Like most fans of the Dave Matthews Band, Marc Williams maintains an uncommon passion for the Grammy-winning rockers. So when the Luzerne County jewelry maker used the band’s “Dancing 8” logo to make a piece of jewelry, he fully expected to get a cease and desist call from DMB management.
After getting hammered with more than a hundred emails from people wanting to place an order for the silver guitar pick with the DMB logo engraved on it, Williams indeed got that call from DMB management. The man on the phone explained that the logo was indeed trademarked and can’t be used without permission. But what he said next completely blew Williams away.
DMB’s management offered Williams the chance to form a business relationship with the band’s brand to design and manufacture DMB jewelry.
Some 2,254 DMB pieces later, the custom jeweler’s business is booming.
“This whole experience with Dave Matthews Band has opened my eyes to manufacturing for the masses,” says Williams, 42.
Making exclusive jewelry in partnership with one of the most popular bands on the planet is just one reason why Williams epitomizes a new breed of entrepreneurial jeweler that is rising from the ashes of a crumbling business model.
Look no further than regional stalwart Bartikowsky Jewelers, for which his father Tom Williams worked for 47 years. The landmark Wilkes-Barre jeweler closed earlier this month with a liquidation sale after 125 years, citing its longtime downtown location as a barrier to success. Williams’ father worked at Bartikowsky’s since he was 17 years old, when Bartikowsky’s was on Public Square and before the Agnes Flood in 1972 forced the store to move.
Getting Started
It was Williams’ father who helped encourage him to pursue jewelry making. Williams, who was born in Kingston, moved with his family to neighboring Swoyersville after the flood and graduated from Wyoming Valley West High School in 1988, was not fond of college, although he did attain an Associates degree in Marketing after attending Penn State-Lehman, Luzerne County Community College and College Misericordia. After leaving school, Williams’ father told him not to waste his money on college. Williams had already been cleaning casts of pieces that his father and a partner made with equipment he purchased and put in the basement of their family home.
Williams hasn’t looked back. Largely self-taught and also molded by his father’s expertise, he started doing simple jewelry repair. After a year of that, he wanted to start making custom pieces as MarcCo Custom Jewelers. He taught himself how to carve wax with what would now be considered primitive tools. He taught himself to cast pieces using his father’s equipment. After about four years, he started doing custom work. In 1996, he had established a shop in his father’s basement and was the only individual in a 50-mile radius doing custom pieces.
Then in 2001 everything changed. He went to a trade show in New York City and learned about a Computer-Assisted Drawing program that made obsolete wax-carving, the process by which custom jewelers create their models.
“I jumped on it as soon as I could. I was probably one of the first 100 people in the country to get involved in CAD modeling for the jewelry business,” Williams says. “The majority of work I do is still brought out of the piece by doing things by hand. It’s just now, making a model of a piece is more accurate.”
And less time-consuming. The technology increased Williams’ capacity and his popularity grew, so he opened a retail space on Main St. in Luzerne borough in 2004. With his father as a part owner of the business who helps on a number of fronts, Williams went about trying to establish himself as the best stonesetter in all of Pennsylvania.
“My name is on the business and attached to everything that goes out the door,” says Williams. “It has to be the best. If I wouldn’t let my wife or mother wear it, I wouldn’t let a customer wear it.
“They can come in and spend $500 or $50,000 — that’s hard-earned money. You can have a $5,000 rock on your hand but the setting it’s in has to be safe or you run the risk of losing that stone.”
Considering he recently shipped a $130,000 custom piece to a customer in Atlanta, that sentiment is especially important.
Sharing the Stage
It was three years ago when Williams decided to “take a chance” and make a piece of jewelry with DMB’s Firedancer logo. He gave them to friends and posted them on his Etsy site. He sold 25 in six months, so he took them down and got bored. A year later he made a second piece using the band’s Dancing 8 logo, a more obscure image from the band’s early days, on a sterling silver guitar pick. He posted photos of the pieces to a DMB fan page on Facebook and that’s when people started to notice, including DMB’s marketing team.
After sending samples that included a white gold Firedancer with black dimaonds on it and a piece using the band’s 2012 tour logo and Pandora-style beads, the DMB team placed an order for 500 Firedancers for the start of last year’s tour in mid-May. Nineteen days after delivering the first 500, DMB sold out and ordered another 500.
At this point, Williams himself was becoming a celebrity of sorts. He and his wife enjoyed passes for a private VIP lounge at the DMB show at Montage Mountain last summer. At the band’s show in Hershey, Williams and friends were invited to hang out backstage and also made their way onstage for when the band was introduced. During the pre-show mayhem, Williams was actually recognized onstage by other fans and was asked to refrain from engaging with fans.
“They thought we were someone special. Me and my buddies were in awe,” Wiliams says.
Later in the summer, Williams made 655 “Lyric Beads,” which included 8 pieces with different song lyrics for the Christmas rush and created two new ones in time for this past Valentine’s Day.
The bulk of Williams’ business is still custom wedding bands and engagement rings. But Williams has used the DMB business boom to purchase machinery that reduces polishing time by more than 60 percent.
Williams has also expanded his beads line, and is now doing high school graduation beads. Since the decline in popularity of class rings, a new opportunity has emerged for customized “school swag.” Williams calls them High School Beads and is also doing Bridal Beads as gifts brides can give to bridesmaids.
“Every day I come to work and sit down at the bench to do something I learn something,” Williams says. “Maybe it’s re-learning something I forgot. If you come to work and don’t learn something every day you’re not doing your job right.”
JOE PETRUCCI is managing editor of Keystone Edge. Send feedback here.