The Jewelry District: Guest Marc Bridge

By Kathy Passero | May 21, 2025

JCK editor-in-chief Victoria Gomelsky and news director Rob Bates talk with Marc Bridge, CEO and founder of online jewelry platform At Present. A fifth-generation scion of the Ben Bridge family, Marc describes a life in the industry that began with cleaning jewelry cases as soon as he was tall enough to reach them, has included a memorable cross-country trip to deliver homemade cookies to Warren Buffett, and spanned decades as a problem solver for the family firm. Marc urges people in the industry to sharpen their storytelling skills in order to deepen consumers’ appreciation for gems, and he explains his role as matchmaker through At Present, connecting jewelry lovers who crave unique pieces with the artisans who create them.

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Presenting sponsor: IGI (igi.org/education)
Sponsor: Nivoda (nivoda.com)

Episode Credits
Hosts: Rob Bates and Victoria Gomelsky
Producer and engineer: Natalie Chomet
Editor: Riley McCaskill
Plugs: @jckmagazine; igi.org/education; nivoda.com; atpresent.com

Show Notes
00:57 Watchmakers are off to the (F1) races
05:13 Raised in the shop
12:32 A quest for answers
15:48 You’re gonna need a smaller boat
18:24 Cookies for Mr. Buffett
21:40 The tattoo/jewelry connection
24:36 Jalil Johnson, stylist in residence
28:05 Volatile times

Show Recap
Watchmakers are off to the (F1) Races
Victoria kicks off the episode with a recap of her recent Formula 1 weekend in Miami as a guest of Rolex sister brand Tudor, a sponsor of the Visa Cash App Racing Bulls team. In addition to heart-pounding action at the track, she got to see soccer star Lionel Messi and his team, Inter Miami (which Tudor also sponsors), square off against the New York Red Bulls.

The number of watch brands sponsoring F1 teams and the variety of signage were impressive, Victoria says. Not long ago, F1 was dismissed by many Americans as a European sport. Now droves of new fans are flocking to the races, including younger spectators and women, thanks in part to the hit Netflix series Drive to Survive. With so much buzz and so many high-end watch brands investing in sponsorships these days, F1 is a sport to keep your eye on, Victoria concludes.

Raised in the shop
Rob and Victoria welcome guest Marc Bridge, CEO and founder of At Present. Marc is part of the Ben Bridge family, a fabled name in the industry that traces its jewelry roots back more than 112 years. The legacy began with Marc’s great-great-grandfather, a Polish watchmaker who emigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1890s, then headed west to Seattle, after the Gold Rush. There, he opened a small watchmaking shop in 1912 that grew into the Ben Bridge Jeweler chain.

Marc spent his first 35 years as a de facto apprentice in the family business. “As soon as I was tall enough to reach the case tops, I was cleaning them,” he remembers. “Spring break in the Bridge family meant six days going to shopping malls in Southern California and a day at Disneyland. From an early age, that was the world in which I lived.”

But Marc enjoyed it. “I very much fell in love with the things that we were selling, and more importantly, the meaning behind why people were buying them,” he tells Jewelry District listeners. “I liked to joke that I spent a lot of time to do the thing that I would have done had I dropped out of high school, which was to sell jewelry.”

He earned an undergraduate degree in American history, a graduate degree in economic history (from the London School of Economics), and a law degree. “All so I could continue to hawk shiny baubles,” Marc says. “Which, it turns out, is the only thing that I know how to do in the world. It’s a good thing I’ve leaned into that.”

Part of “the gravitational pull” Marc felt stemmed from the fact that “jewelry is a happy business,” he says. “We get to see people at the happiest moments in their lives. If we’re doing our job right, someone leaves happier than when we met them. Of all the widgets that we can sell in the world, this is by far the best that I’ve found.”

A quest for answers
The joy of working for his family business, Marc says, is “you do all the things that nobody else knows how to do or is willing to do. So really, for a decade, I considered myself the minister, either without portfolio or of all portfolios. And I did a whole variety of things that I had absolutely no knowledge of, experience in, or really any business doing. And you go and figure it out. ‘We need somebody to run e-commerce’—‘Okay.’ ‘We need somebody to do visual merchandising’—‘Okay.’ ‘We need somebody to oversee real estate, and store construction, and marketing,’ and on and on and on. You step in and you are completely oblivious to what it is that you are doing, and over time you don’t know the difference between the things you know how to do and things you don’t know how to do. And then it’s your job.”

One afternoon Marc was showing a customer handmade 18k gold bracelets when the shopper asked a simple question that changed Marc’s entire perspective on jewelry sales. The person admitted the pieces were pretty, but didn’t know why the pieces cost more than other bracelets in the store.

Marc was stumped. He couldn’t actually explain what made the bracelets better. “I had to dig into why was this thing different,” he says. To find out, he traveled to Italy and attended a workshop in Vicenza. There, he met a master craftsman who for 25 years had been hand-hammering those bracelets.

It triggered an epiphany: “We haven’t told the stories of what these things are well enough. The product is extraordinary, and we put it in a case and put a price tag next to it and expect that our customers—but first even the people selling them—know why this is as extraordinary as it is.” How many sales were lost because of this? How many opportunities to help customers appreciate extraordinary works of art were missed?

