Can I Trust You With My Diamond?

Can I Trust You With My Diamond?

©Copyright 2012: Richard von Sternberg, All Rights Reserved



David Allen's store front at 139 N. Main in Sebastopol



Our blessed little town of Sebastopol just gets better and better with the passing of time.  People with great businesses are coming here and raising the quality bar for our local shoppers and diners.  We now have some world-class eateries, artists and viticulturists amongst us, as well as top-rated artisans.  Recently a jeweler named David Allen moved into a location on Main Street that has been a jewelry establishment since its inception as Gold N’ Gems in the 70’s. David’s store, called David Allen Designs is the 4^th iteration of purveyors of goldsmithing and, in my opinion, the culmination of the evolution of this trade here. David is a world-class goldsmith (and platinumsmith) come to town. 

He is the second jeweler named David Allen I have met.  The first David Allen was a custom goldsmith also, but he lived in Blachley, Oregon and made sensational creations for his personal clients as well as important gemstone dealers, one of whom introduced me to the Oregon David: Brick Stange, no longer with us, who was with Mr. Campbell Bridges when he discovered specimens of green grossular garnet near Tsavo National Park in Kenya.

“In 1967 a British geologist by the name of Campbell R. Bridges was looking for gemstones in the mountains in the north-east of Tanzania. Suddenly he came across some strange, potato-like nodules of rock. It was like a fairy-tale: inside these strange objects he found some beautiful green grains and crystal fragments. A gemmological examination revealed that what he had discovered was green grossularite, a mineral belonging to the colourful gemstone group of the garnets, and one which had only been found on rare occasions until then. It was of an extraordinarily beautiful colour and good transparency. The find made the specialists sit up and take notice; Tiffany & Co. in New York also soon showed an interest in the newly discovered green jewel.”  (refer to http://www.gemstone.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=107:sapphire&catid=1:gem-by-gem&Itemid=14   for the whole story)



Tsavorite garnet with its frozen chlorine
gas color that captured the imagination of
Tiffany and Co., who gave it its name



Tiffany and Company was so impressed with this green garnet that they named it TSAVORITE and created an overnight fame for the gem.  Brick began marketing them here in the USA and had amassed quite a collection when I met him in the early 1980’s at his home in the Los Altos hills, a home that was castle-like with counter-tops made of slabs of fine black opal in matrix and features that left a life-long impression on me.  He opened drawers of tsavorite to show me, from small round stones measuring 3 millimeters in diameter to large, individual pieces that were so rare I felt faint holding them.  I nearly swooned for real when he opened a large walnut jewelry box (itself a work of art) containing a pendant, a ring and a pair of earrings all made of the finest, museum quality, tsavorite I have ever seen.  The pendant stone was 15 carats, nearly impossible to find in nature.  Garnets are not typically large due to the way they crystallize in the earth, but there they were—large, matching, perfect quality green grossular garnets set into magnificent gold jewelry creations made by David Allen of Blachley, Oregon.  A million-dollar ensemble.

I visited the Oregon David when I was on gem-selling trips to Oregon and Washington, stayed with him in Blachley.  When I saw the sign go up on the Sebastopol jewelry store with the name David Allen on it, I wondered if my friend had moved here from Blachley and opened a retail store.  On my first walk by the store on my way to the bank I fully expected to see a window display with tsavorites the size of door knobs, but saw none.  I wondered if it were the same David, or if there were actually another David Allen also in the jewelry business.  I found a web site and wrote the Sebastopol David who wrote back and clarified the mystery saying he had heard of the other David but was not he, adding that my name sounded familiar to him.  I wrote back and told him that I had brought the famous EightStar cut of diamond to the Western world and he remembered, suggesting we meet in person.

I went to his store to visit and found him to be quite worldly compared to the three jewelers who practiced their craft on the premises before him.  While I was visiting, a lady came in to ask a question about a ring her husband had found at a market where he was employed, that had remained in lost-and-found for a year, never claimed by its owner.  Her husband had given it to her and her question was whether it contained a real diamond or merely some simulant.  David told her that her timing was perfect because one of the world diamond experts was visiting and that surely I could tell her about her ring stone.  I looked at her ring in the microscope and, sure enough, I determined it was indeed a real diamond.

What happened next is what prompted me to write this blog post because it was a universal jewelry store moment, one that has entered the minds of tens of thousands of people all over the world as they see no alternative to parting, temporarily, with their diamond in order for the jeweler to tighten a prong, clean a ring, remove the diamond, perhaps, in order to create a new piece for it to be mounted into or other possible alternatives.  This lady, as have countless others, had heard some fear-inducing horror stories from relatives involving the cognitive dissonance created by the suspicion that the jeweler may switch diamonds, or worse, substitute a white zircon, white sapphire, colorless topaz, a faceted yttrium aluminum garnet, Moissanite, cubic zirconium, or some other diamond substitute, allowing the jeweler to essentially steal a stone and fool a client.

Has this ever happened?  Yes, of course.

