In the two years that Genereau & Co. has been operating out of their Greysolon Plaza location, the jewelry store has quickly made a name for itself as one of the Twin Ports’ most reputable businesses of its kind.
The shop was started by three veterans of the industry with more than six decades of experience between them, and it is the result of a lot of planning, hard work and dedication. More than being just a jewelry store, Genereau & Co. is a dream that came true.
Kyle Genereau is one of the two Genereau brothers that co-own the store.
“We are Duluth’s luxury-branded jewelry store that offers top-of-the-line jewelry, with the customer’s experience being the number one focus,” he said. “We are geared towards the customer in making them as happy as possible. Nobody here is on commission. We are very easygoing salespeople – sometimes to a fault.”
It’s clear that, in talking to Genereau, he’s proud of the atmosphere he and his partners and coworkers present in their shop.
“We have a lounge in the back of our jewelry store,” he said, “and we love to invite guests to come and just have a beverage. We’ve got a bar set up with different bourbons and wines and sodas and whatever you might be into. And we’ve got a fireplace. We’re open to the Greysolon Plaza, so people have beautiful views of the entryway into Greysolon when they sit in our lounge.”
“We offer a different approach than your typical jewelry store that tries to sell, sell, sell,” Genereau said. “We will do a lot of custom pieces, but we’re more based on having that customer have an experience like they have nowhere else, so it gets them to come back year after year and tell all their friends who to come to.”
Genereau & Co. offers a wide range of products and services, from luxury timepieces to diamond rings and handmade-to-order items.
“If somebody wants to bring a piece of their own jewelry that they bought elsewhere into our store to get cleaned and checked and polished and whatever else, we’ll do it for them, and there’s no charge. We want them to feel at ease coming into our store,” Genereau said.
The goal isn’t to be the highest-volume business of their kind – it’s to create and sustain the kind of business that the principals who started it always wanted to work at.
For Kyle Genereau, it’s the people he’s the most interested in. “We love our local customers,” he said. “They’re amazing. We love our customers up north on the Range. We call them local, as well. But we also love tourists that come in from out of state, and maybe they’re visiting Duluth for the first time. I just had a couple in two days ago. They were visiting Duluth for the first time and they’re in an RV. They said they had typed in ‘unusual jewelry stores’ and we popped up. And they said ‘We’re not really in to buy anything, but maybe if we see something, we will.’ And they ended up finding two beautiful necklaces, an opal and a silver chain, and that was that. We didn’t bring them into the store – Duluth did.”
Kyle Genereau ended up in his line of work through his brother Andrew, who got a job in a jewelry store in Willmar, Minn., during college.
“He’s very good with people, so the customer service side of it was very nice, and he loves jewelry,” he said. “One Christmas, he was talking to one of our cousins and said he’d like to move to Duluth, and one of our cousins hooked him up with Security Jewelers.”
Several years later, his brother brought Kyle into the fold. “It wasn’t even on the radar for me,” he recalled, “but the thing that got me was that I could work with my brother. I really look up to him and always have. Since then, Andrew and I have been working side by side.”
As the years passed, the Genereaus learned the finer points of their industry and even became part-owners of Security in 2018.
But Kyle said he and his brother were always looking toward the future.
“And so we said, you know what? Let’s see if we can find an opportunity to start our own store. And we asked our salespeople and goldsmiths if they would be on board. And they said, ‘If you guys did something, we would be there in a heartbeat.’ It was pretty amazing.”
The Genereaus had been discussing for years about what they would be looking for in their own store if the time ever came. The key was the idea of focusing heavily on the customer’s experience and not always being worried about year-over-year growth.
“In today’s world, with money and competition and jewelry stores going in and out of business, you gotta do better than you did last year. You gotta sell more this month than you did last month,” Genereau said. “What a pain that is. What kind of environment does that [present] to a customer that just comes in innocently, trying to buy an engagement ring? He’s nervous as heck just buying the ring – why are we gonna put pressure on him to buy? So we thought: this is gonna be low-pressure.”
Hence, the bourbon and the fireplace and so on. It’s not meant to lull a potential customer into a state that makes them more pliable – it’s meant to make the experience of shopping for jewelry comfortable and relaxed and conversational. It’s a vibe, as the kids say.
Outside the doors, the surrounding area also contributes to that peaceful, easy feeling.
“We love where we’re at in this part of town,” Genereau said. “And there’s so much new stuff happening. We’ve got the Sheraton and Duluth Trading and the dentist office across the street and the Norshor and Zeitgeist and the casino and all these other things, down here. And we can see the lake from our front windows. So we were just thrilled – it felt like, wow, things were meant to be this way. And here we are, two years later, and we couldn’t be happier. We are just overjoyed with everything.”
Andrew Genereau can hardly believe the path his life has taken. He never intended to get into his line of work in the first place, and only a few years ago he thought he had left the field for good, and now he’s running his dream shop.
