Leaving The Square a ‘circular’ move
A nearly 70-year-old family-owned Palmerston North jewellery store is coming almost full circle as it moves back near its original location.
Hyde Jewellers is one of the oldest businesses on The Square, but after 54 years it’s moving from the corner of Main St to Coleman Mall in two weeks.
Ross Hyde said the business seemed to have been around long enough to see history repeat, as he found himself practically reversing the move his father made more than five decades ago. The jewellery industry had also swung back away from the large chain stores. ‘‘Looking back on our history, there’s certainly . . . a few circular lines.’’
Hyde’s father Colin Hyde started the business in the early 1950s on Cuba St. It was a vibrant shopping district, but by the 1960s he could see the writing on the wall, as shoppers were drawn to the newer shops around The Square, Ross Hyde said. So he moved into the new shops under the old library, which opened in 1964.
Now Hyde was doing the same, and crossing The Square to end up next to the library, which moved to its current location in 1996.
He would miss The Square store, but running the family jeweller’s for 35 years had taught him to move with the times. ‘‘You have to adapt or evolution will just roll over you.’’
When Hyde took over the business, there were 10 independent jewellers in Palmerston North, he said. Now there are four.
Hyde said it was the result of two big changes to the profession during the early 1980s.
When the first chain-store jewellers like Michael Hill opened, the family-owned stores found it hard to compete with their larger resources but the chains soon mostly switched to imported stock, and independents survived by stepping into the gap, and carving out a niche for high-quality jewellery, Hyde said.
Changes in the 1980s to the way apprenticeships were run made things difficult.
Many smaller jewellers didn’t survive. However, the trade was circling back towards the independent stores again.
‘‘People don’t want the massproduced products as much as they used to. They want something unique to themselves, and that’s what we can do,’’ Hyde said.