Key Takeaways:
• Ketterman’s is celebrating its 75th anniversary, evolving from a variety store opened in 1951 into a full-service family jewelry business.
• The business is transitioning into its fourth generation, with younger family members exploring various roles and opportunities within the company.
• Key factors in the business’s longevity include flexibility, diverse skill sets among family members, and a focus on serving generations of customer families.
As Richlyn “Richi” Ketterman talked about the 75-year history of her family’s jewelry business, its possible future sat right beside her.
Richi was painting her 10-year-old daughter’s nails during a conversation with Southern Jewelry News for its Pearls of Wisdom podcast. Her daughter already says she wants to work at Ketterman’s someday.
Richi’s 16-year-old son has begun working at the Leesburg, Virginia, store, although he has not decided whether the family business will become his career. About 10 other grandchildren are still mostly too young to know what paths they will follow.
That uncertainty doesn’t seem particularly out of place in the Ketterman family. After all, Richi wasn’t always certain Ketterman’s would become her career, either.
The family business traces its roots to 1951, when Richi’s grandparents, Richard and Neysa Ketterman, opened Vienna Variety, a card and gift shop in Vienna, Virginia. Jewelry eventually became an increasingly important part of the business.
In 1988, their son Dan and his wife, Tammi, opened Ketterman’s Jewelers in Leesburg. Over the decades, the company grew through several locations and expanded well beyond the traditional jewelry-store model, combining fine jewelry, bridal, custom design and repair with fashion jewelry, gifts, accessories and apparel.
That eclectic mix has a certain symmetry: 75 years later, the business still carries some of the variety-store DNA with which it began.
The family itself expanded along with it. Dan and Tammi raised six daughters, all of whom worked in the business at some point. Today, multiple members of the third generation have made Ketterman’s part of their professional lives.
Richi was not initially convinced she would be one of them.
She considered careers in juvenile justice and ministry and later envisioned starting an event-planning business. When she returned to Leesburg and went to work for the family, the job was supposed to be temporary.
Then she realized that what she wanted to create somewhere else might have a place inside Ketterman’s. She could make every day at Ketterman’s feel like an event, bringing her interest in events and experiences into the retail world.
That distinction may be one of the reasons the family business has continued through three generations: joining Ketterman’s has not necessarily meant becoming a copy of the generation before.
The daughters have brought different skills to the company, from merchandising and sales to bench work, marketing and other aspects of the operation. Richi herself has worked across numerous areas of the store.
The ability to evolve has long been part of the Ketterman story.
In February 2020, the business moved into a 10,000-square-foot standalone store—just weeks before the COVID shutdown. Southern Jewelry News chronicled how the family adapted during that upheaval, guided by a longstanding family motto: “Find a way or make one.”
Six years later, the question is less about surviving an extraordinary moment and more about how an independent jeweler keeps evolving through ordinary ones: changing customers, changing shopping habits and another generation beginning to come of age.
We asked Richi what has changed the most since Ketterman’s was last featured in SJN in 2020. Her response? What has not changed is the significance of longevity.
Seventy-five years means Ketterman’s is not only handing a business from one family generation to another. It has also served generations of customer families, becoming part of engagements, weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and other milestones—and sometimes seeing the same jewelry return years later for repair, redesign or another generation to wear.
Now a fourth Ketterman generation is beginning to appear around the store.
Richi’s teenage son is working there while still figuring out what he wants his future to look like. Her 10-year-old daughter is far more certain—at least for now—that Ketterman’s is in hers. Their cousins represent another group of potential fourth-generation jewelers, merchants, designers or business owners.
Or perhaps they will choose entirely different paths.
That may be the more interesting part of the succession story. Richi knows firsthand that a family member does not necessarily recognize at 16—or even later—the place they might eventually find within a family enterprise.
As Ketterman’s marks 75 years, the milestone anniversary is as much about what comes next as what came before.
