JIM ROSENHEIM TURNED 80 this year, which will also mark the 68th Christmas he’s worked in a row. He made his first sale, a $15 ring, at the age of 6 in 1948.

Rosenheim has been succeeded by his son, Matthew, as CEO. But as a director, he’s still working an average of 30 to 35 hours every week and his clients contact him directly, as they always did.

“I love the industry, I love the products and frankly, I love dealing with the public. I love the opportunity to be creative and to build a business,” he says. “I don’t work because I have to work. I love what I do.”

In 1968, post-college, he decided to join the family business, until things “got better” in his chosen career field, which was not jewelry. “I came and never left,” says Rosenheim, who then picked up a GIA graduate gemologist degree.

When his parents, Roz and Monte, opened and named the business, it truly was tiny at just 100 square feet. When Jim bought them out they had expanded to 1,500 square feet. Soon after, he purchased the six-story building next door, bringing the space to 12,500 square feet. That move triggered one of many arguments he had with his dad, who’d grown up in a wealthy family that lost that wealth during the Great Depression.

Jim had bought the space and hired architects, interior designers and a contractor, who put a construction fence around the space with a sign, all before his dad even knew of his plans. “He admonished me, said I was risking everything, risking financial security.” But his parents lived to see the building open and the business booming.

In 2015, Tiny Jewel Box debuted another new space spanning the entire historic corner of Connecticut Avenue and M Street NW, bringing the total square footage to just shy of 30,000 over three buildings and rendering the name more ironic than ever. “I get teased about it all the time,” Rosenheim says. “That it’s the not so tiny jewel box.”

During the expansion, Rosenheim hired three research firms to explore whether Tiny Jewel Box needed a new name, but it turned out that people loved the name. “Who knew?” Rosenheim says. He left well enough alone.

Rosenheim cites career highlights that include receiving the GEM Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2017 and the induction into the Retail Jewelers Hall of Fame. “Those are watershed moments for me,” he says. “They were in the presence of dozens, if not hundreds of friends and colleagues in the business. But today, some of the things I cherish most are seeing how my son has evolved in the industry, how he has taken positions on the JA Board of Directors or the GEM Awards and seeing him evolving on his own two feet, becoming an important person in the industry himself. I’m a proud parent.”

Online Only: Q&A with Jim Rosenheim

Q. Was the transition to Matthew’s leadership easier than the transition of ownership from your parents to you?

A. “Every big decision made over the years, I’ve been involved in it with Matthew. I had a lot more experience. I was mentoring him but as he has spent decades in the business, and has had all the experiences and been instrumental in expansion and now running everything, it has been a gradual and successful transition. Two heads are better than one. We have an exceptionally fine senior management team that has been with me 20 years or more. They not only understand the business but they understand Tiny Jewel Box.

Q. What stands out for you about celebrity clients?

A. I’ve worked with celebrities pretty much my entire life. I remember being with Sammy Davis Junior, Barbara Streisand. Laura Bush was a regular devotee; we did lots of work for President Bush and his cabinet officers. Madeline Albright had been a friend of my mother’s and she was a regular face in the crowd long before she was secretary of state. I find that everybody, whether they are celebrities or not, people are people. When you’re across the counter from them, that 2 feet between you and whoever you’re dealing with that is where the experience happens, positive or negative.

Q. How do you balance classy with intimidating? Customer reviews consistently describe the store as classy but not snobby.

A. “Honestly it’s one of the things I am most proud of about the store. We have retained the same DNA that my parents had at 1327 and a half G Street. My employees do not work on commission. Their job first and foremost is to make sure anybody who walks through the front door of the store has a good experience. They’re not pushing people to make decisions that they’re not uncomfortable with, it’s not their personal agenda. They’re not trying to stretch their budgets. Commission based sales are the rule not the exception and you feel put upon, you feel pushed. We try at all costs to avoid that kind of experience and we make it clear to the clients themselves, your needs are what’s important to us. We just want you to find what it is that will suit your needs. And I don’t live in an ivory tower. I spend more time on the floor than I do in my office. I enjoy that interfacing with our clients and our staff, supporting their needs, their agendas.

