Walking my Schnauzer on the beach early one January morning, I ran into a fellow dog-walker, and after the requisite butt-sniffing (by the dogs, that is), he revealed that he was a budding jewelry designer newly arrived in Miami.

I pulled up his website on my Droid phone, and was immediately greeted by a gallery of beautiful, funky necklaces — with almost no text. I asked him the first question that almost always pops into my mind:

“So, what’s your story?”

He looked at me as if I must be a little dense, and repeated that he designed jewelry. I clicked through to his “About” page, but that wasn’t helpful, either — just some boilerplate about “I love to design” and “thanks for looking around.” I decided to try a different approach. “Why did you come to Miami?” I asked him.

And suddenly, his story got interesting. In the past year, a car accident had forced him to quit his old sales job, and his father had died suddenly. The move to Miami was a chance to regroup and reevaluate. During these early morning walks, he liked to focus on being thankful for each new day, while collecting the shells, starfish and driftwood that would eventually find their way into his one-of-a-kind jewelry creations.

This guy didn’t have just one story; he had an entire section of the Dewey Decimal System. First, there was a compelling personal narrative that many shoppers would respond to. Not only that, but every piece of jewelry in his collection had its own unique story that needed to be told.

Photograph the sunrise, I told him. Show your “found items” in their raw form and describe what you saw in them or why they moved you. Let your customers in on the creation narrative, and suddenly they’re buying more than just another piece of decoration — they’re buying a place and a feeling and a memory.

That takes more than just an “About Us” page on a website, of course. It takes Facebook and Twitter and maybe a blog. Doesn’t that mean more work? Yes, but every word is creating value by helping to set this line apart from all the other pretty baubles in every shop window.

So, that’s my story about another random encounter that turned out to be fraught with meaning. And it brings me back to the all-important question:

“What’s your story?”

Every shell tells a story