Walters brothers retiring
For generations, young men have gone to Walters Jewellers downtown for engagement rings. The next year, they’re back with the bride-to-be to pick out wedding bands.
They stop in a few years later with babies in tow. And for anniversaries. And other life intervals.
“I can’t tell you how many countless times people will tell me, ‘Oh, I bought my diamonds there,’ ‘You sold us our engagement rings.’ I don’t know if everyone hears the same story, but we hear it more than you can imagine,” says Sam Walters, who owns Walters Jewellers with his brother Auby.
“It’s a personal connection with every single person. We’re in the romance business, so people are happy.”
Those ecstatic couples and future ones will now have to find another place to start their story.
One of downtown’s oldest gems is closing shop after more than six decades.
The Walters brothers have sold their St. Paul Street building to a developer in Mississagua and are looking forward to retiring. Their plans are to spend time with their families and do some travelling.
“My wife retired five years ago. Auby’s wife retires next month. We felt it was our turn,” says Sam, adding they are going out on a high note.
“When you work for yourself, you work your whole life for your business and sometimes you’re successful, sometimes you’re not. We were the lucky ones.”
Walters Jewellers was started in 1951 by their father Murray Walters, who opened a shop on St. Paul Street a little further down from the current store.
Sam says in those days the downtown was the only place to shop as the malls didn’t exist.
Their father worked long, hard hours to make the business a success. Sam says if he wasn’t at work, he was out at a community event.
“I guess that instilled all the hard work and the community involvement in me and my brothers, because we saw our parents doing that,” he says.
At one point, there was a chain of 53 Walters Jewellers stores from coast to coast and a couple of hundred employees. When those closed, Walters and his sons kept the St. Catharines store going.
Murray Walters, who died in 2015 at age 93, passed the family business on to his sons in 1997.
Auby, who worked in the store from the age of nine and is now 58, says he believes quality has kept the store in business for so long.
“I think it’s quality of the family. Quality of the style of business. Quality of merchandise and the quality of the integrity that we’ve instilled in running this business,” he says.
Sam says they’ve always given people great value and service for the money they’ve spent.
“Many of the people know you by name so they trust in you,” he says. “We have people who come back saying, ‘I wouldn’t go anywhere else because I know whatever I buy from you I can trust.’”
He said they also do the research and spend the time to source out the proper people in the industry to work with, from setters, goldsmiths and repairmen.
The store does a lot of custom work. That means they have to have the proper connections to suppliers so they find any one of 50,000 different little items they may need for clients, from a stone that has to exactly match others in a setting and to specific clasp for a bracelet.
Signs for the going-out-of-business sale went up this week. The store will be open until Dec. 23 when it will close the doors for good.
Sam says customers are happy for them because they’re able to retire.
“In our case, we’re successful, we had a great year, we had a great lifetime in business and now we go out with the biggest party of all.”
The brothers, both Brock University graduates, are the only two employees and are always on the go, always on call.
They’ll clean out the shop in January and the new owner takes possession in February. It’s not yet known what will go into the location.
Auby says what he’ll miss most is the camaraderie with the clients they’ve developed friendships with. But he says when one door closes, another window opens and that’s a window of opportunity.
“The years go by quick and you want to enjoy your time and take advantage of it when you’re well enough,” he says.
Sam also says it was the people who would be missed, some second- and third-generation customers.
But the pair are leaving while feeling good about their run.
Sam says everyone they worked with over the years made money and nobody was ever stiffed for a penny.
“This is us. This is our business. It lasted longer than Sears,” he says.
“Nobody can take anything away from us. Everybody was happy at the end of the day. Not many people can say that they’ve done that after 67 years.”