Q. Did you ever or do you now have retirement plans?

A. I have no retirement plans. I don’t work because I have to work. I love what I do. I love the people I work with and I love to enhance the client experience. I do the trade shows. I lead the charge on the jewelry product and I was involved, along with my in-house designer in designing the Rosalyn bridal collection, engagement rings that are unique and our own.

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Jennifer Farnes, owner of Revolution Jewelry Works in Colorado Springs, CO, attributes her company’s rapid growth, in part, to committing 15 percent of gross income to paid advertising to convey the message, “Come in and get a feel for what handmade fine jewelry really is,” she says. “A lot of people come in because they have heard our message enough that it piques their curiosity.”

Northern Light Is the Best

It’s ideal, says Jay Colombo, a partner at Michael Hsu Office of Architecture in Houston, who designed the Zadok family’s new store in Houston to optimize natural light. “It’s never direct and there’s a lot of consistency and evenness to it.”

Buy If You Can

When Wendy Woldenberg found a space in Seattle for her jewelry store and studio, WEND, she was eager to buy rather than rent it. As a first-time, career-changing business owner, she didn’t want to be kicked out or have the rent jacked up, and because the property hadn’t yet hit Seattle’s red-hot marketplace, she got a good deal.

Consider a Billboard Blitz

Julz by Alan Rodriguez has five billboards that rotate through the Canton, OH, metro market every three months. “Customers say they see our billboards everywhere,” owner Alan Rodriguez says.

Just Be Yourself

That’s Andy and Jenn Koehns’ philosophy when it comes to marketing, and just about everything else that happens in their West Bend, WI, store. “Our voice is ours, and we own it. We tried marketing firms. Not for us. They don’t work here, so they can’t know what it’s really like. It’s why we hired a full-time social media person. She works right alongside us and knows the drill. That comes through in our marketing messages.”

Room to Thrive

Chae Carter, owner of Carter’s Jewelry of Petal in Petal, MS, starts every new employee in sales and then, after a few months, ensures they land where they seem to be shining. “I like for everyone to run their own positions, so they get to really do whatever they want and create their own way once they’ve really learned the ropes,” she says. “We have a lot of freedom at the company so the team members that are self-motivated and have real drive really thrive!”

Have Something for Everyone

Katie Diamond, owner of Katie Diamond Jewelry in Ridgewood, NJ, supplements her jewelry inventory with products in other categories, such as gift and apothecary, which gives her store a bigger personality and a deeper experience. Curation is based on her own love of the products and a desire to create the kind of store she’d like to shop in. It’s also driven by a desire to banish the intimidation factor that comes along with more expensive inventory. “I never wanted anyone to feel pressure to buy in my store. I want them to feel as great buying something that’s $18 as buying something that’s $1,800,” she says.

Elevate the Online Experience

Offering e-commerce online across multiple selling platforms has allowed the Brown family, owners of Once Upon a Diamond in Shreveport, LA, to reach audiences all over the world with their inventory, which is focused on one of a kind pieces. A two-week return policy and free overnight same-day shipping are standard, unless there needs to be an alteration to the piece. They also giftwrap each piece and include a handwritten thank you card sealed with a real wax stamped seal. “We try to bring the store to them,” says Jordan Brown, who owns the store with his father, Steve, and brother, Nicholas. “We can sell pieces across the world and not just wait and hope someone from this area buys it. Because the pieces we like are the really unusual ones.”

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ERIC NYMAN, 89, works six days a week in the jewelry store he bought 54 years ago.

“I gotta do something,” he says.

Then on Sundays, he usually does his laundry.

Nyman says he’s chief-gofer, handling accounting and watch repairs, while his daughter, Sue Parker, is the boss. “She’s calling all the shots,” Nyman says.

“I do what I can to help her out, but ideas change from year to year. I can see the writing on the wall. Everything is changing: watches, clothes, ideas, food, everything has changed so much over the years.”

“There’s not much watch repair,” he adds. “They invented the darn quartz watches and put us watchmakers out of business.”

After he served in the Korean War, Nyman had worked for an auto factory in Michigan, which suddenly began to lay everyone off, so he decided to learn to be a watchmaker, following the example of his uncle, who was a watchmaker in Wisconsin.

