Jewelers specialize in ‘making people happy’

[media-credit id=3 align=”alignright” width=”255″][/media-credit]PITTSFIELD –  Gayle and Herman Rotenberg, owners of Unusual Wedding Rings and More, a full service jewelry store at 137 North St., can tell you a thing or two about love.

They’ve been selling engagement and wedding rings, many of which they designed, for a long time.

“I’ve dealt with a lot of couples in my day,” Mr. Rotenberg, a tall, soft-spoken and friendly man, said.

They moved their business, formerly based in the New York Diamond District for decades, to The Berkshires a couple of years ago.

Mr. Rotenberg will be the first to say he and his wife have specialized in making people happy.

His human services background (he earned a master of social work degree) has come in handy throughout the years.

He’s become an expert at observing human behavior as well as listening.

Many of the couples who have come in to buy engagement and wedding rings from the Rotenbergs have been genuinely happy. They arrived smiling, looking forward to spending their lives with the partners they fell in love with.

Owner has lots of stories

Take, for example, the older couple in New York who came in to buy rings. They had been high school sweethearts who eventually went their separate ways. They both married other people, had children and eventually divorced.

One day, long after the divorces, the man was in a coffee shop when his former high school sweetheart walked in.

“The romance was still there,” Mr. Rotenberg said. He was happy to set them up with the rings.

Then there was the case of a couple that was sad but ended well.

Trauma to triumph

They came into the Rotenberg’s New York store looking very sad instead of being happy and giggly. They even sped up their wedding date.

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Mr. Rotenberg said the man had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and wanted to be married when his life ended. The rings were delivered in a timely manner.

A total of 10 years later, the man walked into the Rotenberg’s store. He told them he had been misdiagnosed and had no brain tumor after all.

“See?” Mr. Rotenberg told the happy (and very much alive) customer.  “I told you my wedding rings were lucky.”

A no show wedding

Then there was a young woman who came in toward closing time. Mr. Rotenberg had sold her and her prospective husband wedding rings a couple months earlier.

She told him on the day of the wedding, her fiancé, the prospective bridegroom, never showed up. He never let her know ahead of time he wanted to forego getting married.

She wanted to know if she could return her rings.

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Chucking his no return policy out the window, Mr. Rotenberg bought back the rings because he felt so badly for her.

He said his background in social work has also helped him evaluate customers. He has a good sense of being able to tell if customers are anxious or mistrustful.

“It doesn’t take me too long to figure them out,” he said. “I’m more sensitive to people’s feelings. Everyone has different needs.”

Helps people with all budgets

Some people are embarrassed because they think they cannot afford engagement and wedding rings.

“There’s always a way,” Mr. Rotenberg said. When a customer is terrified over the price of rings, he tries to calm him down and says, “We’ll figure it out.”

He even worked with a couple who had AIDS who were referred to his store by a social services department. The couple had an extremely low budget and Mr. Rotenberg still helped them get the needed rings.

He said he’s been invited to some customers’ weddings and even became a witness during one ceremony in front of a Justice of the Peace. Some customers have become friends.

“We forgot the rings!”

He’s provided rings at the last possible moment before a wedding where all the details had been remembered except for the rings, he said, adding, “Rings last forever.”

He’s made rings from all different kinds of materials including melting down a grandmother’s ring to make a new one, wood and even enamel.

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People have asked for all kinds of unusual engravings in rings. One woman, for instance, wanted the words “if lost, please return to” and then she added her address.

Another couple added the airplane seat numbers where they met, and still another had these words engraved: “Don’t you dare take this ring off.”

Some of the messages inside rings were way too sexual to appear in a family newspaper, Mr. Rotenberg laughed.

Unlike most people, the Rotenbergs have gone to the movies to check out rings they rented out to movie companies for staged weddings.

Mr. Rotenberg has a thick book filled with notes, letters and some photos from satisfied customers.

“I didn’t make them write these,” he said, looking up from the filled book. Some of these date back to the 1960s.

Hopefully, he will save room in the book for all the notes and letters that are sure to arrive in the future.

Posted by Susan M. Wicker Guerrero on June 13, 2013. Filed under Community News,News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry