Pounder’s Jewelry Displays Gems In New Setting

Business

Spokane lies outside C.J. Pounder’s window.

The founder of one of Spokane’s largest jewelry stores can view the city and imagine the individual customers who will come to him for such milestone gifts as diamond rings and gold watches.

Pounder’s Jewelry, a longtime fixture at NorthTown, left the mall late last year to move into its own 9,000 square-foot store at N3131 Division.

Pounder bought and remodeled the building, a former Moose lodge, which sits on the crest of the Division Street hill.

The jewelry store has neighbors at its new home.

Audrey’s boutique, which formerly was just across Wellesley from NorthTown, moved into the building last October, joining Salon Vital and Drezden Inc., a modeling agency that had moved in earlier last year.

The new Pounder’s store blends the futuristic with the familiar. A high-tech machine takes a picture of a gem and magnifies it on a 20-inch TV screen so customers can better see what they’re buying.

Still, there is homage to the past: The new Pounder’s is done from floor to ceiling in the store’s trademark purple.

Pounder’s jewelry makers, who in the past worked hidden from customers’ views in back rooms, have come out into the open at the new store.

The creativity of the 40-person design staff will be highlighted in the decor of the new store.

Each designer’s work will be displayed in its own showcase.

Enlarged pictures of jewelry will be hung behind the cases where the work is displayed.

“It will be nice because there’s variety to different people’s designs,” jeweler Greg Matsumo said.

But perhaps the real secret the new store reveals is the carpentry skill of the Pounder family.

C.J. and Maureen Pounder, along with four sons and daughters-in-law, remodeled the building themselves after buying it four years ago.

They worked nights and weekends to complete the job and did everything from hanging the huge custom-dyed ceramic tiles on the outside of the building to laying the carpet inside.

In making the move from NorthTown, Pounder’s left behind some of Spokane’s most coveted retail space.

The fact that Pounder’s moved out of NorthTown a month before the new store was ready for occupancy - setting up shop temporarily in a circus tent with two armed guards - stirred speculation that the parting wasn’t amicable.

C.J. Pounder admits that some longtime customers were irritated by NorthTown’s crowded parking conditions but insists there were no ill feelings between himself and mall management.

The move into its own building helps Pounder’s refine its image as a fine jewelry store.

“In the mall everything tends to blur together,” son Rock Pounder said. “Here we’re on our own.”

Karyn Hough, owner of Audrey’s, also likes her business’s new quarters.

“This is going to be a special center,” Hough said.

For 15 years Audrey’s was in a building just across East Wellesley from NorthTown.

The growth of the mall hurt her women’s fashion store more than it helped, Hough said.

“That big parking ramp up the middle of Wellesley was a killer,” she said. “It blocked all my east-to-west traffic.

“Visibly, it made the public think Audrey’s was harder to get to.”

So she began looking for a location away from the increasing popular mall.

Because Audrey’s already shared customers with the jewelry store, Hough jumped at the chance to move into the Pounders building.

“Our customers and Pounders’ customers, when they walk in the door, need to be treated special,” Hough said.

“They need to pampered. We’re just right for each other.”