When you make and sell jewelry, you want to be sure the materials you use are safe.

At Steely Pop, ensuring quality and safety is part of our everyday work. We've developed our own quality control process, and I'll now explain how things work here.

Steely Pop's Quality Control in a Nutshell

1. Choosing safe jewelry materials from the start
2. Reliable, long-term partners
3. Incoming goods inspection and laboratory testing
4. Documentation and record-keeping
5. Using customer feedback to improve quality

It All Starts with Materials

Our jewelry findings are made from stainless steel grades 304, 316, and 316L. We originally chose these materials because they're well known, consistent in quality, and widely used in products that come into contact with skin. In the world of jewelry findings, these materials generally have a good reputation, since they're pure and rarely cause allergic reactions.

The jewelry findings market also uses so-called jewelry metals and various metal alloys, such as brass. These materials have the advantage of a lower price, but they're more prone to tarnishing, color changes, and surface wear over time. They can react more easily to moisture, air impurities, skin pH, or cosmetics. This affects both the jewelry's appearance and the long-term wearing experience and allergy risk.

We've deliberately kept these kinds of metal alloys out of our range. We want to offer jewelry findings whose material is as stable, predictable, and long-lasting as possible, and whose properties hold up well in everyday use.

Pictured: 18K gold-plated jump rings made from stainless steel grade 304.

We Work Closely with Our Manufacturers

Over the past 10-plus years, we've built stable, reliable supplier relationships. We order our products from suppliers we've worked with for a long time, whose practices, materials, and quality we know well. Our manufacturers know that the products are intended for the EU market, and they're made with this regulation in mind.

We Test Products Regularly

We commission several laboratory tests of jewelry findings every year as part of our quality control. Testing isn't aimed at random individual findings, but is done systematically by material and product group. In practice, we test findings that represent a particular material group and use case. This gives us a reliable overall picture of how similar products behave in use.

The tests are carried out by the Finnish laboratory Measurlabs. Measurlabs is an accredited laboratory, which means its operations, testing methods, and the reliability of its results are overseen by an outside body. The lab follows official, precisely defined standards, so testing is done using generally accepted methods. As a result, the results are also reliable and comparable.

Read this article to see what we test in practice

Our quality control is based on risk-based thinking, a widely used and proven approach in the jewelry industry for ensuring safety. In practice, this means testing is focused on the parts and properties that genuinely matter in use.

Pictured: huggie earrings with loops, made from stainless steel grade 304.

Parts that stay in prolonged contact with skin, such as ear wires, ear studs, and huggie earrings, are given higher testing priority than, for example, key rings, which aren't worn directly on the skin. Materials whose behavior is well known and established also don't need as extensive separate testing as materials with less experience behind their properties or use.

What matters most isn't testing everything possible, but ensuring safety by testing the right things in the right way.

Inspecting Incoming Goods

Quality and safety also show up in everyday details, in how a part feels and how it performs in use. That's why we always inspect jewelry findings from a practical standpoint as soon as they arrive.

We pay attention to things like surface finish and evenness, any sharp edges, and how well clasps and moving parts function. We also make sure the parts work smoothly together with other jewelry findings. If we notice anything unusual, we document it. Keeping records makes it easy for us to "look back" and check things later if needed.

Using Customer Feedback in Quality Control

Customer feedback matters enormously to us, and we're always glad to hear about our customers' real-world experiences with our products.

We anonymously log all customer feedback about quality, which makes it easy to see whether a specific flaw or defect keeps coming up in a product. This recorded feedback helps us make informed decisions about sourcing, and about whether to keep selling a product or remove it from our range entirely.

Based on customer feedback, we've adjusted our range, sourced new and better products, and pulled entire batches from sale when something was wrong with a product.

Customers know best how products perform in practice. So our quality control continues through real-world users too.

Best regards, Liisa