A Note From Our Founders

After 58 years, we're closing our doors — and we'd rather give the last pieces away than sell them.

By Kimberly Brown, co-founder of William & Kimberly Jewelry

In 1968, my husband and I opened a small jewelry workshop with a borrowed bench, a soldering torch, and one idea — that every piece we made should outlive us.

We were 22 and 24 years old. Neither of us had any business teaching anyone about gold. We learned from a man named Sal who ran a shop two doors down from ours and let my husband apprentice for him on weekends. Sal died in 1979. We named our first pendant collection after him.

That was 58 years ago.

We're closing the workshop on June 15, 2026. Permanently. The lease is up, our hands are tired, and our daughter — who runs her own design studio — has made it clear (kindly, repeatedly) that we have earned the right to stop.

And so we are.

What we're doing with the pieces that are left

Over the last 58 years we made thousands of pieces. Some sold the day they were finished. Some sat in the case for years before the right person walked in. A few hundred are still in the shop now, finished and unsold, in their original velvet boxes.

We could liquidate them to a wholesaler. We were offered roughly 18 cents on the dollar. We said no.

We could put them on consignment with another shop and let someone else sell them slowly over the next two years. We said no to that too.

What we decided is this: every remaining piece — every ring, every pendant, every pair of earrings, every bracelet — goes to the people who supported us. Free. You cover the postage to your door. Nothing else.

We'd rather these pieces find their last home with the community that built ours, than sit in a vault somewhere waiting to be melted down.

Why we're not running this like a normal sale

If we marked everything down 80% we'd still be selling them. We don't want to sell them. We want to give them away. There's a difference, and the difference matters to us.

My husband says it like this: "They were never about the money."

He's been saying that for 58 years. Every time a customer apologized for not being able to afford the price tag on something they loved, he'd take ten or fifteen percent off without making a thing of it. The pieces left in the shop are the ones we held onto — the difficult ones, the unusual designs, the unsold custom orders, the ones we made for ourselves and never quite put on the floor. They aren't seconds. They aren't damaged. They're the pieces we wanted you to have.

So we are giving them to you.

What you'll be choosing from

The remaining inventory is mostly rings, with a smaller number of pendants, bracelets, and earrings. Materials are what we always worked in — sterling silver, 14k and 18k gold-filled, hand-set sapphires, emeralds, rubies, amethysts, and freshwater pearls. Every piece was made in our shop, by my husband or by me, using techniques we learned and refined over five decades.

These are not mass-produced. They are not the kind of pieces that look familiar because you've seen them on a hundred other websites. Each one carries the small irregularities of being made by hand — a slightly different bevel where the file caught the metal, a setting that sits a fraction of a millimeter off-center because that's how it wanted to go. We never thought of those as flaws. We thought of them as fingerprints.

If a piece speaks to you, take it. It's yours.

A few honest answers to questions we've been getting

Why is it really free? What's the catch?

There isn't one. The pieces are paid for — we made them years ago, in some cases decades ago. We don't need the money from selling them. We do need them out of the workshop before the lease ends. Giving them away costs us less, emotionally and practically, than watching a wholesaler haul them away for pennies. The only cost to you is shipping, which goes to the carrier, not to us.

How much is shipping?

For US deliveries, shipping is typically $9.95 for standard delivery. Heavier pieces or bundles may be slightly more — the exact cost shows up at checkout before you confirm anything. We don't make anything on shipping; it's the postage and packaging cost only.

Are these the actual pieces from the shop, or are you drop-shipping?

These are the actual pieces. Every order is packed by hand from the inventory still in our workshop, and shipped from here. When a piece is gone, the listing comes down. There is no warehouse, no third-party fulfillment, and no restocking. What you see is what's left.

What happens if it doesn't fit, or I change my mind?

Because we are closing the business, we cannot process exchanges or returns after the closure date. If a ring doesn't fit, a local jeweler can usually resize a piece like ours for under $40. If a piece arrives damaged in transit, email us and we'll work out something fair — we are still here for the next 20 days, just not after.

What happens to the shop after June 15, 2026?

The space will be turned over to the building owner. The fixtures are being donated to a local trade school that teaches metalsmithing. Our tools — the ones my husband has been using since 1971 — are going home with us. We don't have plans yet. We have a small house on the Maine coast and we intend to find out what it feels like to wake up without going to the shop, for the first time in 58 years.

One last thing, from both of us

We will not pretend this is easy. The shop is the third member of our family. Closing it feels like saying goodbye to someone we loved very much. But that is the nature of a thing being finite — it has to end, and the end is what makes the middle worth it.

If a piece finds you, please wear it. Don't put it in a drawer. We didn't make these to be stored.

And if it finds the right person — your daughter, a friend on a hard year, a stranger you'll never meet but whose hand happens to be the same size — pass it along. That's how the best pieces find their way through a life.

Thank you. For 58 years. For every conversation across the counter, every birthday and anniversary you let us be part of, every time you chose us when you could have chosen any of a hundred bigger shops.

It mattered. It still does.

— Kimberly and William
William & Kimberly Jewelry, est. 1968