In the more than two decades that Kantor Diamond operated in its downtown Tacoma location, the diamond broker never depended on a flashy street presence to attract customers.
Indeed, unless you saw the company’s ads or were referred by a customer, you might never have known the company existed.
It lived for 21 years in a suite on the seventh floor of downtown’s Washington Building at South 11th and Pacific Avenue, an historic high-rise whose upper floors were populated with lawyers and accountants, financial advisors and foundations.
That all changed last week when Kantor Diamond opened the doors on its new Tacoma home in a building at 4218 S. Steele St. on the main northerly approach to the Tacoma Mall.
A coincidental combination of happenings, some not so positive and others decidedly fortunate, were behind the move from the company’s long-established retail location downtown, said David Kantor, the company’s president.
Kantor remains a downtown Tacoma advocate, but several developments made doing business there more problematic for Kantor Diamond, said Kantor.
The installation of parking meters throughout the downtown area last fall, he said, put a damper on the company’s business.
The sudden change from free to paid parking caught many of his customers off guard, he said, and earned them $25 tickets for unpaid parking.
“Those tickets left a bad taste in the mouths of some customers,” he said. “Some told me they didn’t want to come downtown again.”
Then there were the downtown special events, events such as parades and bicycle races and runs designed to give downtown and its merchants a better exposure to customers.
But for Kantor customers, many of whom came from Seattle and Bellevue to shop for diamonds by appointment on Saturdays, the events meant that access to Kantor Diamond’s retail suite was difficult or impossible. Roads were blocked off. Parking for blocks around was inaccessible.
“When you have five or six Saturdays a year that your customers can’t reach you, it means some of them may not come back. They’ll shop somewhere else,” he said.
Then there was the move last fall of Russell Investments’ headquarters, located about a block from Kantor’s showroom, from Tacoma to Seattle. That subtracted 900 well-paid workers from downtown. Many of those workers had shopped Kantor Diamond on their lunch hour.
Meanwhile, the building that Kantor now occupies had been vacated by International Jewelers. After two years of vacancy, the owners were willing to consider Kantor’s leasing proposal, he said.
Kantor now rents half the space that International Jewelers once occupied. The building owners initially had resisted leasing just half the ground floor retail space, said Kantor, but they became more willing to negotiate after watching the space sit idle.
Kantor’s leasing costs, he said, are the same as those he had in the Washington Building, but the space is three times larger, and customers have free parking and no events to compete with for access.
“If we were inside the mall itself, we’d be paying 10 times as much,” he said.
Indeed, he said, keeping overhead low has been one of the trade secrets of the Kantor business that he and his sister Michelle built. Michelle Kantor is the company’s managing partner.
Kantor built on his family’s connections with diamond sightholders who buy bulk diamonds from the world’s largest diamond producer, the DeBeers Group. The Kantors’ father owned and then sold a chain of 20 retail jewelry stores before David Kantor established Kantor Diamond. Kantor buys diamonds direct from those sightholders, eliminating the distribution channels between them and retail jewelers, he said.
Kantor Diamond once had a handful of retail locations in Washington, Oregon and California, but the company has consolidated its operations to two, the Tacoma store and one in Kennewick. It also has an Internet sales presence.
“We don’t have a building full of managers to support like some of those chain stores. It’s just us,” he said.
John Gillie: 253-597-8663 john.gillie@thenewstribune.com
