Les Olson Jewelers: a hands-on operation

The sign says it all at Les Olson Jewelers: Artists at Play.

For Bob and Rob Shinsky, the father-and-son duo who run the show in Palm Harbor, Florida, “work” is not the right word for what they do. Both are jewelers who love to design and make jewelry themselves – so much so that custom jewelry is their business emphasis, and arranging a future layout with more shop than showroom is a distinct possibility.

So, when the Miss Florida USA and Miss Florida Teen USA organization chose the Shinskys and their store as partners to make the 2023 pageant winners’ official crown rings, it was a perfect match. Caroline Dixon herself, Miss Florida USA, approached them. Rob took the lead on her ring, while Bob made the ring for Sharlysse Nelson, Miss Florida Teen USA.

“It means the world to us,” Rob says. Although this experience is not their first with celebrities, it is possibly the biggest, garnering national attention – and a sense of responsibility to provide the ring that will carry Dixon to the next level, Miss USA.

“The ring has to mirror what the crown looks like, so the challenge is to scale down and find the aspect ratio to account for how it fits around the head and how it fits around the finger,” Rob says.

Bob found his challenge for the Teen ring went a little smoother: “You make a CAD model to see how it comes out, you then check your design and make the necessary adjustments, and this model came out right the first time,” he says. “I showed the model to our team, and they all agreed, it looks great.”

While Rob has grown up in the jewelry business, visiting the store and making sculptures with the wax since he was 4 years old, Bob came into it as a young man, first learning to use his brother-in-law’s polishing machine in his mother’s basement in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Soon Bob was repairing jewelry in the area – until he was laid off.

“You know what, I vowed never to be laid off again,” he says.

While working for a wholesaler in Binghamton, New York, where he met his jeweler wife Pam, Bob spent the late 1970s saving his earnings bit by bit, buying a hammer one month, a tweezer the next, two pliers the next. Finally in 1980 Bob and Pam started their business as a manufacturing jeweler serving jewelers all over New York and Pennsylvania.

In 1988, tired of the cold, they decided to look to the sunny South for an opportunity.

“I was looking for someone who was retiring or who was ill and looking to get out of the business,” he recalls.

Les Olson sent him a picture of his store – which, compared to others where the owners anticipated leaving and never put any more money into the business, was pristine – and Bob and Pam bought the place immediately. Rob was a toddler, and their daughter was only a year or so old.

Originally located in a plaza, the store moved to its current free-standing building on Nebraska Avenue in March 2020.

“We beat the Covid shutdown by two weeks,” Rob says, describing the unfortunate timing as a gut punch. “The one glimmer of hope was we had a lot of orders. We still had a lot of jobs to do. You focus on the things you can control.”

As Bob sees it, the shutdown allowed some breathing room.

“Prior to the pandemic, we had a three-month turnaround on our custom orders. So, it was a great time to get caught up. … My son and I worked six days a week getting the jobs done.”

Besides jewelers Rob and Bob Shinsky and Kiley Rice, the store boasts four salespeople, including resident pearl stringer Aleigh DeLaPorte, as well as marketing director Sean Kline, who filmed the process of designing and fitting the pageant crown rings. The Les Olson sales team is led by “outstanding” sales manager Alexis Pheil.

Rob says the majority of the team is young, including three who are under 30, but with “lots of experience,” more than one might expect of their age.

“For myself,” says Bob, “I’ve seen quite a bit in 56 years, and if any of this up-and-coming generation of jewelers has any jewelry-related questions, all they have to do is ask and I can solve their problem in seconds.”

Despite their talents at jewelry making, the Shinskys never took seriously the idea of changing the name of the business, preferring to honor the Les Olson name, which was well-established when Bob bought the place, and of course there’s that beautiful LOJ logo.

For both men, jewelry-making is their biggest joy: Rob is “wowed” as much as any client when a piece they’ve envisioned comes together, and Bob takes pride in seeing the lasting beauty of a piece he made for a returning client decades ago.

“The name of the game is to have fun, joke around,” Rob says. He foresees a time when he is open to expanding to a second location, while Bob is happy just making jewelry.

He came home from the Tucson Gem Show with tourmalines cut by John Dyer and Stephen Avery, all fired up to make a bangle bracelet with the stones.

“If you work with your hands,” he says, “you’ll always have a job.”