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About: Roy & Kriss

Thanks for dropping by at our place to shop for great values on jewelry and gifts.  My name is Roy and my wife is Kriss.  We want to make this experience fun and to help you find great values and many quality products from some of the leading vendors and manufacturers in the fine jewelry, watch, and gift lines. 

So how did we get here with putting together the Roy Rose Jewelry website?  Good question, I could almost write a book.  It started with coins.  Or rather rare coins which is known as Numismatics or coin collecting.  Well maybe this journey even started before coins because when I was a kid I sold Christmas cards and greeting cards door to door when I lived in Huntsville, Alabama from the 5th through 9th grades. Well, come to think of it I actually started my entrepreneurial journey in 3rd and 4th grade when I lived in Raleigh, North Carolina after receiving a wax mold making kit for Christmas.  My parents gave me a craft-type toy that had a few bags of green wax chips, and a small pot the size of a tin cup to melt the wax over a six inch square mini-stove. In the kit were several white plastic molds that I could put the two halves together with rubber bands and pour the green liquid in and wait until it hardened.  The molds were Wolfman, Frankenstein, and a US Soldier all in 3D. I started selling them to the neighborhood kids at twenty-five cents each.  That was my real start of being in business!

So, after the wax ran out, the molds wore out, and I got tired of burnt fingers my next adventure came right from the back page of a comic book. I mailed off for a free kit to sell personalized Christmas cards.  I was about ten or eleven years old going door-to-door in the neighborhood ringing the doorbells and telling the person that answered the door my name and that I had a terrific selection of Christmas cards that can be personally engraved in gold lettering with their name and they only started at $5.95 per box of 25.  I was in business again in my new city of Huntsville in northern Alabama.

At age thirteen during a family vacation we visited my Uncle Buddy and Aunt Iris in Durham North Carolina. Uncle Buddy showed me his rare coin collection and gave me some trade journals about Numismatics.  On the way back home to Huntsville from North Carolina I read the four magazines from cover to cover.  From that point on coin collecting became my hobby, my passion. When I got back home I subscribed to several weekly and monthly publications about coin collecting and studied them harder than any school textbook. I had my mother take me to several coin shops in the city and bought coins, coins holders, more books, and asked a lot of questions to the owners. By age sixteen I had a print shop make my very own letterhead to use for doing business through the mail with ads I placed in several coin publications. I bought and sold coins through the mail. My family relocated to Pensacola Florida in 1971.

In 1975 while going to college I became the manager of a new coin shop that opened in Pensacola in the lobby of old San Carlos Hotel. I became part owner at age 19. Three and a half years later I parted ways and opened my own coin shop on the north side of town. When the prime interest rate went to over twenty-one percent in 1981 the rare coin business along with other popular rarities investments crashed. This is the time I switched to the fine jewelry business along with my father in both Pensacola and Mobile Alabama. My actual venture into gold and silver jewelry started with the coin shops selling bezels for coins along with gold and silver chains.

In the years from 1981 to 2014 I was part of three fine jewelry stores, two wholesale jewelry companies, and a jewelry manufacturing company. Some of the most memorable times are the years I would go to the diamond merchants in New York to buy parcels containing hundreds of carats of diamonds, take them to my hotel room that night to sort by size and color. The next morning I would drop them off at the setters and finishers. Raw gold mountings from a casting company were ready and waiting. By the early part of 2000 that industry for the most part transferred to India where diamonds were cut and the quality of the manufacturing, setting, and finishing process got better and was far cheaper. So many things have changed over the decades I have been in the jewelry business. The price of gold has been the most dramatic and caused many of the changes.

In 1999 I took my first venture in selling online and it was an off and on beginning. In 2009 I took a serious jab at online selling and have kept working toward building a strong e-commerce presence. In 2014 I added different gift lines and sell on several channels and now have two different websites. I retired from the brick and mortar stores and now work exclusively with my online businesses.

My wife Kriss came to work with me in 2015 shortly after arriving here from Indonesia. We met when I was on a trip to visit several countries in Asia in 2013. I ended my three week trip on the island of Java and that is where we met. Kriss was an English teacher for 9th grade at a private school in Semarang. I flew back on September of 2013 and that is when we had a beautiful wedding and I fell in love with the people and country of Indonesia. It took well over a year to go through the legal immigration process. It is so wonderful to be able to work and be together. We are both blessed by God and have a strong faith and relationship in our Savior Jesus Christ.

 

Find us on Facebook under Roy Rose Jewelry and also on Amazon.

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