“It was just going to be a one- or two-year deal,” he said of his first steps into the jewelry business as a college kid, 32 years ago. “It’s turned into a lifetime of work, now. I enjoy the product that I sell a lot, and I enjoy the customers that I work with. That’s really the main thing that keeps a person in this business around, I feel.”
That personal touch is the reason Andrew left the jewelry business after three decades and decided to focus on his construction company. He felt like he couldn’t pretend to be happy with the way things were going.
His homebuilding company (Andrew Genereau Construction and Electric) became his focus, and he left the jewelry business that he loved so much behind. “I just built homes for about four years,” he said. “And then I saw a ‘For Rent’ sign in the location that we’re now in.”
“It had always been in my mind that we would have our own store,” Andrew said, “and that was our plan. But also, if it never happened, Kyle would have stayed at Security, probably, and I would have just built homes for another 10 years and retired. But then, this came along. And it’s been excellent.”
One might assume that having your own construction company would’ve been a great help to Genereau as he tackled starting his new business, but he was thrilled to find out that the corner location in Greysolon Plaza was almost perfect for them as-is.
“The main sales floor didn’t change,” he said. “You know, we did a little bit of buildout, but we put in new light fixtures, painted the walls, and then all of a sudden that turns into something. But, yeah, being in that field, I knew that this buildout would be pretty straightforward. Probably the hardest part was cutting through the walls and putting in the arch to get back to our lounge area. But the rest was fairly easy – just a lot of cosmetic changes.”
“My business is my two sons, a nephew, a cousin, and then three other guys,” Andrew said. “For the most part, it was painting. We had our plumbing subcontractor come in. We had an electric contractor come in, but we did everything else. And some of our staff, too – everybody’s touched a paintbrush.”
Andrew Genereau said his main feeling as the team got ready to open their doors was of pride in his name and the history that it carried. “We’re fortunate in that my mom and dad were respected, hardworking people. My mom’s parents were the same. My dad’s parents – the same. We wanted to use our name because a lot of people know it. My dad was in construction. Both he and my grandpa coached hockey at Duluth Cathedral. My grandfather had a real-estate company in West Duluth. The best thing we could have done was use our name.”
But there were nerves, certainly, even given his experience. “You take out a big loan and you build a store and you hire other people – they leave their jobs and they come and start with us. That was something where, for a while, you’d wake up at three in the morning wondering if it’s gonna be good – but it’s really been great. We’re fortunate.”
Diane Huot was the interior designer on the project.
“Andrew invited me to design the store after collaborating with him on some residential and commercial projects,” she said. “It was truly a pleasure working with Andrew, Kyle, John and their amazing team, bringing their vision to life and creating this wonderful space right in the heart of downtown. We focused on bringing forth the feeling of stepping into a high-end jewelry store in New York City, and we succeeded in doing just that. It’s definitely one of my favorite projects to date.”
Third partner John Panchyshyn is the store’s master goldsmith. He spends his time in the back room, doing repairs and making custom items to order. Like the brothers, he ended up in his field while looking for any old job, but he became a jeweler’s apprentice and thrived. Twelve years ago, he ended up at Security Jewelers and the relationships he forged there led him to his current job.
“My bench is filled with custom [items],” he said. “I do more hand fabrication than probably most people in my position do. There’s a lot of calls for somebody to make things from gold that is handed down, and so I need to take that, melt it into an ingot, and then I need to make whatever it is that I’m making from that raw material.”
It’s a strange sort of recycling – Panchyshyn takes old gold and forms it into new jewelry that carries with it the history that it had, just in a new form.
“I think a lot of what keeps me engaged,” he mused, “is that each individual piece is a completely new task. There’s creativity in how you go about approaching that, and how to get that last 1 percent of the skill tree where you really master the skill and you’re like, this is my variation of how I do that. I find it very rewarding. I enjoy every day that I get to come into work.”
Panchyshyn bought in as an owner for the same reasons the brothers wanted to strike out on their own – to have their own space and be their own bosses.
“It’s quite uncommon for the bench jeweler to also be the owner,” he said. “I try to make sure that the work we do on the benches is regarded in the way that it should be. There’s no chain of command as there has been in the past for me. If I need a tool, I just get it. We get a lot of freedom to push the boundaries of what my apprentice and I are able to do. We take on tasks that a lot of people aren’t willing or able to do.”
A couple years into a journey that once might have seemed unlikely, Genereau & Co. stands as a testament to the power of people – the people who keep a business open with their patronage, the people who dedicate their lives to serving them, the people who build the buildings and decorate the insides of them, and so on.
Business in the modern world might be getting more virtual and AI-assisted and so forth, but Genereau & Co. proves that it’s all about the humans that get up every day to help others.
“It’s very easy to start a business when you have the right people,” Kyle Genereau said. “Without them, we wouldn’t be where we are.”
Tony Bennett is a freelance writer based in Duluth.
