Thursday, November 5, 2026
I’m sitting on a balcony enjoying another glorious morning with a strong morning coffee overlooking the sapphire blue Mediterranean Sea on the southwest coast of Mallorca, Spain. The only sounds are seagulls, mourning doves, and the gentle trickle of a water fountain just below me. It’s easy to ignore the media and unsettling news that bombards me at home. Being here in Spain is a total unplugging from reality…a virtual mind, body, and soul cleansing.
The only time the TV is on is for my wife and her tennis station or an occasional soccer game. All the stations are either Spanish or from other European countries, so for me watching an American crime cop show dubbed in a foreign language isn’t my thing.
So I’ve been reading voraciously while my better half is keeping active playing tennis and participating in Pilates classes available here. I recently ran out of reading material and you know what they say about idle minds being the devil’s playground.
That got me thinking about how my life has changed…no more sixty-hour weeks for me; it’s hard to hand over control of a business that started from literally nothing. I have convinced myself to let go and see what the next generation can do to make it thrive and do even better.
I’m back in the States, so if you follow my columns or my daughter Lindsay’s, you may remember I wrote about how challenging it was to build a successful jewelry business on the island thirty-some odd years ago. In retrospect, attempting that feat in this current economy would be comparable to a snowman’s chances of surviving a quarter-mile sprint on Resident’s Beach in August!
I read somewhere that opening a jewelry store in today’s economy has less chance of success than a Cyber Café or worse, a travel agency. I even checked with my new best friend, ChatGPT, which confirmed my worst expectations: a jewelry store is in the top three as a bad idea for an amateur entrepreneur.
Color me more than grateful! Location is everything; I’m very sure if our shop was anywhere but here I wouldn’t be singing praises. Now that “The Jeweler’s Daughter” (My kid Lindsay) is calling most of the shots, things could not be looking better. Last season, her first season in charge was the busiest and most successful since I first opened my door in 1994.
In her preparation for the upcoming holidays and the 2027 season, first on Lindsay’s agenda - the showroom got a full facelift. Second, a more diverse selection of international and domestic jewelry, a large stock of natural and lab-created diamonds, many set in dramatic one-of-a-kind rings and pendants. Our selection of loose diamonds is waiting for you and Lindsay to sit down together and design and create the ring or pendant of your dreams! Third, was telling her new customers, “Pay no attention to the man sitting at the bench behind the curtain!”…namely me!
Things are looking brighter than the diamonds in our showcase; the future is so bright I gotta wear shades!
Now that I’m not working full time, I have time to create handcrafted pieces from the loose diamonds and gems I have collected over the past forty-five years. No pressure, no deadlines.
Very sincere thank you to my friends and customers who supported me and my family all these 32 years and made my wildest dreams come true on Marco Island, amazing for a kid from the streets of Dorchester, Massachusetts. Once again, many heartfelt thanks.
Like I mentioned, I’d been thinking, now to the subject of the title… What it once was. The challenges don’t stop once a business is established. In our case, the worst thing that happened to us besides the acts of Mother Nature, oil spills, pandemics, or a bad economy was the sudden surge of precious metals! I saw the writing on the wall but I never predicted it would hit a high of $5,589.38 on January 28th, 2026. I was having trouble dealing with the price at $2,000 and practically overnight the price nearly tripled!!!!
It was like a kick in the head to the entire jewelry industry, both wholesale and retail. Who in the world is going to pay these prices? (Go figure, we see a total contradiction, having the best year in the history of being on the island, thanks to our jewelry-loving clientele from Naples and Marco Island and beyond!)
In January 2026, it still had my daughter and me thinking, do we drop back to the five-yard line and punt or maybe pray for “a Hail Mary to the finish line? Talk about a Ying and Yang business relationship: me the pessimist and Lin the ultimate optimist. She won on merit; we continued to buy more merchandise on the condition…we inspect every piece of jewelry, including bracelets and chains, like a CSI forensic agent checking for craftsmanship, practicality, value, and most importantly, cost. When it comes to my money and yours, what we procure for you, these four things matter
The reason? Currently, what once was is no longer in many cases. Many international and domestic jewelry manufacturers had to go back to the designing boards and retool machinery to make gold jewelry more affordable, meaning less weight, even hollow; in many cases, this is not a good thing. (In my lifetime as a goldsmith, I never made a hollow piece of jewelry.)
It’s a simple formula: less gold +less cost + more desirability = profit. Problem is you can make jewelry too lightweight; visually it looks good, until you pick it up and it has no heft or substance. This lightweight stuff can dent, fray, and fall apart weeks after you purchase it; the prongs have no strength, so they bend and fail, and out in the wind goes the gem it was holding.
The epidemic of broken featherweight hollow chains, bracelets, and anklets coming in the shop is unbelievable! Last January and February, chains purchased online or in chain stores given as Christmas gifts barely lasted two months before needing repair. Problem is you can’t repair this stuff; a jeweler’s torch or worse, a laser, blows through the links like gold leaf. We no longer accept them because the finished result is unacceptable by my standards, and they were returning month after month because they just don’t hold up. My advice…buy only solid link chain. Of course it’s more expensive but at least it will last a few decades, not months.
The truth is an educated jewelry buyer is a smart buyer, so if you have questions, come by the shop and see and feel the difference between our fine jewelry and not-so-fine jewelry that has flooded the market.
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