Our Story

Goldie’s Jewelry opened its doors in 1991, but our story begins much earlier.

Jewelry has been part of our family for generations. Long before Goldie’s existed as a storefront, there were jewelers on both sides of our family. My grandfathers worked in the trade, as did generations before them. The tools, habits, stories, and standards of that work were passed down long before anyone thought to call it a brand.

One of the oldest pieces of that history is still with us today: a pair of my great-grandfather’s scissors dating back to the 1800s.

They are simple tools, worn by use and age, but to me they represent something much larger. They are a physical connection to craftsmen in my family who worked with their hands generations before I was born. We have newer tools now, better machinery, lasers, computer-aided design, microscopes, and technology those men could never have imagined. But the purpose is still recognizable: make something well, repair what can be saved, and take pride in the work that leaves your hands.

That history continued through both of my grandfathers.

A Trade Carried Across Generations

Our family’s connection to jewelry did not belong to only one branch of the family. Both of my grandfathers were jewelers.

Their lives unfolded in a very different world from mine, in the Middle East and through years marked by war, migration, work, family, and responsibility. Jewelry was not simply an industry to them. It was a trade: something learned through practice, patience, and repetition, and something capable of providing for a family wherever life happened to take you.

One of my grandfathers’ histories also intersects with the Second World War. During the war, he received commendations connected to the Royal Air Force from men serving abroad in the Middle East.

Those papers remain part of our family history.

To someone else, they may look like old documents from another era. To us, they are reminders that the people whose hands eventually shaped our family business lived through circumstances far larger than jewelry. They worked, adapted, earned trust, raised families, and carried their skills forward.

The store today contains pieces of that history in ways customers may never notice. Old tools. Old photographs. Documents. Objects collected and kept by my father. Things that would be easy to throw away if you saw them only as old things.

We see them differently.

They tell us where we came from.

Goldie

Then came my mother, Goldie.

In 1991, my parents founded Goldie’s Jewelry together.

Her name went on the door, but Goldie was more than the name of the business. She was the center of our family and an inseparable part of what the store became.

My parents built Goldie’s the way many family businesses are really built: through long days, personal relationships, repetition, sacrifice, and the belief that if you treated people well, did good work, and stood behind what you sold, customers would come back.

And they did.

People came in to buy jewelry, but they also came in with broken chains, watches that had stopped working, engagement rings that needed sizing, inherited pieces they did not understand, and jewelry that carried memories far beyond its monetary value.

Over time, Goldie’s became the kind of place where customers did not necessarily need to know exactly what service they needed. They could simply bring something in and ask, “Can you fix this?â€�

Very often, the answer was yes.

That became part of our personality as a store. My father still has one of the best descriptions of it:

“We repair everything but a broken heart.â€�

There is humor in that line, but there is truth in it too. Repair has always mattered here because jewelry often arrives attached to a person, a memory, or someone who is gone.

My Father

My father brought his own eye, knowledge, personality, and collection of unusual things into Goldie’s.

Some businesses become more sterile as they grow. Ours never really did.

There have always been interesting objects around the store, old pieces, things with stories, jewelry that may not fit neatly into whatever happens to be fashionable that year. His collecting instinct is part of why Goldie’s has never felt like a jewelry store assembled entirely from a supplier’s catalog.

He also represents the direct connection between the older generations of jewelers in our family and what I do today.

I grew up around the business, around jewelry, around customers, around repairs, around people discussing weight, karat, stones, watches, settings, workmanship, value, and all of the small judgments that eventually become second nature after enough years in the trade.

You absorb more than you realize.

Growing Up Goldie’s

For my sisters and me, Goldie’s was never an abstract family business.

It was simply there.

It was part of our parents’ lives and therefore part of ours. The store, the customers, the work, the long hours, the conversations at home, the successes, the frustrations—all of it became woven into family life.

As children, you do not necessarily understand what your parents are building while they are building it. You simply experience the reality of parents who are working, providing, worrying, solving problems, and showing up again the next morning.

Only later do you begin to understand what it required.

Goldie’s survived because my parents kept showing up.

That matters to me now.

Losing Goldie, Keeping Goldie’s

My mother died in 2017.

Her absence changed our family permanently, and it changed the meaning of the store for me as well.

When a business carries your mother’s name, you cannot separate the work entirely from the person.

The sign says Goldie’s.

The website says Goldie’s.

Customers say Goldie’s.

Her name is spoken every day.

There is grief in that, but there is also something beautiful about it. The business my parents built continues to carry her name into rooms she will never physically enter.

That makes stewardship of the store feel different to me than simply owning a business.

I am not trying to preserve Goldie’s in amber. My mother would not have built a business for it to become a museum. The challenge is to let it continue growing while protecting the things that made it worth continuing in the first place.

My Turn

Today, I have the privilege and responsibility of carrying Goldie’s forward.

The jewelry business has changed dramatically.

Customers can buy diamonds from their phones. Lab-grown diamonds have changed pricing and choice. Computer design allows us to build pieces that once required countless hours at a bench. Modern casting, laser welding, imaging, and manufacturing have expanded what a small jeweler can create.

I believe in using all of it.

Tradition does not mean refusing to change.

To me, honoring a tradition means understanding what was valuable about it and carrying those values forward using the best tools available today.

That is why Goldie’s can be deeply rooted in old-world jewelry knowledge while still embracing lab-grown diamonds, digital design, modern custom manufacturing, and new ways for customers to participate in the design process.

The methods evolve.

The responsibility remains.

Jackie and Our Boys

Goldie’s is still a family business because my family is still part of the reason I care about what happens to it.

My wife, Jackie, and our children are part of the next chapter of this story.

My sons are growing up with Goldie’s in their lives in much the same way my sisters and I did, although the world around them is very different from the one I grew up in.

I do not know what relationship they will ultimately have with the jewelry business.

That is theirs to decide.

What I do hope they inherit is something larger than a store.

I hope they understand the value of building something carefully. I hope they learn that reputation accumulates slowly. I hope they know that there is dignity in working with your hands, in knowing your craft, in treating people fairly, and in standing behind your work.

And perhaps one day they will look at those old scissors from the 1800s and understand why we kept them.

The Scissors

Those scissors have become one of my favorite symbols of our history.

They belonged to my great-grandfather.

More than a century later, they remain in our family.

Think about everything that had to happen for that object to reach us.

A craftsman used them in another century. His children preserved them. Families moved. Wars happened. Countries changed. Generations were born and died. My grandparents lived their lives. My parents built Goldie’s. My sisters and I grew up. I married Jackie. We had children.

And somehow the scissors kept moving forward with us.

That is what heritage actually looks like to me.

It is not a marketing word.

It is an object you can hold.

Tradition Into the Future

Goldie’s Jewelry began as a store in 1991.

But the craft behind it began long before then.

Today we design custom jewelry, work with natural and lab-grown diamonds, restore old pieces, repair watches, buy gold and estate jewelry, create engagement rings, reset family stones, and sometimes simply solder together something that means far more to its owner than its material value could ever explain.

Every one of those jobs belongs somewhere on the same timeline.

Great-grandfathers.

Grandfathers.

My parents.

My sisters and me.

My wife.

My children.

And whatever comes next.

The tools have changed dramatically since the 1800s.

The reasons people wear jewelry have not.

We still use it to mark love, family, marriage, achievement, memory, faith, loss, identity, and the passage of time.

That is why I believe jewelry matters.

And that is why Goldie’s matters to me.

Goldie’s Jewelry — carrying tradition for generations into the future.