When three members of the Pattons Fine Jewelry team earned key awards at the Jewelers of Louisiana convention in September, they brought still more honor to a long-respected family business that started 70-plus years and three generations ago.
Established by O’Dell and Opal Patton in 1944, the business started as a clock and watch repair shop in downtown Alexandria.
The repair shop grew into a fine jewelry purveyor when their son Ken bought the business in 1972. He and his wife, Sandra Patton, moved operations to the Alexandria Mall and eventually operated five Pattons Keepsake Diamond centers in south Louisiana through the 1970s and 1980s.
In 1992 and 1994, the family consolidated the five locations into their current stores – one in Alexandria and one in Baton Rouge.
Meanwhile, the third generation kicked in. Ken and Sandra’s son Kevin Patton, who participated in the business from a young age – “Child labor laws were not that strong,” he jokes – took over along with his brother Kent after their father died in 2008. Today, Kevin works in Baton Rouge while presiding over both locations.
The stores’ primary focus is diamonds, especially engagement rings. The COVID shutdown brought three very troubling weeks in March 2020 before Pattons held its first Facebook Live Sale. Since that rough patch, post-pandemic returns have been some of the best.
“Other stores increased business 20 to 40 percent, and we’re up 60 to 70 percent,” Patton says, noting that clients’ personal savings increased across the country to a historical record, giving customers lots of money to spend on jewelry.
Pattons recently hosted an educational event focused on lab-grown diamonds, which customers are increasingly becoming aware of.
“We started selling lab diamonds five years ago, just to test the waters. I’m all about choices. I’m not going to tell a client you can’t buy a lab diamond here. I just tell them the truth about this and all our products and let them decide what is correct for their situation. My grandfather used to say, ‘Always tell the truth, it’s easier to remember.’ Now approximately 60 percent of our engagement ring sales are lab diamonds.”
In addition to sales success, Patton can be proud of several achievements and honors earned by family and team members along the way.
“My mother and our CEO, Sandra T. Patton, was the inaugural recipient of the Jewelers of Louisiana Lifetime Achievement Award, in 2017,” Patton says. The honor is given to someone who has been involved in jewelry for over 20 years and has a record of professionalism, community involvement, exemplary customer service and excellence in the jewelry industry. Sandra Patton remains a presence in the business, he says.
In 2002, Kevin was the first of three from Pattons Fine Jewelry to garner the Jewelers of Louisiana award most recently won by Tenisha Jason-Moore.
“That award honors someone for their philanthropy, ethics, and more than anything their moral compass,” Patton says – adding what seems to him equally or more important: Jason-Moore’s personable ways.
“She has an infectious laugh; she and her customers are always laughing. Customers come back and ask for her,” he says.
Also in September, two team members won design awards.
Alexandria store manager Melinda Wallace, an industry veteran and California transplant who came out of retirement to join Pattons, won first place for designs retailing for $6,000 or more. Her entry was a free-form boulder opal with a 14-karat gold overlay containing marquise-shaped emerald “leaves.”
Wallace does custom work at the store, which entertains and pleases clients.
“There’s nothing like a lady designing jewelry for another lady,” says Patton.
Independent jeweler Ara Chanakian, who works outside of Pattons but serves as the Baton Rouge store’s repair source, won two third-place design awards.
“Ara has his own shop,” Patton says. “He learned from a Master Jeweler in Lebanon, and then he moved to Louisiana.”
While his wife of 40 years, Susan A. Patton, has joined the business and is called the First Lady of Pattons, it remains to be seen how or if a fourth generation will hail under the Pattons label. Daughter Victoria is a general surgeon, son Todd a nurse, and son Matthew opened his own jewelry business called Cut that specializes in custom jewelry and high-end custom knives.
The three recent award winners are part of a team of about 13 people across the two stores, which are some 125 miles apart. Several team members are veterans of the business, some started at a late age, and some started younger and with no experience beyond being amiable.
“I can teach you about jewelry, but I can’t teach you how to smile and be friendly,” Patton says. “Over the years, I’ve learned that the secret to success is just being nice to people. … I genuinely like people. We’re not salespeople, we’re story tellers and problem solvers. We want to help people get something that makes their wife or fiancée happy. Our goal is to make our clients feel pampered. We call it the Pattons Pampering Promise
.”
Patton says he rarely sees an online review about how a client got the lowest price on their jewelry.
“If you read our Google reviews, it’s always about service. They’ll say, ‘They made me feel like family.’”
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