He graduated as a master watchmaker from the Bradley University School of Horology in Peoria, IL. He worked as a watchmaker in Kalamazoo, MI, and in Sault Ste. Marie, MI. Then he learned that Feldstein’s, a jewelry store in Escanaba, was for sale.

In 1968, Eric and Betty Nyman bought the store and moved their four daughters to Escanaba. Their youngest daughter, Sue, was not yet old enough to go to school. So, Eric and Betty brought Sue to work with them, and she launched her jewelry career by cleaning showcase glass at age 3.

Nyman enjoyed the day-to-day variety offered by his new career. “It’s different all the time,” he says. “In the auto factory it was the same thing over and over, eight hours a day.”

Parker says she wanted to join her dad in the business since she was in junior high and never considered doing anything else. “I’m lucky that I learned most of what I know from him,” she says.

Nyman is also a long-time member of the local rotary club and the Masons. Jewelry memberships including IJO and RJO have led to exotic vacations, including a trip to the De Beers mine in South Africa.

Retirement is not on the agenda. “If I retire, I’d have to sit home and look at the four walls. I don’t want to do that. I give ‘em my two cents here all the time.”

His best advice? “Times change. Roll with it. Have a good time.”

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AS THE 84-YEAR-OLD CEO of his 100-year-old family business, David Adams says his proudest moment came when his daughter, Kimberly Adams Russell, decided to join him in the business.

Kimberly says she had a role model worth following.

“My dad instilled in me that integrity in business far outweighs money and fortune,” she says. “He never exaggerated a diamond grade or overcharged a client. He has passed his business ethics on to me and our team to ensure Frank Adams Jewelers could still be in business after 100 years.”

His biggest career challenge was also family related. Frank Adams, his father and the store founder, died in 1981 when David was 42. David’s brother immediately “retired,” and David was left alone to run the family business. “I went from having both my father and brother by my side to working alone,” he recalls. “I had to buy out my three siblings’ share of the business and learn to navigate the business as the sole proprietor. I had a lot of self-confidence to make it work, and I worked every hour of every day.”

The Albany, NY, store began as a small watch repair business in 1922 with founder Frank Adams at the helm. Today, Frank’s son, David; his granddaughter, Kimberly; and his great-grandson, Jeffrey Adams Russell, operate the store and manage a team of 20.

David started working in the store after high school, cleaning and assembling boxes. He studied diamond grading at the GIA, spent time in the Coast Guard, got a college degree at Siena College and joined the family business full time at age 22.

Although David originally wanted to be a dentist, he came to enjoy the customer interaction and being a special part of the community. “I liked the diamond and colored stone business most. The science and the technical features always challenged me.”

When not working, he’s always loved the peacefulness of boating in The Adirondacks, reading history books, and of course, food and wine, he says. As the company turns 100 this year, David hopes to be around long enough to see his grandson, Jeffrey Russell, achieve great success in the family business.

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BOB MEDNIKOW LOVES to talk about the jewelry business, race cars, and a beautiful woman named Betty, the love of his life, who happens to be his wife.

“Betty gets a little upset when I introduce her as my first wife,” Mednikow, 90, says.

He still owns (and drives) the car he courted her in, a 1955 vintage Sunbeam Alpine, identical to the one Grace Kelly drives in the movie To Catch a Thief, which won an Academy Award for best movie of 1954.

The best day he ever had at work was the day in 1960 that Betty, with blazing dark red hair, walked into his family’s Memphis store, Mednikow Jewelers; naturally, he rushed downstairs to assist her. “I could not believe God could make a woman that beautiful,” he says. Eventually, Mednikow talked her out of entering the Miss Arkansas Pageant and into marrying him instead. “I didn’t want all those other guys to see her in a pageant; they would want dates with her,” he says.

During the Korean War, Mednikow was commissioned as a second lieutenant stationed in Germany, where he learned to race sports cars, a pursuit that became a hobby. When he joined the family business, his father, John, told him, “You can’t sell diamonds with grease under your fingernails and an oily rag in your pocket,” so he’d send Bob to Walgreen’s to buy supplies to scrub his hands.

