"A happy business" — New Albany shop offers custom jewelry, repairs

NEW ALBANY — Couple Les Kinkade and Julie Taylor-Kinkade have been in the jewelry business for decades, and in the past year, they have taken the next step by operating their own business.

Kinkade Jewelers opened more than a year ago at 4510 Charlestown Road in New Albany. The small shop offers custom jewelry design, alterations, sizing, repair and appraisals.

Les manufactures and repairs pieces, and Julie works with customers at the front of the shop.

“We are just a small boutique kind of a jewelry store,” Les said. “This is a wonderful neighborhood, and this community is fantastic. We love meeting all the folks.”

Les said “it’s been a great journey so far.” Although they have both been in the jewelry business for many decades, this is their first retail establishment.

“We’ve always been in the Louisville area in the last 35 years working for other jewelers, but then COVID came along, and we thought, let’s go ahead and do something different,” he said. “So we took the plunge and opened this little boutique jewelry store, and it’s been a wonderful experience.”

Julie said it has been an honor for customers to trust them to repair or create their jewelry. The store is focused on personal service, she said.

“We just enjoy our customers, and we want to make them feel like this is part of a family, and they’re not just a customer,” Julie said. “We want to get second-generation, third-generation family members from this. It’s not just a one-and-done kind of thing.”

Many jewelry stores do not complete production or repairs in-house, but Les does all of his work at his bench in the New Albany shop.

“So many things are shipped out of state, and you have to wait a month or whatever to get them back — to do a ring sizing, a lot of times it’s a month,” he said. “We can do it on the spot or by the next day.”

He is a second-generation jeweler who first learned the trade from his father at his family’s jewelry shop in Tacoma, Washington. He started at age 13, and he has been making and repairing jewelry for 59 years.

“My parents owned a jewelry store, and then I’ve been working for other jewelers managing their manufacturing and repair, and we’ve done repair work for most all the jewelers in the Louisville area,” he said.

Julie has worked in jewelry sales for about 36 years, and she has worked with Les for about 20 years.

“I started when my kids were very little, and I just wanted a very part-time job while they were in school to get me out of the house, and it developed into more and more…I learned it from the very basics up and here I am today on the sales side.”

The shop’s services include the repairing and repurposing of older jewelry.

“It’s fun to make people happy,” Les said. “We do a lot of converting grandmothers’ and mothers’ jewelry into something they can repurpose — we can take pieces or remake it so they can wear mom’s and grandma’s jewelry.”

When Les repurposes a beloved piece of jewelry, he has experienced “everything from absolute speechlessness to tears.”

“It’s way more valuable than the actual material,” Les said. “We did a piece for a pastor’s wife in Corydon, and she actually wrote a book about it called ‘Grandma’s Jewels.’”

“Doing that brings tremendous satisfaction on our part — to see people smile,” Les said.

The jewelry industry has changed over the years as technology and tools have been introduced. They have a 3D printer for some models of jewelry and milling machines, and lasers have played a major role in repair work, Les said.

“When I started, I used to have three different torches on my bench…depending on how much heat you need,” he said. “Now we don’t use the torch near as much as the laser welder, because you can control so much more and you can actually do seamless welding, so you can’t even tell it’s even been worked on.”

“We can do a better job,” he said. “The equipment is way more expensive than it used to be, but you can make nicer jewelry.’

Rebecca Lightcap works for Les and Julie on the shop’s sales floor. The business brings people happiness, she said. Her husband, David, also works at the shop part-time in the workshop.

“We don’t sell sad rings,” she said. “People leave here, and it’s just a happy business.”

People entrust them with the most valuable and the most sentimental things they own, Lightcap said.

“They wear them every day, it’s their wedding set…and they are willing to hand that across the counter and leave it with us for repair, sizing, whatever and entrust us to give it back to them when they come, and that’s probably the best compliment we could ever get, is for someone to trust us, and that’s why we’re here,” she said.