Watch Week Aspen, Signet Changes, Scams to Spot: ‘The Jewelry District’

By Natalie Chomet | August 25, 2026

Hosts Victoria Gomelsky and Rob Bates talk about Victoria’s experience going to Watch Week Aspen for the first time. She shares how the annual gathering started, how it has grown, and the culture of watch collectors and watchmakers coming together. Rob talks about Signet’s latest executive appointments and their backgrounds. The hosts take a step back to think about what this type of news from a big industry player means for JCK’s audience and what they can take away from it. Rob closes with updates on a gold scam that jewelers should be on the lookout for.

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Title sponsor: De Beers (adiamondisforever.com)

Show Notes
03:30 Victoria’s impressions of Watch Week Aspen
09:30 Signet’s latest hire and the larger industry implications
18:20 A scam jewelers should watch for

Episode Credits
Hosts: Rob Bates and Victoria Gomelsky
Producer and engineer: Natalie Chomet
Editor: Riley McCaskill
Plugs: @jckmagazine; adiamondisforever.com

Episode Transcript
This transcript has been abridged and edited for clarity.

Victoria:
Hey everyone, welcome to The Jewelry District…

I went to Watch Week Aspen, very much a billionaire’s playground. I think that’s a cliché, but it’s so true. It was the third annual edition of this really lovely, growing watch festival that happens across four days in August.

It was founded by Elizabeth Smith Hrubala and her father, Oliver Smith. And they are the father and daughter team behind Oliver Smith Jeweler. Oliver was a guest on one of our very early podcasts. He opened his store in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1984.

What happened was, they are big watch and jewelry retailers. Panerai had opened a boutique in Aspen around 2018 and asked Oliver if he wanted to manage and operate that boutique. There are a number of multi-brand and high-end beautiful stores in Aspen. And they have that relationship where they’re operating these mono-brand stores on behalf of the Swiss watch brands. A. Lange & Söhne, for instance, works with Meridian Jewelers.

Oliver Smith did this Panerai boutique, which has since transformed into an Omega boutique. But the family started coming to Aspen and turned the space above this former Panerai—now Omega boutique—into their own second retail location.

Three years ago in 2024, the industry was talking about ways to capitalize on all this money that has flooded into Aspen. It’s always been a place for the ultra-rich to enjoy themselves during winter and summer. But ever since the pandemic, I think that just went into overdrive.

A lot of people sought refuge in the beautiful surroundings. I mean, it’s hard to overstate how beautiful Aspen is. It’s very small. It’s very walkable. The restaurants and the architecture are very charming. It feels cohesive without feeling homogeneous.

And there’s an incredible amount of high-end retail there. Hermès has a big boutique, Gucci, all the luxury brands. You feel like you’re either on Madison or Fifth Avenue, on Bond Street or Champs-Élysées.

Every major brand seemingly has a presence there. There’s quite a number of jewelers and watch brands there. And the Smiths thought, Why not take advantage of this and create a watch week?

The first year was modest, but it attracted enough attention of collectors that they had a second one. And the third one, they invited me to. I took advantage of that and brought my sister because you want to be covered when you’re in Aspen. It’s very expensive to be there.

Aspen is not that easy to get to, and during the season it’s going to be very expensive to stay. For the watch and jewelry business, by virtue of just being there, the customer is already prequalified to spend.

This was the biggest event ever that they’ve held: 300-plus collectors and 19 different brands participating including 14 watchmakers—everybody I mentioned, A. Lange & Söhne, Hermès, Blancpain, Glashütte, several independents.

Then the interesting thing—and I highlighted this in a piece on JCK—the other retailers partook as well: Meridian Jewelers, Avi & Co., M.S. Rao, which is a wonderful antique estate business founded in New Orleans, a tremendous place to go look for jewelry and watches. They have a second location they opened in Aspen just five months ago.

It was nice because Oliver Smith is a multi-brand retailer, but they also got other multi-brand retailers involved. And everybody had their own event. It was a decent showing. There was a master schedule, and you could wander in and listen to a watch talk at M.S. Rao, then walk over to Avi & Co. and see their crazy $1.2 million Rolex Daytona with the obsidian dial. Then you could go over to Oliver Smith and see a panel on independent watchmaking with some of the CEOs from Europe who arrived. There was beautiful weather, great food, lots of collectors who were super excited to be there.

