Elodie Pavlin sat in her sun-filled office on the top floor of Pavlin & Co’s flagship building. Behind her vintage brass and leather desk, the window offered a view of the busy streets of midtown in late spring, the worker bees on their lunch breaks, the tourists filing in and out of Gucci, Prada, and Versace, the police taking a break from their post outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. But Elodie didn’t waste time with the view. She hadn’t gotten to the helm of the company by daydreaming. At fifty-three years old, she was a woman with tunnel vision, and her focus at the moment was the party she was hosting tomorrow night.
Her eyes glanced toward The New York Times unfurled across her desk. It was a three-week-old copy she kept in her top desk drawer, open to the style section. The headline read, “One Hundred Years of All That Glitters.”
This summer marks the centennial anniversary of Pavlin & Co, eponymous jewelry company founded in 1919 by Isaac Pavlin, whose son, Elliot, made engagement synonymous with diamonds. To mark the occasion, the family’s private jewelry collection will be on display at the flagship store through the month of June.
“My father, Alan, spent his life celebrating the idea that a diamond says love,” said Elodie Pavlin, now CEO. “He marked many occasions with a piece of jewelry gifted to my mother. Now I want to share these treasures with our devoted customers to show our love for them.”
The exhibit opens the night of May 25 with a private party. It opens to the public the first week of June.
The black pug by her feet, Pearl, let out a sneeze that sounded like it came from a much larger creature. Pearl, her only trustworthy companion.
“You hate this air-conditioning, don’t you?” she said, reaching down with an affectionate pat.
Elodie closed the paper, inhaling with satisfaction. Tomorrow’s party was going to truly showcase her talents as CEO. She only wished her father had lived to see this day.
Growing up, Elodie loved nothing more than following her father around the Fifth Avenue store and feeling the buzz of the customers, the click of metal and glass as cases were opened and locked, the crinkle of stiff paper bags in Pavlin & Co’s trademark green—the color of emeralds.
“Emeralds don’t sparkle, they shine,” her father always said. The shopping bags themselves even had a gleam to them. Emerald green had always been the brand’s signature color.
The store was her second home and had been for as long as she could remember. Starting her freshman year of high school, Elodie spent every summer at the office. She didn’t have the glamour job of catering to celebrities trying on jewels for the Academy Awards or showing multimillion-dollar engagement rings to high rollers. Instead, she had a desk at a cubicle and took orders, learned how to weigh loose diamonds, picked rings up from the setter, and arranged for deliveries. She was happy to pay her dues, to learn the business from the ground up. Someday, she would be the one hosting luminaries at the fifth-floor salon. She would be the one greeting the press at the annual holiday launch party.
That day had, at last, arrived. Since her mother’s passing, Elodie had presided over two successful holiday season launches, and now was preparing for the company’s centennial year—an anniversary she needed to leverage as spectacularly as possible. It was increasingly difficult to keep jewelry in the minds—and budgets—of customers.
People simply didn’t buy jewelry like they used to. The entire business model was based on tradition—a tradition engineered in part due to the marketing genius of her grandfather. What would an anniversary be without a pair of solitaire diamond earrings or a string of pearls? An engagement without a big diamond ring?
But these millennials! They preferred the latest technology gadgets for their birthdays. A trip to Phuket for their one-year anniversary. An engagement ring and wedding ring might be the only pieces of jewelry someone ever buys for their spouse, and even those sentimental items were becoming less and less essential. It was hard for her to believe, but it was true. This is what it had come to. And for all the big splashy pieces that generated press, for all the borrowed glitz and glamour during the television and film awards seasons, it was the buying habits of the average person that sustained a business over the decades. And the average person needed to be coaxed, prodded, and lured in like a fish on the line. That’s what made evenings like the one she had planned so important. Desire had to be invented.
Her assistant buzzed in with a call. “Sloan Pierce from Whitmore’s for you,” she said.
Sloan was the daughter of one of Pavlin & Co’s longtime customers, the socialite Harriet Pierce, and worked at the venerable auction house Whitmore’s.
“Hello, Sloan. I hope you’re not calling to say you can’t make it tomorrow night.” With this, Elodie pulled Pearl onto her lap and got a sloppy kiss.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world. But I’m expecting it will be such a smash event I might not get a chance to speak with you, and there’s something I want to discuss,” the woman said, her voice breezy. Confident. “Are you free for drinks at the Carlyle on Friday?”
Elodie assumed some charity event needed a chairwoman. The polite thing to do was say yes, of course. And while it was tempting to think she didn’t have time for such things, the truth was her life outside the office was quiet.
She looked around her green-accented space, as finely appointed and as still as a photograph in an interior design magazine. Everything in its place. Her life was ordered and in control. She’d never had a husband or children, and this left all her energy for Pavlin & Co.
“I think that could work,” Elodie said. Elodie always had weekend cocktails at the Carlyle. Clearly, this had become common knowledge, and Elodie was flattered. Finally, the type of attention—the type of power—she had long been due. It was a new era for Pavlin & Co—her era.
Hers alone.