John was born in Russia and came to Kansas City, MO, at age 13 in 1902, learning the business from the bench up. “He was a craftsman,” Bob says. Bob’s uncle, Jacob, had immigrated earlier and established Mednikow Jewelers in Memphis in 1891. John merged the two branches of jewelry businesses and relocated to Memphis when Jacob died.

Bob and his own son, Jay, who have worked together for 30 years, have devised a foolproof system for settling any disagreements that arise in the business.

They ask each other, “What percentage do you think you are right?” Bob says. “If Jay thinks he’s 90 percent right and I think I’m 60 percent right, I’ll give it to Jay. Only once did we both think we were 100 percent right, so we settled it with a neutral party after a shot of Scotch.” The arbiter, the late Willard Sparks, an investment banker, client, and family friend, said, “Bob, Jay’s right. Let’s have another drink.”

“I’m most proud of the fact that Jay has taken over with the same enthusiasm and the same integrity that I learned,” Bob says. “I’m the fourth generation. Jay is the fifth. He will be carrying on when they carry me out and I know that Jay will carry it on well.”

Jean Matthews, executive director at Mednikow’s, says Bob retains as much enthusiasm for the business as anyone possibly could have. “When he has discovered a beautiful diamond or ruby or sapphire, he will take that around the store and share it with all of us, and we all ‘ooh and ahh’ at it like it was a new baby.”

When not at work, Bob runs three days a week on a treadmill, and if the weather is nice on Sundays, he runs outside, too.

Betty, 80, worked with Bob in the business while Jay was in college. She’s long retired, but Bob doesn’t have any plans to do so. “I don’t think I’ll be ready to retire until either Jay or the IRS tell me I need to,” Bob says. “I’m a people person.”

Online Extra: Q&A with Bob Mednikow

Q. What do you like about the jewelry business?

A. There’s a certain consistency that people don’t see. Christmas comes every year and it’s like that old O’Henry story. Men are going to buy a nice gift for their mate and women are going to want to buy a nice gift for their children. A happy time for us to sell our jewelry. Changes in fashion affect jewelry like the length of a skirt or hairdos. But the basic thing is people want something beautiful to wear. There are parts of the world wear people didn’t wear clothes but they wore jewelry; it’s an expression of who you are.

I read an article by an attorney who had intended to close his father’s jewelry business when he died, but he didn’t close the store. Instead he gave up the practice of law and stayed on as a jeweler. Because jewelers deal with the happiest people on earth and as an attorney he felt that all he was doing was settling arguments. That’s exactly how I feel. It’s a business I love and I’ve passed it on to Jay because he feels the same way.

Q. What do you look for when hiring?

A. We have a marvelous staff. We look for ladies and gentlemen who have integrity and love jewelry and that’s more important than being a high powered salesman or being a gemologist or anything like that.

Q. How do you deal with changes in technology?

A. Jay was a computer science major in college. When I don’t know what to do I call him; when he doesn’t know what to do he calls my granddaughter.

Q. What did you study in college and how did you acquire your jewelry knowledge?

My degree was in accounting and then I went to business school at Harvard, in the executive education program.

Q. What other interests did you have growing up?

All the Mednikows are either jewelers or musicians. When I was in the eighth grade I had my own band that played at parties. But my parents decided I needed braces and one weekend my musical career ended. (He had played the trumpet and it just didn’t work with braces.) I have a sister who is a classical pianist who was a professor at Julliard. Jay’s children all have a musical bent.

They may be interested in the business or they may wind up on Broadway.

I had also been wondering if you would be able to use the photo of Bob Mednikow with his car? I don’t know if it would work for your layout but it’s relevant to the story.

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EVE ALFILLE, 87, has pursued so many interests in her life, listing them all seems to push the bounds of credulity.

She has degrees in business, historical linguistics and medieval poetry, and has worked as a CPA, stockbroker, teacher, field archaeologist, medical translator and sculptor in large metal forms. That was all before she launched her career as a jewelry designer and store owner.

She’s also been married to her husband, Maurice, for 65 years. “Well, I have lived a long time,” she says.

Alfille was born in France and moved with her family to Canada after World War II. It was her work as an archaeologist on a dig that brought her to jewelry 50 years ago. The inspiration came when she held in her hand a completely intact, small Phoenicean glass god that had been unearthed after 3,000 years. It made her think about the lasting power of precious objects.

