A world of watches

June 29, 2007 09:31 am

— By Robbie Robertson
The Star-Herald

It’s not often that you find a modern-day pioneer but Kosciusko has a good example of one in Bob Keller at Gemday Jewelers in downtown Kosciusko.
While Keller runs a successful jewelry store, he is also one of the pioneers of selling jewelry on the Internet.
Keller started his Internet jewelry business in 1995 out of his basement in Birmingham and has grown it from there.
“It just seemed like the logical thing to do,” Keller said. “This didn’t start out as a plan to have a huge Internet business. We literally started to learn how to put together a web site and put together a business on a web site.”
So Keller and his son Evan, who was in college at Auburn at the time, put together a web site to sell jewelry, mainly watches.
“We started early enough that nobody even knew what the Internet was,” Keller said. “We started because we wanted to learn the programming side of the business. As a matter of fact, we didn’t take a single order for three months. We did a lot of experimenting in that 90 days and I don’t even know if anybody saw it or not.”
Keller said in those first months, they might get three or four orders a month while people were still learning about shopping on the Internet. But in December of 1996, Keller bought the store-front in Kosciusko and has never looked back. Now Keller and his staff of seven fill more than 400 Internet orders a month and can send out as many as 50-75 shipments a day.
“We were always believers that the Internet was going to be big, we just didn’t have any empirical evidence like cash flow,” Keller said. “Sales started out very slowly but they began to gain and pick up every month until we said we couldn’t do this out of our basement any more.
“Sometimes it can be a real stretch to get everything delivered. And during the holidays, we’ll add extra help to fill the orders.”
Now the business has grown to three different web sites, www.gemday.com, www.topflightwatches.com and www.time4tridium.com. On top of that, Keller carries 20 different lines of watches, ranging from the fairly inexpensive to the expensive divers and pilot’s watches he carries.
“Once the Internet took off, watches were among the most popular items because people who were nervous about buying on the Internet knew what they were getting,” Keller said. “It was an item you could identify and know what you were getting. And since then as the trust has built, we have expanded to diamonds, gem stones, rings and such forth. Watches are a big part of the business but not as big as they used to be.”
After starting the business with his son Evan, he now runs it with his youngest son Zak who runs a good portion of the customer service on the web site.
And since their inception, they have shipped watches and jewelry all over the world, from Europe, Russia, South America, Australia, China, and even the small island of St. Denis just west of Madagascar which is located off the southern coast of Africa.
“It’s really funny, when we got into this we didn’t think we would have a lot of repeat customers but we do,” Keller said. “We see a lot of the same customers coming back. And since we were one of the first ones out there, people know our name. When you give people a good price, good customer service and good delivery, they’ll continue to do business with you and we feel like that’s what we do.”

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