If you put a gun on a table that is loaded, you could say there is something dangerous there.  Yet, in truth, the danger, latent in the gun or not, is meaningless until the gun is put in the hands of a human being.  We are all a little different from each other; some of us are much different than others.  The police officer who picks up the gun to holster and drive his or her beat to protect society presents, perhaps, one of the least dangerous scenarios as the motive behind the holstering and the usage of the gun is socially endorsed and reasonable, acceptable to most of us.  The murderer, whose motive is socially destructive, changes the metric so that it is warped by comparison to that of the officer and brings danger to the gun scenario.

A diamond placed into the hands of a reputable jeweler is safe and considered sacred as a possession of the person who entrusted it to that jeweler.  That diamond will be returned to that customer, no doubt at all.  The unscrupulous jeweler is, beyond the status of jeweler, an unscrupulous PERSON with a life agenda built on ulterior motives.  This is the wrong person to give your diamond to.  And how can you know?

To further the analogy of the gun, a weapon can be cocked and ready to fire.  People can, similarly, be “cocked” and ready to explode if betrayed.  Since it is embedded in our mass social consciousness that there is vulnerability in jewelry stores where the owner is unscrupulous, a diamond-switching betrayal, once discovered, pulls the cocked trigger in us and makes us broadcast as loud and far as we are able what has happened to us, triggers fear and scorn for the betraying jeweler and, almost instantly, explodes his or her reputation and implodes his or her business.  In short, a diamond-switcher cannot make it in business.

I could see the concern in the lady’s face and, at the same time, read David Allen’s countenance for his macro perspective of this common cognitive dissonance, this fear of loss.  And as I suspected, out of the mouth of the customer came the words set there by two of her relatives who had passed along our customary social diamond-switch phobia.

I had a different context to frame David in.  I already knew that he had been in the business for decades and that his background was one any jeweler would be proud to have.  About the same time I got into the gemstone business in the late 70’s, David went to work for an up-and-coming jeweler on the San Francisco Peninsula named Tim Fidge who “founded the original custom jewelry shop, ‘Gold Fever,’ on Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto in 1976. Three years later, the store moved to Town & Country Village shopping center in Palo Alto, and in 1985, he changed its name to ‘Timothy Fidge & Co.’”

Tim died in a plane crash while still a fairly young man, leaving his wife to run the business.  And what a business it was.  Tim was a smart risk-taker, a quality, when combined with good luck, can propel a business owner to great heights.  In the early 1980’s I was approached by a missionary who had gone to Brazil to spread her religion in a remote area of Minas Gerais.  While there she found that local villagers lived in poverty but had access to riches since 80% of the Brazilian gemstones were mined not far from their village.  (Brazil supplies a SUBSTANTIAL amount of gem rough to the world: aquamarine, tourmaline, topaz, amethyst, chrysoberyl, alexandrite and others).  This distaff missionary conceived an idea that, by itself, lifted her host village out of poverty. 

She saw that huge amounts of topaz were being mined and cut nearby and made a proposal to the company in charge of production asking to be “fronted” a large quantity of topaz she could take to America and sell.  As she moved around America she was guided to gem dealers in each area and our paths crossed when she got to the San Francisco Bay Area.  She was carrying thousands of carats of the most beautiful imperial topaz available, clean material cut well, saturated with great color, and offered it to me cheaply.  I had four salespeople at the time and wasted no time calling them in to get their parcels of topaz to go out on the road with to offer to retail jewelers.  America was in a recession at the time, so it was difficult to get retailers to commit to purchase anything.  They mostly wanted it consigned to them, but I priced it to sell, not to consign.  I priced it so low, that a smart retailer could be guaranteed an almost obscene return on investment.  Still, smart or not, those retailers were too afraid to commit to any large purchases, so each salesperson on my staff was able to sell one piece here and one piece there.  However, my salesman who covered the peninsula went to Tim Fidge’s store and struck pay dirt, so to speak.  Fidge saw the opportunity for what it was, recognized this as the opportunity of a lifetime and bought everything my salesman had with him and then called for more.  After watching Tim demonstrate his entrepreneurial prowess, it came as no surprise to me that he quickly rose up the ranks of the jewelers and was soon in the league of the other major retailers south of San Francisco such as Gleim the Jeweler, Steiners and Sally Morton, retail establishments catering to serious jewelry buyers begun by grandparents of the current owners, and became, during the first generation of store ownership, one of America’s most important jewelry store owners.

It was with Tim Fidge that David Allen became a master goldsmith and, after a few years, ran the entire goldsmithing operation for Tim.  David was entrusted with one of the most important parts of Fidge’s operation and shined there.

With this in mind, I chuckled to myself as the lady with the found diamond expressed her concern about leaving her ring with David.  He addressed her fears appropriately and I told her she had nothing to worry about, but, of course, because there is a universe of space between all minds in the world, how would it be possible for her, or anybody for that matter, to know David’s background and put him in the context of a trustworthy jeweler?  Because I spent so many decades in the trade, I have that context in my mind and I know that David is entirely trustworthy, competent, able, and has a goldsmithing history that is the envy of jewelers everywhere.

That lady left her ring and was able to pick it up the next day, happy about finding the ring, happy about finding the right jeweler.  And, best of all, it happened in my little town of Sebastopol where life just keeps getting better and better.