Today we’d like to introduce you to Suzanne Grover.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Suzanne. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
We are a small, high quality diamond jewelry and gemstone store in Houston, Texas, with a huge selection and an even bigger heart.
Forty-four years ago, my husband and I moved to Houston, Texas, and he vast land, the gigantic ranches with grazing white, black, and brown cows, and especially Houston itself absolutely mesmerized us.
My lifelong love for jewelry and crafts inspired my decision to venture into a business in our new city of Houston. With the help of a family friend, I learned all about diamonds and opened my first store in Meyerland Plaza Mall in southwest Houston. Our business was two-fold: selling gifts from Europe, Japan, China, and India, and selling diamonds, diamond jewelry, and gemstones.
Our customers were particularly impressed with our jewelry line and would ask us questions like, “How can we open our own business? Would you supply jewelry to us?” With this consistent demand for wholesale jewelry, we decided to move to our current Richmond Avenue location in 1992 and start selling wholesale diamond jewelry locally and nationally, from Maine to Miami and Los Angeles to New York.
In 2008, after the financial debacle, we felt it was time to add another dimension to our business to meet the increasing presence of the internet and online sales. So, we created our first website and started selling on line directly to the public and same wholesale prices.
In fact, we were one of the very first omni-channel retailers with a website presence and a physical store. We gave our customers the best of both worlds, where they could visit our store to see, touch, and purchase the same merchandise they had seen online.
Indeed, our customers truly love that they don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for a product they have not even seen! For this reason, many of our store patron’s drive over 200 miles and sometimes even fly to come to our store from other Texas cities, Louisiana, Arkansas, and more.
To this day, we are proud to say that we still manufacture our own jewelry, which leaves out the middleman and passes savings on to our customers.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
The road has had some forks in it, but I would say we have been blessed. There were times when we had to ask ourselves if we should keep our business running the same way as always, or should we change based on customers’ observations or questions or with the trends that we saw emerging in the marketplace.
In 1992, my customers at our gift and jewelry store in Meyerland store asked lots of good questions about whether I could supply their jewelry if they had their own stores. Listening to their questions got me thinking about taking my own gift and jewelry business in a different direction that resulted in moving to our current location selling wholesale diamond jewelry. I took the fork in the road marked “Change” that time.
Again, in the first decade of the 2000s, we faced another fork in the road related to staying the same versus changing. The increasing presence of online shopping combined with the financial debacle of 2008 spurred us down the fork in the road that was marked “Change.” The result was the creation of our website, where we could sell online directly to the public at the same wholesale prices.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Inter-Continental Jewelers story. Tell us more about the business.
Simply stated, we sell and produce the best quality jewelry in Houston, including high quality diamond jewelry of all kinds as well as high quality gemstone jewelry. We specialize in Custom Jewelry and Custom Engagement rings. If you can dream it, we can create it for you, yet at a very reasonable cost. We manufacture our own jewelry in house, which leaves out the middleman and passes savings on to our customers. We also carry a large number of GIA certified diamonds, and we hand-select our GIA diamonds so they are the best of the best in their category.
In addition to our exquisite jewelry, we pride ourselves on our amazing customers and the excellent customer service we love delivering to them. If a customer is very detail-oriented and wants to be involved in every aspect of the custom design process down to the spacing of the channel-set diamonds on the engagement ring, that’s great! If a customer has no time to spare and places his or her trust in us to produce a unique design with very little customer input, that’s great too! We put the utmost effort into accommodating our customers’ wishes until they are completely satisfied. In fact, we are so confident of our efforts that we offer a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee that speaks to our 44 years of experience in the jewelry industry tested against the most rigorous standards in the jewelry industry.
Contact Info:
- Address: Inter-Continental Jewelers
6222 Richmond Ave., Suite 570
Houston, Texas 77057 - Website: www.intercontinentaljewelers.
com - Phone: 713-785-9600
- Email: icjdiamonds@gmail.com
- Instagram: @intercontinentaljewelers
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/icjdiamonds/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/inter-continental-jewelers-houston-3
Image Credit:
Photography: Lizette Belen Soto
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