“It’s a striking thing to find yourself face to face with something that presents the past in a graphic way,” she says. “I felt this compulsion to create something myself that could be discovered in 600 years and have some meaning. So, I started creating spontaneously.”

Alfille’s new pursuit led to her winning an AGTA Spectrum Award and launching new jewelry collections every spring and fall. She opened a gallery in downtown Evanston, IL, 35 years ago.

The inspiration for the gallery’s maximalist interior design is the fanciful caves she remembered seeing as a child in a Russian animated film called The Stone Flower. Minimalism in the form of bare white walls is not for her. “Minimalism stifles me. I can’t create like that.”

A night owl, Alfille finds that ideas for new collections come to her most often in the witching hour, after midnight. “When I am working on a new collection, a new series, I have some idea of what I want to do. But inspiration is a difficult process because you can’t really control it. Then all of a sudden at 3 or 4 a.m., I see it. You’re in the zone and you know just what you want to create, and that’s always nice. A happy moment.”

About half of her work involves custom design. “You end up translating your ideas according to what they need. Every day there is a strong psychological component. I like seeing people, I like the communication.

“I love it, which is why I have no intention of retiring.”

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BILL UNDERWOOD, 90, a first-generation jeweler, was raised amid the Oklahoma dust bowl during the Great Depression. His dad, Bob, had a service station where Bill worked as a boy. His mom, Mildred, was a homemaker.

His parents scraped together and loaned Bill $1,000 to get his jewelry business off the ground. “My jewelry store almost failed that first year. Had it not been for my wife, LeAnn, working for 75 cents an hour, it might have!” he recalls.

“I had no employees at first. My initial budget to start the store was the loan from my parents, plus the GI Bill provided me $110 per month, which I used to pay for everything: inventory, rent, advertising, utilities and eventually part-time help. Hardly enough to get started.”

Underwood became the first American Gem Society Graduate Gemologist in Arkansas, but he had difficulty getting any backing from bankers, in part because they had never heard of that credential. “So, I had to do a selling job to educate them in order to eventually get a loan,” he says.

Sixty years later, Underwoods Fine Jewelers is a thriving, third-generation business with Bill’s son, Craig, at the helm. Bill continues to come to the store and offer advice, feeling a deep connection to the business he built and founded. Craig’s dedication and success is the highlight of Bill’s own career, he says.

Craig says what he admires most about his dad is his eternal optimism. “It’s not a fake, or unrealistic optimism,” he says. “He is truly able to see the silver lining, even on the darkest of clouds.”

Craig says the best advice he’s gotten from his dad is to follow his own interest when choosing a career. “He never pushed me to go into the family business, but he always held the door open in case that was the direction I wanted to go,” he says. “He stressed to me that I must find a career that makes me happy. Additionally, he said if you choose a career only for the paycheck, you will be unfulfilled and become dissatisfied with your profession.”

When it comes to having a purpose in life, Bill suggests following that old adage: “Do what you love and love what you do. Then work won’t just be a job, it will be a joy too.”

Online Extra: Q & A with Bill Underwood

Q. What was the biggest challenge you faced through the years or one obstacle to overcome?

A. Having the patience and dedication to succeed by conquering the daily problems of business. Things like cash flow, as it seemed like there was never enough spare money to invest in inventory to the level I desired, or enough money to do the advertising I wanted to do to tell the Underwood story.

Q. What did you like about your job, or what was needed to succeed?

A. Helping people celebrate their successes and achievements in life with permanent and beautiful gifts. I often did this with custom designs, which I knew how to create.

Q. What do you consider to be the biggest change in the jewelry industry since founding Underwoods?

A. Customers buying “online” and bypassing the normal/traditional shopping experience. In the jewelry industry, online shopping may appear to the customer to be an attractive and convenient way to shop, but too often it turns out to be a foolish decision. Because most jewelry is a blind item, which makes it difficult to verify true value, it is easy for a shopper to be taken advantage of with little chance of retaliation for the unscrupulous seller. This practice was common from competitors back then, as well as now.