One of them stood out: He was a second time participant Jeff Schmalbach, aka @modernwatchguyatx. He’d come to Watch Week Aspen last year. He had lived in Scottsdale, so he knew the Oliver Smith team. He’s now based in Austin, and he’s a big watch guy. I didn’t ask him what he does for business, but his hobby clearly is watches. So much so that when he lived in Scottsdale, his wife threw him a 40th birthday party at Oliver Smith. I mean, you don’t get more devoted than that.

So I walked up to him at one of the cocktail events and recognized him from just being at these events.

I walked up to these two guys: one was a physician from Illinois named Ronald Champagne. He was lovely. And then he introduced me to Jeff, the guy from Austin I mentioned, who is the big Oliver Smith fan. He and Ronald had met on WhatsApp some time ago. They had this digital relationship, which is really common in the watch world where you get united by collector groups around the country, but they’d never met in person. So there they were connecting. And I just thought, “How great for Oliver Smith to be able to pull people together, give them that community vibe where everybody’s like, ‘Oh my God, I know you and we’ve talked before.’”

And it’s hard to go wrong spending Aspen in the middle of the summer. It’s such a beautiful place.

Tell me, we’ve got some retail news. What should we know about?

Rob:
Well, Signet has appointed Jamie Cygielman as new president of Zales and Banter, which is the former Piercing Pagoda. She has a really interesting background because she was the former general manager and president of American Girl. And last September, she was appointed global head of dolls for Mattel. And you know what that includes?

Victoria:
No.

Rob:
That includes Barbie. Now she’s going to be head of Zales. And she’s worked in fashion too. She’s worked for Madison Square Garden, where she managed the Rockettes. So she’s an interesting choice. She’s obviously an extremely accomplished executive.

There’s usually, I would say, a little trepidation when someone from outside the industry takes an important role in the industry. There have been people who’ve been successful doing it because, you have to start somewhere, right?

The current CEO of Signet, J.K. Symancyk, came from outside the industry, as did his predecessor, Gina Drosos. So he was obviously open to having somebody from outside the industry as president of Zales.

It’s an iconic chain, as we all know. It’s been around forever, and we’ll just have to see how she does. And it’s not like the new CEO is only appointing people from outside the business because he also appointed Pamela Cloud, who used to be with Tiffany, and she was like a top executive there for a long time.

Victoria:
She opened her own pearl brand, right? Roseate? Did she leave that?

Rob:
Yes, she left Roseate, yes. They have a new president now. I think it’s obviously doing well because you’ve heard of it and it’s still going, right?

So, Pamela Cloud was appointed president of Blue Nile, which is also owned by Signet. And her brief is to help bring it upscale. As we know, it recently bought the Clear Cut, which is headed by Olivia Landau and Kyle Simon, who have been on our podcast. So they’re going to bring their kind of customizable service to Blue Nile.

It’s interesting trying to re-create the type of white-glove service you get at a place like Tiffany or another upscale jeweler online at Blue Nile, which for years has been known as a discounter. We’ll see how well it does.

Obviously, every company is looking toward the high end right now because that’s where the action is. Blue Nile does have a history. It has always been seen as a discounter in that they have low margins, but it does have a history of selling very expensive diamonds— $50,000, $100,000 diamonds. To sell those online is no small feat, right? Because people are nervous, and to be able to win the trust of people to sell that expensive a jewel online is not easy. And to be able to elevate the brand to that level, especially since recently Blue Nile has been heavily into lab-grown. So, you’re basically changing the whole image of the brand and refashioning it. So those are the two new executives at Signet. It’s always tough, especially since they both came from outside the company and one came from outside the industry. But we wish them all well.

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Victoria:
I think I’ve wondered this for all the years that I’ve been writing about jewelry, because of course, at JCK, we serve a wide variety. The audience really crosses the industry, but we’ve always focused on independent retail jewelers as the core of our readership, our listenership. And I’m going to ask you a question that will make you say, “I can’t believe you’re asking that.” But why should an independent jeweler from somewhere around the country care that Zales or Blue Nile has these new executives? How does that end up filtering down and being of meaning to somebody who’s trying to run an independent business somewhere in the country?

Rob:
Honestly, it may not, to some. That said, it is news in our industry—one of the biggest, most important companies in the industry. I don’t think it’s going to affect most of our audience directly. However, certainly what happened in the past at Blue Nile affected independent retailers.

What Zales, Kay, Jared, and all these brands choose to promote definitely affects them. Does the internal politics and the résumé? It probably doesn’t matter. But even though Signet is a competitor, this is the kind of industry where I believe a rising tide lifts all boats, in that if they’re successful at raising the profile of Zales and Kay and Jared, I think that will help independent retailers too.

