Lula Halfacre was young and pregnant when she moved from Mississippi with her husband Marion to open a jewelry store.
A little shaken by the real estate prices, they forged ahead anyway and looked at two stores,just about the only two for sale at that time,in two days.
They decided on Newport Beach. Less than a week later, Lula gave birth to Erik Halfacre.
“Our hearts just felt that this is where we should be,” she said.
That was in 1979.
In 1991, their store, Traditional Jewelers, moved to Fashion Island. Eight years later, it expanded at the Newport Beach mall.
Traditional Jewelers received the small business award at the annual Family Owned Business luncheon put on by the Business Journal and California State University, Fullerton’s Family Business Council on Nov. 1 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine.
Marion and Lula worked together at the store for years. Lula took care of accounting and marketing, and Marion was the leader, in charge of diamond and watch buying and sales. They both shared the same values, so working together was never a negative, she said.
In June, Marion died of a heart attack. Lula has been charged with taking care of business, while mourning the loss of her husband.
The staff, vendors and the community have been supportive and day-to-day business is easy, she said.
“I’ve lost my best friend. That’s the hardest part,” she said. “He was an awesome man.”
But the family business is carrying on.
Marion wouldn’t have wanted it any other way, said Anna Cleveland, marketing director. His passing has prompted the staff to do even better than before, she said.
“That’s exactly what he’d expect,” Cleveland said.
If the company isn’t successful, then it can’t give back to the community, Cleveland said. That was Marion’s inspiration. He and Lula were entrenched in the community via a number of charities and boards. Lula intends to continue to be active. She’s a Chapman University board member.
Marion groomed Erik to take over. Erik, vice president, is in charge of watch and diamond buying like his dad.
“He has his dad’s passion for this,” Lula said.
Erik, 28, joined the business four years ago after attending University of Southern California, where he majored in economics, and then gemology school in Carlsbad. He also did an internship in New York.
Though Erik has the bulk of his father’s work, everyone has absorbed Marion’s duties, Lula said.
“We’re all wearing a lot of hats,” she said. “There’s never ever going to be a replacement for Marion Halfacre.”
Daughter Natalie Halfacre, 23, a broadcast journalism student at Chapman University, helps out with branding and marketing.
Her aspiration is to be a news journalist like Diane Sawyer or Katie Couric, Lula said. But she gets involved in the business by default and she always has a career to fall back on, Lula said.
Traditional Jewelers carries the top 20 watch brands and jewelry from the top designers. But the real brand is the store itself, which has developed a reputation
of integrity, said Frank Dallahan, chief executive of the American Gem Society Lab in Las Vegas.
“It’s really the local store that’s the brand in the industry,” he said. If you have a great reputation, you are the brand. They have developed that over a long period of time.”