Q. What do you miss the most of the “old ways” of doing business?

A. Trusting vendors to honestly protect exclusivity in the market area.

Q. What is one thing you wish you’d had when beginning your business?

A. Bill says if there were one modern convenience he could’ve had starting out it would’ve been without question a computer, “because of the many, varied things I could do with it. From inventory control to generating laboratory reports. From quick correspondence to formal letters and or professional letters. And most importantly, custom designs. Being able to show the client all of the variations and possibilities, in color, for their custom creation!”

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LYLE HUSAR WAS 25 when, after training as a watchmaker and working just a year for someone else, he and his wife, Alice, opened their first business in 1968 with $5,000 in savings.

Before that, he’d been a machinist, supplementing his income with gigs as a rock musician, beginning with the accordion and piano and adding guitar to his repertoire.

The Tic-Tok Shop, where he sold and repaired clocks and watches, occupied all of 400 square feet. “Every little corner and every little piece of wall you could find, I’d hang a clock on it and as fast as I could hang one clock, another one would sell, and I had to order more.”

Even so, keeping his head above water was a challenge at first. “I had no idea there were that many hats to wear when running a business: carpenter, plumber, electrician? But my wife had a business background. She took care of bookkeeping and I took care of making the money. The goal was to be my own boss and I think I succeeded.”

The couple began adding jewelry lines to their inventory a decade after the business was founded and the business became Lyle Husar Designs Fine Diamonds & Jewelry. “When we first started, it was fun jewelry, not the expensive stuff, but as the years progressed, we got higher grade color and diamonds,” Alice says.

Lyle’s proclivity to wear lederhosen in ads didn’t begin as a marketing ploy but as a protest. He and fellow tenants in the building were frustrated by the lack of control they had over the thermostat. But the unhelpful landlord said they were welcome to wear “more” or “less” clothing to adapt to the temperature. Lyle decided to wear lederhosen (leather shorts with suspenders) as a response to that comment. The attire had the added significance of adhering to the Swiss watchmaker tradition, and it quickly became what he was known for wearing year round, even in the cold of Wisconsin winters. “We always worked it into our ads and got a lot of good laughs out of that, but people remembered us,” Lyle says. The sales staff, all women at the time, played up the theme by wearing drndles, an 18th century German dress and apron combo to complement those lederhosen.

Lyle’s son, Craig, has framed the last pair of lederhosen that his father wore and hung it up in the destination store he designed and opened in 2019. “I often wondered why my dad was wearing lederhosen, in the middle of a Wisconsin winter. As a child, his watch shop, was my playground. I remember a Swiss Matterhorn mural, watches, clocks, and a watch bench filled with tools. I’d often hear “Nice legs Mr. Husar” from little old ladies when I worked. My parents risked everything to pursue the American Dream. This business would become their legacy, and mine as well.”

The dress code today is business casual.

Although Lyle, now 81, began transitioning into retirement about 10 years ago as part of a family succession plan, he continues to work with Craig and daughter Christine in the family business, one day a week, repairing watches and consulting on custom design projects. “They save the best stuff for me,” Lyle says. “There are not a lot of watchmakers around.”

Husar loves the 7,500-square-foot store Craig built in Brookfield, WI. Lyle and Craig together designed the stainless steel diamond shaped-handle on the front door. The watch shop is still known as the Husar Tic-Tok Shop. “Everybody who comes in, their jaw drops and their eyes light up. And there’s a big, “wow.”

Lyle is also impressed with the technological advances he’s seen since 1968. But he does miss a simpler way of doing business. “There were so many things you could do on a handshake, and you just can’t do that nowadays,” he says. “You end up taking everyone’s picture and going through all kinds of paperwork and that takes that many more people to run the place.”

Both Lyle and Alice are involved in volunteer work. Lyle is a member of the Wisconsin Woodworkers Guild, a group that has made as many as 1,000 wooden toys in a year to ensure all children at area women’s shelters have Christmas gifts. Lyle also still plays guitar once in a while, says Alice, particularly when she is watching something on TV that he doesn’t like.

Lyle appreciates the importance of hard work, but he did offer Craig this advice during construction of the new store: “Take a breath every once in a while. Relax.”