So it’s not necessarily a zero-sum game, because the more you shine a light on jewelry—not that jewelry is doing bad now, it’s actually doing very well—but the more you shine a light on jewelry and diamonds and, in particular natural diamonds, which, I don’t know how much you’ll be working with at Zales and Banter, but the idea is that these are the biggest voices in the industry. They have the biggest consumer reach out of any product, more than any brand, as far as consumer reach and advertising—watch brands are a little different. I think it is important that people at least keep tabs on what’s happening. They’re not only competitors, but they’re part of the same industry. I find it important.

Victoria:
I think that was a perfect answer. You’re right. I guess it’s like all news. You can choose to interpret it, apply it, and learn from it. I think understanding how the biggest companies in the business are operating, the choices they’re making just is insight for you, or for anybody on some level. I think it’s worthwhile. It’s not always going to feel immediately relevant, but maybe down the line something will.

Rob:
Yes, and Signet’s footprint is huge. The leading jewelry chains are Kay, Zales, and Jared. Diamonds Direct also targets the same customer that a lot of independent jewelers go after.

I do have something to talk about that’s independent jeweler-related.

This has been happening a lot. We have gotten at least three stories about this and it’s a very troubling thing. I would ask any independent jewelers to be on the lookout for this.

Apparently there’s a scam where scammers pose as people who are working for the government, a bank, the FBI. They call up senior citizens and convince them that for some reason the FBI is going to come after them, or their money is at risk. They give them a phony story and say, “You need to take out all your money and buy a bunch of gold with it, then deliver it to an agent,” who is an accomplice.

I guess they want the money in gold because it can’t be traced, right? The person being scammed gives the money, they get the gold, it’s melted down, and it’s harder to find who the scammer is.

First of all, there have been some jewelers who’ve been arrested because they’re working in cahoots with these scammers. They go and melt down the gold in the back of their store. So, a bunch of people have gotten in trouble for that.

But there have been a few of these cases that are nice stories. I mean, they’re unpleasant stories in that it’s horrible that people are doing this scam. This scam is going on all over the country. Now that the gold price is high, it’s this new thing.

There was a recent case, Cedar Springs Coins and Jewelry in Cedar Springs, Michigan, where a a senior woman came in and said, “I want to buy gold.” And the jeweler asked, “What kind of gold?” And the woman said, “I don’t know, I just want gold.” And she was apparently very nervous. The jeweler called the police and somebody was arrested and charged with a couple of felonies.

There was one person who I interviewed for JCK, Yianni Roupas, owner of Costa’s Fine Jewelry and Gold in Wisconsin, also had an older woman come in. She was shaking and she said she wanted gold, but she didn’t know exactly what to do with it. I think in that case, he actually sold it to her. But then thinking about it later, he realized that maybe there was something weird about it. He called the woman and she didn’t want to say exactly what happened. So, then he called the police who called the woman and she didn’t want to talk to them either, so the police had to go to her house.

But it’s good to hear these stories where jewelers were alert and smart enough to stop these horrible crimes. These are instances where senior citizens are at risk. They’re basically putting their entire life savings at risk. We salute all the jewelers who’ve stopped these scams and ask any other jewelers, please be on the lookout.

Make sure that if somebody comes in who’s older and looking to buy a lot of gold, if they’re nervous, they can’t tell you why they’re buying it and it just seems a little off, that’s when you might want to start calling authorities or at least find out a little bit more about what’s going on. Do some questioning and due diligence. You don’t want to take an elderly person’s life savings away. I mean, this is a particularly nasty crime.

Victoria:
It’s just upsetting to think about. You imagine your grandmother or your grandfather in this situation and how heartbreaking that is. Well, thank you for alerting people to that.

Rob:
I have another crime story, it’s about people ramming cars into jewelry stores, then getting out and steal a bunch of stuff. So horrible. Now, if you drive a car into a jewelry store, you risk hurting or possibly killing somebody. And that’s unfortunately what happened. In April, a 72-year-old man was sitting at his jewelry store when two idiots rammed the car into it and ended up killing him. They’ve just been caught and are now are facing murder charges.

I guess the good news is this was a huge trend last year—there were about 16 incidents of this last year—and so far this year, there have only been three.

But, it was only a matter of time before somebody got seriously hurt. It’s just a nasty crime. And there’s not much you can do to prevent it. Not everyone’s the nicest person in this world.

Victoria:
No, I know. Although I think still the world is dominated by good people.

Rob:
Yes, I believe that too.

Victoria:
But it’s important that people know. Thanks everyone. Have a great rest of the summer.

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