The first shoppers are starting to mill about the elegant tree-lined walkways of Shelter Cove Town Centre. At the waterfront park, those birds who were late for the early worm are flitting about seeing what has been left behind. In the shops, signs are being flipped from CLOSED to OPEN.
And inside Heritage Fine Jewelry, it’s Groundhog Day. Or at least that’s what the three siblings who run the place call it. Each morning, the three of them go about their choreographed routine, setting out dazzling displays of sparkling jewelry, warming up the cash register, seeing to any last-minute cleanup needs.
These days, it’s Jennifer Lance, Doug Safe and Patrick Safe setting up the shop as brothers and sisters, as they’ve done together for 20 years. But the routine they follow, the wordless handing-off of duties as the store readies for business, was devised by their mother, Patti Catalano. Since her passing three years ago, it’s been their way to keep her heritage going.
“I call it the house that Patti built. We just live here,” Doug said, carefully arranging a felt-lined case full of diamond rings. “It’s stuff that we’ve been doing our whole lives, and not having her around has been weird.”
Not that you’d know it to watch the three of them go about their day. Each has their area of expertise and sets about their task with brilliant precision—Jennifer and Doug in the front of the house, Patrick in the back making repairs and crafting jewelry.
“I had the pleasure of working with Patti before she passed,” said Elaine, a five-year employee of the business. “There wasn’t even a hiccup. They just did it. I was impressed, and I knew Patti would be too.”
She’d be impressed, but it’s clear she wouldn’t be surprised. After all, from the time Catalano started in the jewelry business more than 40 years ago to the day she passed, her children had always been a part of it. From her original shop in Florida to Heritage Fine Jewelry’s Pineland Station debut in 1990 to the new Shelter Cove location today, Patti Catalano was not just building a business. She was building a legacy.
“Mom used to tell me, ‘I’m not doing this for me, I’m doing this for you guys,’” Jennifer said. As for bringing her kids in, “she always left the opportunity there, but it wasn’t really spoken.”
And the siblings, for their part, gravitated toward the business with an equally unspoken, and equally strong, passion.
“In my teenage years, you’d find me back there just fiddling around with stuff,” said Patrick, who now makes that his full-time job as the lead on all the repairs and restoration work Heritage does. “I wasn’t in the business at first. I was just messing around.”
Likewise, Doug and Jennifer recall helping customers in their mom’s store as young as 10 years old. “Customers would say, ‘I think I should speak to your mom,’” Jennifer said. “And I’d just say, ‘Try me.’”
During the years that Catalano was building the business, each of the siblings found a calling outside of jewelry. Doug, for example, worked building and developing timeshare units. “But if something came up here, that became secondary,” he said. During the Christmas rush, he would work his day job from 5 a.m.-1 p.m., coming into the store in the afternoons to help. “My employers were nice enough to let me do that because they knew this came first.”
“When the school bus drops you off at a jewelry store every day as a kid, you soak it up,” Jennifer added. “Did we all think we’d come back and do this? No, but we realized she had a really successful business, so little by little we all trickled back.”
And now with all three siblings under one roof at Heritage Fine Jewelry, they carry on what Catalano started, albeit with a few “adoptees” who have joined the company.
“They definitely make you feel like family,” Elaine said. “The good and the bad. You’re going to get teased, but that’s okay.”
“You had to be thick-skinned with mom, too,” Doug added with a laugh. In fact, most things at Heritage Fine Jewelry are said with a laugh, a testament to the ease with which this family has fallen into the day-to-day patterns without the person who made it all possible. Fighting like siblings? Hardly.
“There’s always going to be some bickering and disagreement, but we’re too busy. What are we going to do, discuss it for five days? If you want to make a big deal out of something, there are three of us. Two of us will out-vote you,” Jennifer said. “But usually, we’re all on the same page.”
Together, these three are moving Catalano’s heritage for outstanding jewelry forward to a new generation. And they’re keeping her spirit alive in other ways.
“The Humane Association was always huge with her,” Patrick said. “We’ve always had pets in here, and we do fundraisers all the time. Mom always said, ‘Give back, and it will come back.’”
Patti Catalano built a business. She built a legacy of giving back. But more important, she built family ties that stayed strong long after she passed.
“We used to wonder if there was a point where she’d stop working, but her whole family was in here,” Doug said. “She loved being in here.”
