The Longevity of Steve Baribeau's Jewelry Hospital

A long string of tiny gears, wheels and screws make an orderly line across the bench top. Old watches spill out from boxes and baskets, waiting to donate hard-to-find parts to broken watches -- heirlooms that no longer keep time. A graveyard of watch movements, cases, straps and batteries cover the rest of the watch bench at Baribeau's Jewelry Hospital. Many of the tools are older then the 44-year-old man hunched over a watch. The slightest breath will scatter all of the small parts. Steve Baribeau is not breathing.

Skills like goldsmithing and watch repair are old and unique. It takes a particular kind of personality and character to sit at a work bench, leaning into a fire and hot metal, for years on end. Every piece of jewelry is different, individual in how worn it is, how broken it is and what needs to be done to make it whole again. A bench jeweler like Baribeau must be equal parts metallurgist, designer, engineer and artist. Some of these are skills that can be learned, some of them you are born with.

Because of the unique demands of the work and the permanence of the product (there are goldsmithing communities in India that have been working with gold since before Buddha), not many jewelry businesses are familiar with or engage in meaningful change. Gold certainly hasn't changed other then in price, but that price is all that is needed to wreak havoc with the jewelry industry. As the price of gold goes up, so then goes up the price of jewelry and many repairs which require gold to be used. All of this points to a decrease in sales. Many retailers are adapting by buying and selling gold at a profit, providing needed cash to people with old or broken jewelry that they can't or won't get repaired.

"There just isn't much for retail sales over the last few years. As people get laid off, they buy less jewelry," says Baribeau, crouched over the jewelry bench, lighting a small ring on fire. "If a bracelet or a necklace breaks, people just put it in a box. They don't bring it in to repair." He starts to drop small flakes of gold solder onto the ring. The metal starts turning red as he moves a blue-hot torch over it. "I can buy gold, but that's not a good way to run a business." The solder flows into a break in the ring, sealing it. He grabs the ring with tweezers and dunks it in water. "It's better to be making or repairing something of value then just being a money exchange. That's not a good way to build a business"

"It started when Granholm proposed a new service tax in 2007," says Baribeau. "We lost some national retailer accounts. They moved their business out of state to avoid the potential tax increase." For several of Baribeau's clients, the threat of the tax was enough to pull out of the state; executives were not going to play a game of wait-and-see. Even though the service sales tax was never passed, the proposal was enough to scare away large accounts. A year later, the other shoe dropped when the econopacalypse happened and people started to lose jobs. For some retailers, being a gold seller was enough; for many, it was not.

Even with the increased buying and selling scrap gold, retail sales nationally have dropped off between 30-40% in the last three years, according to Jewelers Circular Keystone, a trade magazine. Regional and family-owned retailers, the meat and potatoes of Baribeau's jewelry repair business, have been closing their doors in droves.

Baribeau's perspective on his craft and his industry is long. In the family for three generations, he started in the shop by picking up tiny pieces of gold off the floor around his father's repair bench when he was three, learning to size rings by 12 and setting stones soon after. Bairbeau left a career as a successful financial securities broker to take up the mantle of the family business, like his father before him. "I just kind of grew up in the shop, and no matter what else I've done, I always keep coming back to jewelry."

Ring sizing, setting stones, repair prongs -- all of these are tasks that haven't changed much in the last 50 years, but staying in business has required adaptation. To save his 60-year-old business, Baribeau started learning more about watch repair, and then turned to the Internet to tell the world about it.

"The problem, as an old, family-run business, is that I can't turn to a marketing company and spend $100,000 on national advertising. The money doesn't work that way." What Baribeau did was put together, with help from his family, a database, but in the old-fashioned way. "We went through the yellow pages, through Google, and found all of the small stores and shops all around the country that might need watch repair. It took a while, but we've got over 2,000 of them."

It turns out that not a lot of shops repair watches, and the ones that do are very expensive and few in number, creating a good market opportunity for Baribeau. He learned more about watch repair, especially for luxury brands like Rolex, Cartier and Tag Heuer. Using information from his database, he started off with a small direct mail campaign, one state at a time, and it worked. A client in Illinois, another in Oregon. Jewelry stores that survived and found new ways to stay in business started to send Baribeau watches to work on. Old Bulovas, Omegas, Elgins. Watches that could be saved and work again with some attention and care.

"We started off just getting watches. Not a lot of people want to spend much time or energy on a 60-year-old watch, but it's a puzzle that I love." As the shop started to receive and repair more watches, many of the same stores started to send jewelry for repair. Now, the little family-owned jewelry store on East Fulton does business in more than 25 states with over 100 accounts.

According to Baribeau, it was a very old watch bench combined with a fast Internet connection that saved his business.


Adam Bird is a photographer and writer who makes pictures that tell stories, writes stories that share pictures and who is insatiably curious about how everything works. On twitter, @AdamBirdPhoto, or on Facebook.