Clark Jewelers may have established a tidy niche long ago in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, but in 2014, it became … neat: In December of that year, Patrick Clark was making a ring for a client friend in the bourbon industry when he set a brown diamond amid white diamonds and was inspired by the striking image.
“I called my brother and said, ‘Hey Chad, guess what I’ve got here at my bench,” Clark recalls. “A bourbon on ice!”
Sensing they were onto something, the brothers scoured the internet and confirmed that no one had marketed the brown gems as bourbon colored. They promptly applied to trademark three expressions: Natural Brown Bourbon Diamonds, Bourbon on Ice, and Bourbon on the Rocks – for the gems themselves, the overall collection, and a men’s collection, respectively.
Kentucky-based Clark Jewelers has enjoyed great success with their trademarked Natural Brown Bourbon Diamonds, Bourbon on Ice, and Bourbon on the Rocks collections.
While registering the trademarks took years, the new collections quickly became a hit. Clark Jewelers has attended the Kentucky Bourbon Festival in Bardstown, the Bourbon Capital of the World, every September since 2015. And every year, their booth brings in new customers.
“It’s the biggest part of our marketing,” says Clark. “We’ve sold pieces to people in Australia, Japan, England, Canada. We’ve shipped pieces all over the world, sometimes a year later. People have an anniversary coming up and they remember us from the festival.”
The Clark brothers (l-r) Chad, Tom, David and Patrick with a picture of their father, store founder Tom Sr.As for the moment that started it all – a client bringing in a picture of a ring his wife admired: “She’s thrilled to have the inaugural piece,” he says.
The Bourbon on Ice line has been popular throughout the bourbon industry. Clark says he has made items for Fred Noe of the Jim Beam line and Wally Dant of Log Still as well as others he knows would prefer not to be mentioned.
“It’s fun to have a product you created, and to have somebody come in and ask for it like it’s a national brand,” he says.
Of the seven children born to store founders Tom Clark Sr. and his wife Martha, Patrick Clark is one of five siblings to carry on in the family business, which began on a shoestring.
The senior Clark’s father had died when he was young, and after coming home from World War II and marrying, he worked in his father-in-law’s laundry business for a while. Then he moved to Louisville and worked in a cigarette factory while attending watchmaking school. After he’d spent six years in jewelry retail, his traveling boss one day announced he was going to give another employee a raise and take it out of Tom Sr.’s paycheck.
“My dad didn’t like that, so he quit. Five kids and no job,” Clark says. It was 1959. His parents borrowed $5,000 and opened their own jewelry store.
“They were scared to death. I have their old deposit books, they were handwritten. I don’t know what things cost in 1960, but at the bank they used, the guy who worked as a teller there – who went on to become the bank president – told me my mom came in every day to make a deposit. She had to do it to make sure they could cover their checks.”
Major renovations on the location Clark Jewelers moved into in 1990 will be complete by the store’s 65th anniversary next year.The first Clark Jewelers store opened downtown, and soon after, a second location opened in a strip mall. In 1974, the family closed the downtown store and consolidated operations at the mall. They bought a freestanding building across the street and moved there in 1990. That place is undergoing renovations, which Clark says should be complete in time for the store’s 65th anniversary in 2024.
“It looks like 1990,” Clark says. The future promises cedar posts, painted brick, dark gray trim, and a repositioned sign to call more attention to the store at its busy intersection, which is also being redone. Inside, his wife Laurie, who manages the laser engraving service which has proven to be a customer magnet, plans to refinish the light oak cases to something darker and more contemporary.
The family has yet to establish a third-generation direction for the store. Patrick and three brothers, Chad, David, and Tom, all attended Gem City College in Quincy, Illinois, and they have managed the store along with sister Kathy for several decades. Patrick, who studied watchmaking, became a jeweler by default in 1986 when his elder brother David cut his hand and couldn’t work the bench for six months, and Chad, the other trained jeweler, hadn’t joined the store yet.
Tom Clark, Sr. (center) promoting the store, circa 1960.“I had never done stone setting before, and that Christmas I got initiated,” Patrick recalls.
It was a good thing: Watchmaking and watch repair were on the wane everywhere, and the store felt the effects. Clark hasn’t done watch repairs in more than 30 years.
In 1990, Patrick and Tom earned their Graduate Gemologist degrees after years of study. He was surprised to learn how rare the achievement was: A veteran GG told him the completion rate was only 5 percent.
“I highly encourage anybody who’s thinking of it to do it,” Patrick says. “It helped us increase our sales. You have more knowledge of gems, and people trust you more because they can tell.”
Clark also swears by his longtime membership in RJO as a source of support that helped them stay debt-free, a much-needed condition during the pandemic of 2020.
He recommends jewelers embrace technology. He says Edge software, laser welders, and 3-D printing have been boons to his business, which enjoys a stable growth rate of 2 percent to 3 percent year over year.
That said, he points out: “You can’t Google customer service. People ask me, ‘Do you know every person who passes through the door?’ I say no, but I try to.”
He once recognized a woman by the jewelry she was wearing but couldn’t recall her name. Still, he made a connection by telling her he liked her necklace.
“She chuckled and said, ‘You should like it, you made it!’”
