, the network asked you to let it know.
Jewelry Routes
What the Badge Did
A badge is membership made visible: a small graphic on a member's own site that declares the connection and links the visitor back to the community. For a niche B2B network growing at roughly 150 members a year, badges on members' trade websites were both identity and recruitment - every badged boutique or manufacturer site was a door into the network for the next designer or wholesaler who saw it.
The fashion network ran the same device on a larger scale, with its own badges page in this section, and asked its members in the same words to consider adding a badge to their fashion websites. The two badge pages are the paired record of that shared mechanism.
After the Sale
The badge program ended with the platform: when the domain was sold in September 2013, there was no longer a network for a badge to point to, and the page says so in its first line. The jewelry discussions the company hosted moved to the jewelry discussion group on its fashion network, and the Jewelry Network's own record - its 2008 launch, its forums, groups and blog system, and the reasoning behind the sale - is told on the main network page linked at the top of this page.
This page remains as the small-print record of the badge itself: what it was, where its code lived, and when it stopped existing.
Badge pages like this one are easy to overlook in a site's history, but they document the growth mechanics of the early social web: before platforms supplied follow buttons and share widgets as standard furniture, a niche community grew by asking its members to carry its emblem onto their own websites, one badge at a time. The Jewelry Network's badges traveled that way across the jewelry trade's sites until the 2013 sale retired them.
Common Questions
What was the Jewelry Network badge?
A badge members could add to their own websites to show their connection to the Jewelry Network, created from code provided on the network's site, with help offered to anyone who could not find the code.
Do the Jewelry Network badges still exist?
No. The page states it directly: the badges no longer exist, because the JewelryNetwork.org website was sold in September 2013. The page is kept for historical purposes.
Where did jewelry discussion go after the sale?
To the jewelry discussion group on the company's fashion network; the main Jewelry Network record page, linked above, tells the full story of the network and its sale.