True Tale

“We had a mother and daughter pair that came in and were bound and determined that aliens had been in their house. They said the aliens came in at night and took their rings and filed them down, so they got thinner and thinner, so that’s why all of their jewelry was worn. The front door also had about a quarter of an inch filed off of it. And the aliens sewed their clothes to make them too tight. They just wanted to tell their story. They didn’t want to buy anything.” – Lyle Husar

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WHEN “BLUE LAWS” blocking alcohol sales were lifted in Colbert County, AL, Joan Charlene Little, now 84, knew that as a devout Christian she didn’t intend to sell alcohol in the grocery store she owned. But she knew if she didn’t, competitors would soon put her out of business. Still, she trusted God would find a new direction for her entrepreneurial energy.

Initially, she tried to open a gift shop. But from Day 1, she says, “people who came in wanted jewelry repair, watch batteries, wedding bands, engagement rings, everything that I didn’t have. At the end of that first day, I said, ‘Lord I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you have given me a jewelry store and not a gift shop.’”

Sensing an opportunity, she quickly got up to speed, both on education and merchandising. Her daughter, Jan Carlon, worked in fashion jewelry at a showroom in the Atlanta Apparel Mart. Jan had purchased a gold herringbone chain there for herself, and soon everyone in Muscle Shoals wanted one, too.

The chains became Little’s first fast seller. “I could buy gold every week and usually sell it by the end of the weekend,” Carlon says.

“She learned everything the hard way,” Carlon says of her mom, “by trial and error, and by attending seminars, and taking classes and joining the Independent Jewelers Organization.” Prayer was an integral part of it, too. “She prayed over watch batteries, about how to take links out of watches; she’d say ‘God, tell me how to do this!’”

The mother-daughter team has worked together for decades now, first in a mall, then in a strip center, and most recently in a 3,000 square-foot freestanding building they purchased.

Little attempted to retire for six months when she was 79, but that didn’t stick; it seemed to make her sick. “I thought, ‘This sickness is for the birds,’” she says. “And I haven’t been sick a day since I came back to work. God has richly blessed me, and he didn’t expect me to quit and stay home.”

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GILLES ST-GEORGES, 88, sold Wise potato chips and launched a horse farm before finding his true calling as a bench jeweler at age 51.

Although he’s retired on paper (he transferred ownership of Enchanted Jewelry to his daughter, Jill Keith in 2017), he spends three hours a day in the store changing batteries for customers to allow his daughter to concentrate on custom design.

He looks at watch battery replacement as more art than chore.

“You have to be careful,” he says. “You don’t want to destroy somebody’s watch. It doesn’t have to be a Rolex or a Patek Philippe to be special to them. It can be just a plain old watch they’re very proud of. Or it can be a Mickey Mouse watch, a souvenir from Disney World that they want to keep going.”

One of the things he enjoys most is replacing watch batteries for seniors, no charge. “I tell them it’s their lucky day,” he says.

“When you do things you enjoy, you don’t think about how much work it is, you just do it,” says St-Georges, a statement that applies equally to the horse farm and the jewelry business.

Both legacies have stuck around. His grandson is a bench jeweler and he has a granddaughter who rides horses. “My first wife and I both enjoyed animals, and so when this farm came up for sale, we bought it, raised horses and ended up showing and judging horse shows,” St-Georges explains.

After selling the horse farm, he found himself at loose ends. A friend in the diamond business encouraged him to learn jewelry repair, which he did. “There was another jeweler that was about 20 miles from here. I would sit and watch him at the bench.”

Keith had intended to help her father retire and close the business before she got hooked herself, particularly with CAD, and decided to take over the business. “She’s grown the business by four times what I had,” St-Georges says.

Looking back, St-Georges sometimes wishes he’d gotten into the jewelry business earlier in life. “It’s a great business; if you’re honest and you enjoy your work, people will come back to you and they will do everything they can to keep you healthy and alive in your business.”

Says Keith, “My dad has inspired me, his grandson, and now his great-grandson. He is a legend in Northeastern Connecticut.”

“I think the world of her,” St-Georges says. “Having family around makes life very pleasant. I’m very happy that she took it over and made it grow.”

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