Welcome to the Harbrook Jewelers blog. I want to take this opportunity to let you know who we are and what we are going to offer you in this forum.

I’m Ron Holliday, owner of Harbrook Jewelers. I grew up in the jewelry business.

My family store in Klamath Falls is where I began learning the essence of the jewelry business. I was probably around 10 or 11 when I would wrap packages or clean the counter glass at the store. Later, I learned jewelry repair, fabrication & design. I worked for my family store until 1997 when I decided to go out on my own.

I found a little “hole in the wall” store that was about to go out of business. I took the challenge, and a month later, I was the owner (or more accurately the owe-er) of the store. I’ll never forget what the previous owner told me moments after handing over the keys. He said “You know kid, this isn’t going to be as good as you think it is”. He was so right. It’s better. Through the help of great customers and staff, Harbrook Jewelers has exceeded what I could imagine.

All of the training I didn’t even know I was getting from my dad while I was growing up suddenly became incredibly important. Not just the skills I learned at the jewelers bench, but the lessons of integrity, work ethic, advertising, , customer service, consistency, and thousands of other things. All of these clicked with me, and I suddenly was not the follower, but the leader.

My traditional training gave me a very strong background in precious materials, elegant linear design, and I favor well-known gemstones of quality.

Cindy Bailey’s circuitous path through the jewelry business started with selling Indian jewelry. Then she worked for a colored stone wholesaler, owned her own store, ran an appraisal business, worked for a very prestigious store in Fort Worth and consulted with the Trust departments of large banks in the Dallas area settling large estates including priceless pieces of jewelry.

Along the way, she has completed her Graduate Gemologist course at GIA, read thousands of books on jewelry, and researched enough on many topics to write her own books. She designs her own jewelry, using materials as varied as Platinum & Paper. Utilizing her experience with a wide variety of jewelry, she broadens the jewelry horizons of everyone that she comes in contact with. She is a born teacher, and loves to share the finest details of jewelry history that really helps that jewelry come to life.

So, Cindy moves to Brookings, and comes into Harbrook, hoping to find a job. So we are about 10 minutes into our first interview, and we suddenly both knew that we had found something very special. Even though we had tremendously different experiences, we saw jewelry and the jewelry business in nearly the exact same way.

What’s this mean to you? Well, whether your favorite piece of jewelry is geometric, diamond, symmetrical, gold and high polish……or pleochroic glass set in silver with surface treatments and a very artistic design, we’ve probably not only seen it, but we’ve been involved in helping design, create, service, appraise or repair something like it.

I have seen Harbrook grow into my vision of what a jewelry store should be: a place where like-minded people come together and make something truly special. We love jewelry, you love jewelry. We truly can give you something you can’t get anywhere else. We’ve been using CAD for over 4 years to produce one-of-a-kind pieces that can not be accomplished by hand, and we’re looking forward to utilizing technology to discover even more new ways of finding beautiful jewelry for our customers.

It’s what we do every day, and the people of Brookings have been keeping it all to themselves long enough.