Jewelers recovering after a hard lesson learned

You might think that to those in the jewelry business, one Christmas is indistinguishable from the next, an exhausting onslaught of men and women looking to wow someone with a watch, a pendant, or an engagement ring that will inspire a "Yes!".

But for Harvey Rovinsky, Christmas 2007 will forever be "embedded in my brain." And not for anything worthy of an eggnog toast.

It was the first holiday season of a recession just picking up steam - and on disturbing display at Bernie Robbins Jewelers.

"If you would have asked me six years ago, I didn't know if I would be here [now] talking to you," Rovinsky, the company's CEO, said recently, seated behind an irresistible-to-look-at array of yellow diamonds in his Marlton store.

That store, which opened in 2003, was a sign of renewed economic confidence after the instability that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It came four years before rough times hit again, forcing what Rovinsky called "some really Draconian changes."

Those included the 2008 shuttering of a Bernie Robbins jewelers store that had opened in 2006 in affluent Short Hills, N.J., and the closings of an insurance replacement business in Radnor and an outlet store in Somers Point, among others.

It meant salary cuts of 10 percent to 15 percent, layoffs, and, for those who kept their jobs, reduced hours. What once was a company of 100 employees is now half the size.

"It was the most painful part of our wonderful story," said Rovinsky's high school sweetheart and wife of 45 years, Maddy, whose parents Bernie and Lorraine Robbins started the business in 1961 as an appliance and gift store on a block in Philadelphia that no longer exists, now swallowed by the Center Square office towers.

But you know what they say: "No pain, no gain." Or, as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."

Or, there's Harvey Rovinsky's silver-lining view: "I have a recession M.B.A. That lesson will stay with me for the rest of my life."

The lesson is one born of a time when "money was real easy," said the 67-year-old, who splits his time between family homes in Huntingdon Valley and Longport, near Bernie Robbins headquarters in Somers Point. "Our business was growing double digits."

Because of that, he said, borrowing money was easy, which financed expansions into suburban markets where many of Bernie Robbins customers live. In addition to Marlton and Somers Point, there are stores in Newtown and St. Davids. (The Rovinskys pulled out of Philadelphia in the early 1990s over crime and other concerns.)

"I was so naive and stupid," Harvey Rovinsky said of the boom years. "I had no idea there could be anything but dynamic growth."

Another mistake was trusting other people to run important parts of the business. Harvey said he has "become a numbers guy" and reconnected with vendors. Maddy Rovinsky, who taught for 30 years in Philadelphia schools, is the company's vice president, head buyer, and fashion expert.

"Truly remarkable" is how Douglas Sills, vice president and an owner of A. Link & Co., a diamond jewelry manufacturer in New York City, described the Rovinskys' ability to stay married so long while also working together.

It's a fitting description, too, of the survival of his business relationship with them in 2008 and 2009.

"It was no picnic," Sills said. "We owed money. He owed me, and I owed my diamond guys."

Harvey Rovinsky resisted doing what other retailers did: panicking and returning all unsold A. Link product, Sills said. That enabled Sills to keep his line in front of Bernie Robbins customers until they started buying again.

"It was three years until we kind of worked our way through it," Sills said. "It was just constant commiseration. . . . It's a marriage."

Bernie Robbins has had sales growth every month this year, for the first time since 2006. The future involves two new projects the Rovinskys are not ready to talk about.

What they won't be doing, they assured, is abandoning their roots.

In every store is a framed picture of Bernie Robbins, who died in 1996, and a dish of jelly beans, which he always offered customers to make them feel at home, his daughter said.

That Maddy, at 66, and her husband spend more time on the job than they might have anticipated at this stage of their lives comes with sustaining her father's legacy, she said.

"We needed the heart and soul in the business," she said, "and nobody had it but us."

Harvey Rovinsky talks about the family business started by wife Maddy's father, Bernie Robbins. www.inquirer.com/businessEndText

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