From Cartier To Kay, These Jewelry Brands All Buy From This Billionaire
by Christopher Helman · ForbesLogistics, not love: Louisiana wholesaler Matthew Stuller has built his ten-figure fortune with a relentless focus on fast delivery, manufacturing and customer service.
By Christopher Helman, Forbes Staff
Matthew Gordy Stuller was 15 when his mom dropped him off at the library in his hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana, so he could catch up on studying. An indifferent student, he ditched his books to wander around downtown and spotted a “going steady” ring in a jewelry store window that he thought might win over a particular girl. He persuaded the store owner to sell him the $39.99 ring, which succeeded in charming the young lady, for $5 down and $5 a week. “I’ve always been somewhat of a romantic,” he confides.
Yet sentiment has little to do with how Stuller, now 73, has become America’s wholesale jewelry king, with a net worth that Forbes estimates at more than $1 billion. Instead, he has built his fortune through a relentless focus on manufacturing processes, logistics and satisfying his retailer customers’ every need.
Stuller met that $5 weekly nut by delivering papers, mowing lawns and washing cars. He showed up every Saturday at 10 a.m. at the jewelry store to make his payment, then hung around to help. “They always needed their windows cleaned,” he recalls. Before long, he had a paid part-time job at the shop, where the bench jeweler taught him how to polish jewelry, size rings and set stones. “I loved it,” he says.
By his senior year of high school, Stuller was holing up late at night in the janitor’s closet at his father’s dental practice, repairing jewelry and experimenting with lost-wax casting (used by dentists to produce bridges and crowns) to fabricate missing parts like clasps and links. He still needed to buy certain items. Yet when he called the big distributors, he found them rude. “It was like you were interrupting their day. ‘What do you want?’ ”
Stuller knew he could do it better. So after graduating 68th in a high school class of 69 and enduring one semester at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he dropped out to start selling wholesale to bench jewelers out of the back of his new 1970 Datsun 240Z. “Originally it was just strictly gold parts, because that’s all I could make,” he says. Soon after, he found a jewelry company in New Orleans that was going out of business and bought its inventory and rolling display cases with a postdated check for $4,500, which he barely covered with a loan from a local bank at which, not coincidentally, his father was a big customer. A few years later, when his dad retired, Stuller bought his dental offices to house his ever-expanding collection of equipment, including ovens, polishing devices and a centrifugal casting machine.
His dad also helped with a key piece of advice: Never take on a partner. “You will outwork a partner,” his father reasoned. So why share equity? Today, a half-century later, Stuller’s eponymously named, still 100%-family-owned company remains headquartered in Lafayette, where it has its biggest production complex: 600,000 square feet of laboratories, manufacturing and packaging, employing 1,500 workers.
Add in production from smaller plants in Mexico, Thailand and India, and Stuller fulfills an average 6,000 orders a day including nearly 130,000 items, some sourced from other manufacturers. A primary ingredient: gold bars. Stuller melts enough to make more than 200 pounds per day of gold alloys for casting.
The company books about $800 million in annual sales and throws off $80 million to $100 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda), Stuller says. Forbes estimates it’s worth at least $800 million. (The remainder of his fortune comes from the profits he has taken out of the operation.)
Stuller’s website highlights his wide range of products: jewelers’ tools, unmounted gemstones, engagement rings, bespoke bracelets. He says every jewelry retailer buys from him, even Tiffany, Harry Winston and Cartier. His biggest client is Signet Jewelers, the parent company of mall-based giants Kay Jewelers, Zales and Jared.
His secret sauce? Logistics. For years, Stuller personally hauled hundreds of tiny boxes to the post office. Then he started putting couriers on Greyhound buses. In 1981, he had a eureka moment when he met Fred Smith, founder and CEO of then-10-year-old FedEx. Today dedicated FedEx and UPS jets sit on the tarmac at the Lafayette airport waiting until Stuller’s last-minute packages get loaded at 8 p.m. If customers in the continental U.S. place orders by 5 p.m. their time, Stuller guarantees they’ll receive the items the next morning, provided they’re not custom-made. “I just get the greatest pleasure every day by shipping stuff on time,” he says.
It’s a big relief for retailers, too, who don’t have to carry lots of (very expensive) inventory. “They can get rid of all their tackle boxes and trays for all the finger sizes. I will sell them anything they want,” Stuller says. Third-generation New Orleans jeweler Coleman Adler says Stuller has brought the same revolution to jewelry stores that Sysco did to restaurants. “You can get it somewhere else, and probably cheaper, but not all from the same place or as fast.”
Stuller will sell anything to anyone. In the early 2000s, he launched a new offering of cultured pearls from the South Seas and initially attempted to pump up his own margin by limiting how many jewelers he would sell to in any given market. “Customers complained: ‘What do you mean you’re not going to sell it to me?’ ” he says. He abandoned the exclusivity experiment after a few years. “That’s the trick for a good business: Let your customer make money; do not take the last dollar,” observes veteran diamond industry analyst Martin Rapaport.
Stuller was a De Beers “sightholder” from 2005 to 2015, one of the select few chosen to receive large shipments of rough stones from the world’s largest diamond miner. But he found it more trouble than it was worth. Better to buy what he needed from preferred dealers and leave the cutting of the highest-end stones to specialists.
That’s another key to Stuller’s success—focusing on what he can do better and more efficiently. In his custom “Gemvision” department, his employees transform a rough sketch of a piece of jewelry into a high-resolution three-dimensional computer file that they will 3D-print in plastic, ready for casting. That allows Stuller to quickly fulfill custom orders (many for athletes and celebrities) like a recent pair of $2.2 million, 13-carat earrings. “There isn’t anyone who can do what they do,” says Rick Norris of Rick’s Jewelers in California, Maryland, who has been a bench jeweler for 47 years and is a big Gemvision fan. “We used to do our own casting, but it’s usually cheaper for me to design the ring here and send them the CAD file rather than firing up the machine.”
Stuller is astonished by advances in 3D printing and keen for more. “We can print in metal now, but the finishes aren’t right and there’s too much metal loss,” he says. Just give it a few years. “I need to be on the cutting edge.”
Take synthetic diamonds. Chemically these are real diamonds; they’re just grown over weeks in machines rather than formed over eons in the earth, and they sell at retail for about a tenth of the price of the traditional kind. Of the million-plus diamonds of 0.2 carats or larger that Stuller sells each year, 80% are now man-made. But, true to form, he isn’t sentimental about the decline of pricey natural diamonds. He’ll make up for it in volume. “We will sell tenfold more diamond jewelry in the future than we sell today.”
HOW TO PLAY IT
By John Dobosz
With brands that include Zales, Kay Jewelers and Jared, Signet Jewelers is the largest retailer of diamond jewelry in the United States, where it generated 91% of its $7.2 billion in sales in fiscal 2024 ended February 3. CEO Virginia Drosos is focused on profitability. Signet’s retail footprint shrank from 3,682 stores in 2018 to 2,676 as of April. Acquisitions of online jewelry retailers Diamonds Direct in 2021 and Blue Nile in 2022 helped to more than triple online sales, from $498 million in 2018 to $1.6 billion in 2024. Over the same stretch, the company went from a $657 million loss to $810 million in net income. Even with earnings expected to decline 1% this year, Signet’s stock looks cheap, priced at 6.3 times earnings, a P/E ratio 33% below its five-year average of 9.4.
John Dobosz is editor of Forbes Billionaire Investor, Forbes Dividend Investor and Forbes Premium Income Report newsletters.