Compliments to My Customers and Fans

Stanley appears on the cover of Japanese magazine in 2007

Hello, everybody!

I have the best customers anyone could ask for.  Mostly they’re in Japan, but they’re here in America, too.  More than a decade ago my business had a store on the main drag through the foothill communities of L.A. and I catered to my customers and performed a public service that was not available anywhere else in those communities – I had a pawnbroker’s license and I bought gold and silver.  When my business started doing a lot of manufacturing and designing for Chrome Hearts, I leased the building next door and hired workers until there were five or six guys helping me.  Even so, I couldn’t keep up with my other customers’ business, which I insisted on taking care of personally in order to maintain the integrity of my business, and I finally had to stop serving the public and concentrate solely on the increasing business from Chrome Hearts.  My children were very young then, required a lot of attention, and were a great source of fun and joy in my life.  We can’t have everything we want, so we have to choose the best and let the rest go, even though I really missed interacting with my old customers every day.  A few still came by for coffee and conversation, which I really enjoyed.

A few years later my wife and I found the house we live in now and decided to buy it because it has this huge workshop on the back half of the lot that is just perfect for my business and zoning that allows me to operate my business here.   So by the end of 1997 I had moved my business completely away from the public eye and very few people (only family, close friends and business associates) knew where I was or what I was doing.  But you know what?  Some of my old customers found me anyway!  I didn’t really try to hide – my name and number are in the phone book and I still visit that part of town from time to time and see old customers once in a while.  It’s the ones who took the time to hunt me down that impress me the most.

And not only from my own town!  Get this!  One morning a few years ago my wife was working in her vegetable garden behind my workshop when she hears a female voice calling “hello!”  She turns to find three people who are looking for me.  Two of them, a woman and her son, have come from Japan and the third is a gentleman who is taking them where they want to go.  The woman had gotten my address somehow and came to visit unannounced!  Now that really surprised me!  Of course I spent a little time with them, but only my friends and family are really allowed to make surprise visits.

So what makes these people and the rest of my fans so great?  They know me.  They know my reputation for quality work, honesty and fair play.  When I closed my doors and they had to start doing business with the other jewelers in town they discovered the difference.  The other jewelers didn’t offer personal attention and personal interaction, nor did they have the customer’s best interests at heart.  Customers didn’t leave with a warm and fuzzy feeling; they left with anxiety in their hearts.  And they paid too much for the services they received.  This is what I hear from everyone who came back to me.

Last week my wife and I were visiting with a couple who used to come to my store often.  For years they wondered where I’d gone but were too busy to track me down.  Recently, the wife started working at my doctor’s office and was quite surprised when I walked through the door for an appointment.  So she and her husband came to visit and ask me to fix her wedding ring (which I had made more than 20 years ago).  She couldn’t stop talking about how glad she was that she’d “found” me because she wouldn’t let anyone else even try to fix her ring.  I smiled and chuckled, of course, as I started working on it, and I related an incident that she reminded me of that had occurred a long time ago.  Mary (that’s my wife) said I should put the story in my blog and preserve it for history, so here goes.

One day a woman came into my store on her way home and asked me to clean and check her diamond ring.  So I looked at the ring and told her I’d clean it and check it, but that the stone wasn’t a diamond.  She started to get a bit upset because she thought I was lying to her.  So I asked her if she’d had it cleaned or repaired somewhere else recently and she said that she’d had it cleaned at another local jewelry store.  I told her to go back to that place and TELL them – don’t ask – to give her diamond back to her and to also tell them that I told her to go get it back.  She got her diamond back, then she came back to me and was a very happy woman and a good customer after that.  I do rather enjoy being able to help people avoid getting ripped off when I can.

Well, that’s all for now.  Stay tuned for more later.  I hope you have a wonderful day!

Stanley

http://www.stanleyguess.com