A Family Legacy of Trust, Craftsmanship, and Community.
How a Side Venture Became One of Cincinnati's Most Trusted Family-Owned Jewelry Stores.
Roy Yelton was a police officer assigned to investigate an influx of gold into his Ohio jurisdiction. The trail led not to a crime, but to a legitimate business owner in northern Kentucky who had a vendor’s license to sell gold jewelry. Yelton became a customer and a friend of the guy he had thought was a suspect. When the jewelry salesman retired, he urged Roy to enter the business. “You’re honest and you like people; I think you’d be good at it,” he told Roy.
Convinced, Roy Yelton started the business on the side without telling anyone, says his son, Mark Yelton, securing a $10,000 loan and buying the yellow gold jewelry inventory, which he brought home in a cigar box.
“He flipped open the cigar box and my mom (Joanne) about had a heart attack,” Mark says. “She thought he was crazy and they started arguing. That was September and from September through Christmas he sold every piece. He went from a cigar box to the trunk of his car, then converted a spare bedroom with a case and track lighting. When Mom kicked his business out of the house, he went to flea markets. Finally, he rented a space in an old drug store.”
The business grew from there, into two locations.
Then, in 1999, the year Mark married Tina, Roy was diagnosed with leukemia.
Instead of expanding to a third location, which was the original plan, the family regrouped, selling the original and keeping one store, while staying focused on customer service. “If the client came into one store, we might be at the other store and they usually wanted to talk to a family member,” Mark says. “We had been spread too thin and this was a turning point for us.”
When Mark and Tina joined the business full-time nearly 25 years ago, they realized that in order to grow the business they needed a freestanding store.
The strip mall location was typical for its time, Mark says, with fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling, white cases and blue carpets. “It was very, very nice at the time, but when we moved we knew it was time; it was very dated,” he says. “The industry had changed so much that we knew we were going to have to do something if we wanted to be one of those independents that stuck around.”
They found the perfect, high-visibility location for a destination store and moved in nearly five years ago.
Sadly, although Roy had rallied from his initial diagnosis and lived for years in remission after a bone marrow transplant, he didn’t live long enough to see the new store completed. He died suddenly in October 2009, and the store was scheduled to open in November.
“It was tough on me and Tina and Mom,” Mark says. “To be honest, we didn’t even want to open. But at the same time, my dad’s dream was to have a freestanding store. And we knew for us to grow and to have a cool store we needed the freestanding store. We knew he’d be mad at us if we didn’t keep moving forward. We’d like to think he’s still here, and that he’s pretty happy with the outcome, too.”
Of course the timing was rough in other ways — 2009 was a recession year.
“Things weren’t so great, but we had purchased the building and there was no going back,” Mark says. “ A lot of people came to see us, and it ended up being a great Christmas, although a bittersweet one. We had growth right away. We knew pretty quickly we made the right decision but it was still tough; we were constantly learning and adapting.”
Warm but Cool
The Yeltons didn’t want the place to look like a typical Midwestern jeweler; they wanted a completely different vibe.
“We spend as much time in the store as we do at home, and so we wanted it to be really warm and inviting and comfortable,” Mark says. “Younger guys are intimidated as it is and sometimes it’s easier to walk into a mall store than for them to pull up to a big freestanding jewelry store and walk in — it’s an act of bravery on their part. So we want them to feel very welcome. At the same time we wanted it to be cool and slick.”
They achieved the look they envisioned by incorporating a lot of curves in the design, facilitating traffic flow in the process.
“To me, I think the best thing about the store is the flow,” Mark says. “You feel comfortable when you walk in, and the curves make you move naturally throughout the store.”
Keith Kovar, principal with GRID/3 International Inc., began by drawing bubbles to define certain areas — such as a quiet area for diamond sales. Those bubbles turned into a curved motif, which radiated from the center of the store. There were three columns in the space and two of the areas are spun off with the columns as the central feature. “Tying the columns together made them into a positive thing rather than an element of ‘what are we going to do with this?’” Kovar says.
On the exterior, Kovar had the task of transforming the former Roadhouse restaurant into an elegant jewelry store. “We wanted to do a major change to what the building looked like, but we didn’t want to do a major change to the building itself. We left a lot of the brick, and clad it in such a way that it looks totally new. And we changed the entrance.”
The project was made simpler by the stand-alone nature of the building. “It’s a lot easier to make a big impact when it stands in the middle of a big parking lot,” Kovar says.