One of an occasional series
A story passed down in the Henne family says money was so tight during the Great Depression that R.G. Henne would write checks and mail them with insufficient funds in the bank. Then he would ask the head mother of a nunnery on Penn Avenue to pray that money would come into his jewelry business in time to cover the shortfall.
The prayers never failed.
And each time the checks cleared, Mr. Henne would always celebrate the small miracle by sending ice cream to the nunnery.
“R.G. purchased a lot of ice cream for the residents of Little Sisters of the Poor,” said John Henne Jr., fourth-generation owner of Henne Jewelers, one of Pittsburgh’s most recognizable names among high-end jewelry stores.
Desperate times during those early years called for desperate measures. But as the business prospered into the modern age, the Henne family has adopted new strategies for paying the bills.
“Today, we have a line of credit at PNC Bank,” said 50-year-old John Henne Jr.
For a business that started 130 years ago selling and repairing railroad watches for train employees charged with keeping the local station operating on time, Henne Jewelers has changed a bit.
These days, the most popular watches sold there are made by the exclusive Rolex brand; and the Shadyside store is a destination for customers searching for fine jewelry items such as 12- to 14-carat solitaire stones or a pair of diamond earrings that could set them back more than $1 million.
But the going has not always been easy.
Jewelry sales dropped a whopping 72 percent at the depths of the Great Depression.
The Great Recession of 2008 was another tough episode. Henne Jewelers sales fell 25 percent from 2007 levels, which had been the company’s best year. Things got so bad nine years ago, the family took significant pay reductions, cut bonuses, cut marketing, cut back on buying and laid off three workers out of a staff of 22.
Even in the darkest days of the recession when the showroom was empty and the cash register was not ringing, John Henne never gave up hope for a turnaround. “It helped to know that our store managed through the Great Depression and we should be able to do the same thing,” he said.
“We reached out to our bank, all of our suppliers and certainly talked to our staff that we would get through this,” he said. “We decided we would make decisions during this most important time based on what’s right and taking care of our customers, and we would stand out as different from our competition.”
That meant if customers brought a piece of jewelry back to the store that was broken and out of warranty, Henne would repair it for free. Rolex watches had a two-year warranty at that time and Henne extended the warranty to five years.
Business came back faster than anyone expected.
“I remember that time in late 2008 and 2009 I didn’t think we would get back to pre-recession sales numbers until maybe 2013 or 2014,” Mr. Henne said. “But by 2010, sales were already back on the rise. By 2011, our sales had already exceeded our best year in 2007 and they have been on a steady increase since then.”
Still vacationing as a family
The business had been a dream realized by Rudolph Joseph Henne in 1887. Family tradition has that he paid $5 down on the original building on Centre Avenue.
He and his wife, Margaret, lived on the second floor. They had one child — a son, Rudolph Gerard who was known as R.G. — who would inherit the business not long before the Great Depression.
R.G. Henne passed the business to his son, Jack Henne Sr., in the 1960s. During the 1990s, Jack Henne Sr. and his wife, Nancy, passed it on to their three children, John, Anne and Meg.
“Dad was really good at setting it up for us, and he was clear in his expectations,” John Henne Jr. said. “He said this is a family business. Even though the business has been around for a long time, it’s not some tradition that needs to be maintained. If the business ever gets in the way of family relationships, we’ll sell the business.
“So we lived with that and there were times when it was challenging. Siblings that fought as kids could fight as adults when they are working in a family business together.”
John Henne Jr. eventually bought out both of his sisters. He bought Anne’s share of the ownership in 2006 and bought out Meg in 2012.
“We worked through the buyouts amicably,” he said. “We used consultants to help us get through that. The nice thing is my mom stated what would be a definition of success for our family and that’s that we would still go on family vacations together and get along. And we still do that.
“We still go every year to Avalon, N.J. All of my sisters, their husbands, my wife, our kids and my parents. All 16 of us stay in one house and we have a great time.”
That prized Rolex brand
Sales were on a slight decline when John Henne Jr. came into the business in 1992.
“As I got to know customers and started asking questions, I found out many of them came to us because they bought their engagement ring from us 20 or 30 years ago,” he said. At the time, the company had kind of given up on engagement rings.
“One of the main reasons was at that time, certification of diamonds by independent laboratories was not very popular,” he said. “So you went on the trust of the jeweler selling you the ring. Dad was a member of the American Gem Society, which was very strict in its grading. If he graded a color an H and the clarity a VS2, that’s what it was.
“He was competing against stores that would take a diamond that was three grades lower than an H and call it an H. So our prices looked expensive in relation to that. He just didn’t want to deal with it.”
John Henne Jr. decided the best way for Henne Jewelers to grow was to get back into the engagement ring market, establish new relationships with customers and grow with them through their lifetime of jewelry purchases.
“What changed was I went to certified diamonds,” he said. “I only brought in diamonds that had independent lab reports. And that was still pretty new at the time.”
Today, bridal jewelry — engagement rings and wedding bands — accounts for about 38 percent of Henne’s sales. Rolex watches account for about 25 percent, with the remainder being sales of fine jewelry items.
Henne is one of only three Rolex watch dealers in Western Pennsylvania. The Rolex watch dealership, the company’s crowning achievement, did not occur until 1999.
“It took two years of writing letters, making phone calls, sending them articles about our business and telling them we were worthy to carry the brand,” John Henne Jr. said. “So finally in 1999, they called and said we would be getting a franchise.
“I never kissed up or begged as much as I did during that two-year period in order to get the brand. But it was really worthwhile.
“I kid around and say we were in business 112 years before we finally became a good jeweler, because having the Rolex brand is like having the USDA stamp of approval,” he said. “In the customer’s mind, it really does say that you are a fine jeweler.”
Tim Grant: tgrant@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1591.
First Published: June 26, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