“As an industry, we don’t do as good job of storytelling as we should, based on the nature of the product,” says Marc. “So many other things that compete for discretionary dollars engage in alchemy.” Beauty products and fragrances, for instance, take something that is “intrinsically worthless,” label it, and give it a story, and suddenly shoppers shell out large amounts of money for it, he says.

“We’re selling things that are by their definition precious, that are creations of the earth over the course of long period of time, that are unearthed with care, that are brought to life by talented people, that we bring into our lives for deeply meaningful reasons. And we stick it in the case, and maybe sometimes we sell it when there’s a blinking light that says this is 60% off,” he says. “We don’t need to alchemize this product. We just need to shine a spotlight on what it does.”

That, in a nutshell, is the philosophical and emotional foundation of At Present, which Marc launched in 2020.

You’re gonna need a smaller boat
Victoria asks if it was hard to leave the family business. Fortunately, Marc’s sister Lisa was eager to help their father helm Ben Bridge, so no one objected to him pursuing his dream.

“If you think about taking over the responsibility of a very large heritage jewelry business, part of that is figuring out where the industry is going and where you’re going to steer the ship,” Marc says. “It really made sense for it to live in a different place.” He realized his heart wasn’t in captaining a large ship; it was in trying to build a rowboat from scratch.

His mission would be to talk to “a different customer in a different way,” by connecting unique designers creating exceptional work with consumers who were looking to buy jewelry but not finding pieces that excited them.

Cookies for Mr. Buffett
When Rob asks Marc if Berkshire Hathaway’s purchase of Ben Bridge in 2000 led to any memorable interactions with Warren Buffett, Marc shares his favorite anecdote.

In 2002, Marc and his father planned to drive from Seattle to St. Louis for Marc’s sophomore year of college, passing through Omaha on the way. Maybe Mr. Buffett would like to see us, Marc suggested. His dad made a phone call, and to their surprise, the famous billionaire said yes, he’d be delighted if they stopped by—as long as they brought some of Marc’s mom’s molasses cookies.

“So for three days we drove across the country with this Tupperware container of molasses cookies,” keeping them chilled with ice from motels, Marc recalls. Finally they reached Kiewit Plaza (now Blackstone Plaza)—Berkshire Hathaway’s headquarters—and knocked on the door. Buffett himself answered and told them he often came into the office on Saturday mornings to see if anyone had sent checks.

“He’s just the most brilliant and completely sui generis person you’ll ever meet,” says Marc. “[His] reputation does not do justice to just how brilliant and empathic and creative he is.”

The tattoo/jewelry connection
Circling back to Marc’s comment about reframing the narrative to help shoppers understand jewelry, Rob asks how Marc plans to put the concept into action.

“You have to open the aperture for the people who are telling the stories and the people who are getting exposed to those stories,” Marc responds. He sees At Present as a matchmaker between jewelry clients who crave something different and emerging and independent artists, designers, and goldsmiths.

The jewelry business is half the size it deserves to be, in Marc’s opinion. How do you grow it? You put it in places people wouldn’t expect it to be. And you expand the “demand story” by connecting jewelry with moments that defy traditional expectations.

Why should the category be reserved for round-number birthdays, anniversaries, or engagements? Why not connect it with celebrating a win, commemorating a loss, or marking where you are in your journey—the way some people think about tattoos? “[Tattoos] tell the story of your life,” Marc says. They’re forms of self-expression. “That’s very much how I think about jewelry…. We just need to show them the types of the things that set their heart on fire and show them how does this work, how do you wear it, how does this bring you joy in your life.”

Jalil Johnson, stylist in residence
Vic is intrigued by the fact that At Present has its own stylist in residence, writer and fashion trailblazer Jalil Johnson. That’s unusual for a jewelry company, she points out.

Marc says At Present relies on Jalil’s sense of style and his ability to see the world through a creative lens to curate its collection. Johnson also helps the company articulate its message, and his “tremendous” following amplifies it because his followers trust his taste.

Though not a dedicated designer, Jalil collaborated with Marc on At Present’s recent Bold collection. They drew inspiration from Jalil’s idea for acrostic jewelry, which encodes messages by spelling them out with gemstones. One of Marc’s favorite pieces in the collection is a square ring with a stone in each corner—blue sapphire, opal, lapis, and diamond to signify bold.

“It’s about this intention of leaning into life with boldness,” Marc says. “Jalil is not a jewelry designer, but he has a remarkable frame of reference and a tremendous following, so…we can use our platform to really share and amplify those stories.”

Volatile times
Victoria, Rob, and Marc wrap up the podcast with a brief discussion of the upcoming JCK show and the outlook for jewelry. While most of the designers Marc works with are too small or new to exhibit, At Present will be in Las Vegas, as will some of their larger partners. “It’s always fun to see old friends,” he says.

Victoria asks if gold prices and/or tariffs are having an impact on Marc’s approach to buying. “Business continues to be strong for us, so we’re cautiously optimistic about the rest of year,” he says. However, he has “no doubt” that the nature of what At Present sells will change. There’s been an uptick in the brand’s silver sales recently, but he suspects that’s a natural outgrowth of the fashion cycle.

Ultimately, there’s too much “dynamism in the world” right now to make predictions about commodity prices or emerging trends, Marc says.

Any views expressed in this podcast do not reflect the opinion of JCK, its management, or its advertisers.