We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jenifer Vinson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Jenifer, thanks for joining us today. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?

I do earn a full-time living from my work, but it started out as a hobby.

In 2019 I started learning how to make dice so I could make custom ones for myself and my the other players in my weekly Dungeons and Dragons game. At first, the results were a bit of a mess, but once I got the hang of it and started posting what I made on my personal Instagram account, I started getting a lot of inquiries about ordering them. I wasn’t quite ready for that at the time, but once I honed my craft a bit more, I started offering them for sale later that year.

The demand for my work had exceeded the supply by quite a lot. Handmade dice take a long tie to make well. It started to become clear that the income from my side business could quickly outpace my full-time job as a graphic designer if I were able to dedicate more of my time to it. I made the jump to full-time in May of 2021 and have been doing this full time ever since.

I don’t think speeding up that process would have been that much of a benefit. I had a relatively secure full time job that I loved through the uncertainties of covid, and that security was really important to me at the time. I managed to get very lucky in a lot of my timing choices through this whole endeavor, and it allowed me to make a well-regarded name for myself in the space before it became flooded in 2020-2021.

Jenifer, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I specialize in handmade artisan polyhedral dice for role-playing games, and have turned those dice into modern and subtle jewelry pieces. I use the dice like gems, pendants, and centerpieces in my jewelry designs. Since the shapes I use are very reminiscent of cut gems, it often isn’t very obvious that you’re looking at dice until you look closely. And that’s the point.

A couple years into my dice making career, I realized that there wasn’t any dice jewelry out there that I would ever want to wear. It was often so fantasy-themed that it just wasn’t my style, or so simplistic as to not be artful. I like jewelry that’s modern, angular, and has an artistic point of view. I realized that if it didn’t exist, then I should make it.

Since then, the jewelry side of my business has expanded to the point where it is the majority of what I do with my dice now. As this growth accelerated, I went from being a dice company to a dice jewelry company. What I am most proud of is the thought that goes into these designs – the consideration of proportion and shape language make my work stand out in stark contrast to the other dice jewelry that has cropped up since I started. My professional background in design has definitely given my work an edge in this space.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I’m doing it right now! In the last few years, the dice industry has exploded alongside the growth in popularity of tabletop role-playing games. Not only an explosion of handmade artisan dice, but also of factory-made dice from overseas, many of which intentionally scout the social media of handmade dice makers to copy designs and techniques and sell them at a fraction of the price to retailers. It’s had a fairly devastating effect on many artisan dice businesses.

I was really fortunate to have already build a solid brand, audience, and customer base when this came to a head, so I was in a better position than almost anyone to weather it. Despite that, I know that these things only escalate, and most people will realize they only need so many sets of dice. They’ll do the math.

So my decision to pivot into dice jewelry was three-fold:
1. I get to expand into a new medium I’m excited about while bringing my dice-making expertise into it
2. I’m meeting my customers where they are. They want more of my jewelry, so I will focus on that.
3. I recapture the market that still loves dice, but is hesitant to buy more because they already have more than they can use. Now they can wear them!

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

The reason I started doing ANY of this was to take things from my imagination – characters, locations, events, concepts from my Dungeons & Dragons game – and bring them to life. I wanted to create artifacts that visually represent those concepts.

For example, I have a dice design called Loch Noir, with inky black tendrils crawling through icy blue. In our game, Loch Noir was a place so terrifying that we couldn’t complete our quest there – we ran. We entered the city through the bottom of a dark underground lake (the eponymous Loch Noir), and found ourselves trapped under the surface by a foot of ice, with shadowy figures converging on us from all sides under the water. My own phobias here were so triggered that I started to have a panic attack. Needless to say, this game can create some strong emotions in people. Those strong emotions got translated into the dice design Loch Noir. It became kind of iconic, and was my flagship design for years.

Taking the nebulous mental/emotional experiences of these role-playing game stories and giving them physical form within the confines of a small polyhedral shape that’s not only beautiful, but functional, has been my driving force since day one. In their rollable dice form, they help tell even more of the stories that inspired their creation. In jewelry form, they’re a wearable nod to the adventures you carry with you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://yaniir.com
• Instagram: https://instagram.com/_yaniir_
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/yaniirdice
• Twitter: https://bsky.app/profile/yaniir.bsky.social

Image Credits

Photo of me taken by Asher McClennehan.
All other photos are by Jen Vinson (me)