A Quad-Cities gem: How Necker's Jewelers grew to be among the top independent jewelry stores in the country

The history of one Quad-Cities family-owned jewelry store involves moldy money, the farm crisis and two brothers with a drive to become among the top independently owned jewelers in the country.

Necker’s Jewelers' story starts in 1893.

That's when German immigrant U.S. Brumer opened Brumer’s Jewelry in DeWitt, Iowa. He owned and operated the store, the predecessor to Necker’s Jewelers, for nearly 60 years.

Enter Don Necker.

At age 17, Don enlisted in the U.S. military and fought in World War II. After the war, with the help of the G.I. Bill, Don attended watch-making school at Bradley University in Peoria. He then worked for jewelers in Maquoketa and Dubuque before opportunity struck.

Brumer’s Jewelry went up for sale in the early 1950s, and Don and his wife Dorothy decided to buy it.

In 1952, Don was 25 years old with no assets. Local banks refused to loan him the money to buy the jewelry store.

So, Don and Dorothy turned to family members, who loaned them enough cash to buy the jewelry store for about $7,000.

That cash came from underground.

To help Don and Dorothy, their family members literally dug up money they’d buried in their backyards out of a mistrust of banks after the Great Depression.

As the story goes, the banker counting Don and Dorothy’s money to purchase the store put more and more distance between himself and the bills, some of which were moldy from years underground.

“My mother talked about digging underneath the chicken coop to pull out the jars,” said Dave Necker, one of Don and Dorothy’s five children.

The storefront in downtown DeWitt sat along what at the time was Highway 61 and kept up steady traffic.

Don and Dorothy changed the store’s name to Necker’s and started raising a family in a two-bedroom apartment above the store. They had five children — Dan, Dee, Doug, Dave and DJ.

Dave and DJ would later take over ownership of the store.

It might have been cramped in the 1960s, but Dave, who was 4 years old by the time the family moved out of the apartment, has fond memories of his early years above the store.

“Our dad would often come running up the stairs to let us know we’re a little too loud or there would be water draining through the ceiling,” Dave recalled.

“We pulled the drawers out of this built-in and then dove off that into the tub," Dave said. "The water went over the edge and of course, showered down into the jewelry store.”

Don would work during the day in the jewelry store, and every night after dinner, he would go back downstairs and do the jewelry repair and bookwork.

Don and Dorothy eventually put in an intercom so they could communicate between the apartment upstairs and the store downstairs.

Dave remembers having a little bit of grass behind the building with a sandbox to play in. 

“I remember the tub, I remember the dining area, I remember hiding places in the apartment, I remember riding cardboard boxes down the steps, and I remember getting my mouth washed out with soap because I was spitting corn,” Dave said with a smile.

Growing up, the kids helped in the shop

DJ tried his hand at soldering charm bracelets as a teenager.

“Dad fired me,” DJ recalled with a laugh. DJ had alternated the charms instead of aligning them all on the bottom, making the bracelets lopsided, he said.

Dave learned engraving and worked part-time in high school. He also learned to resize rings, re-tip prongs and make a ring in a week-long jewelry school.

Dave decided that wasn’t for him.

“I came back, and I was in the basement with no windows, no humans, and I decided I did not want to be a bench jeweler,” Dave said. “That was a good experience for me.”

Years later, he would resurrect those skills to resize rings or set stones for rush jobs.

The farm crisis hits

After attending some college, Dave tried his hand working on oil rigs in California. It was there that he got a call from his dad, wondering if he had any interest in the jewelry business.

It was the early ‘80s, a hard time for the agriculture-centered town of DeWitt.

“We were in the middle of a farm crisis back here,” Dave said. “Which, I really didn’t know or understand. But I asked him how he’s doing. He said, ‘It’s not very good.'”

At the time, Dave and DJ recalled, there were just a few storefronts in DeWitt still open — Necker’s, Dot’s Hallmark (which was run by Dorothy Necker), Scott Drug pharmacy, banks and bars.

“He said, as sales were, he had to find a new career, unless I had interest in the business,” Dave said. “I asked him if he had a plan. He said he had a plan. And I said, well, then, I’ll come home, and I’ll take room and board as part of my income and we’ll dig out of this hole.

“And we did.”

They started with a big liquidation sale. They hired a company to liquidate assets so they could get rid of aging inventory and invest the money into new items and advertising Necker’s outside of DeWitt.

At the time, Necker’s had few Quad-Cities customers driving to DeWitt. But they started to change that. Now, the Necker brothers estimate 90% of business at their DeWitt store is from out of town.

The transition

Then came a diagnosis. Don Necker learned he had prostate cancer.

DJ, affectionately referred to as the baby of the family, graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in finance and went to work for a different jewelry store in Kansas City.

When their father’s cancer worsened, DJ moved back home and started working for the family business in 1989.

That same year, Don Necker died after owning Necker’s Jewelers for 37 years.

In 1990, Dave and DJ bought Necker’s Jewelers from their mother, Dorothy.

Dave, at 28 years old, ran the marketing, while DJ, at 25, managed the books. 

They were young, but they were confident. Perhaps overconfident, the pair like to say. The goal was to open 10 new stores, be in every local mall and become the largest jeweler in the Quad-Cities.

“We just thought we’d work our way through the process and figure it out,” DJ said. "That was about our business plan — work a hundred hours and pay off our mother and make the business successful. We had confidence that we could do that."

"We had a belief system that we could do just about anything if we had to figure it out," Dave added.

The brothers opened a store in Southpark Mall in Moline in 1990 and another in the Duck Creek Mall in Bettendorf in 1997.

In 1999, the brothers moved from the store’s decades-long storefront to a larger, standalone building down the street in DeWitt.

Within a few years, nationally, malls started to fade and the Necker brothers decided to move toward a standalone store in the Quad-Cities. They closed their Moline and Bettendorf mall stores and opened a Necker’s Jewelers location in Davenport in 2002.

The most recent move came in February 2024, when Necker’s Jewelers moved one door down from its 53rd Street store to a remodeled, larger building at 4009 E. 53rd St., Davenport. The striking geometric designs on the new store are meant to evoke diamond facets, the flat surfaces cut into a gemstone.

The move doubled the jewelry store's square-footage from about 4,000 to about 8,000 square feet, making the Davenport shop the largest jewelry store in the state of Iowa by square footage, according to Necker’s. 

The Necker's business is in the top 1% of independent jewelers in the country, according to the company. 

Changes in the jewelry business

Like anything, the jewelry business has changed in the last 133 years. Photographs from the early days show the jewelry store selling canes and eyewear.

In fact, Necker’s still repairs eyeglasses, now using a laser welder.

In the 1960s, Necker's sold binoculars, wallets and leather goods. The store had a full bridal registry with flatware, stoneware, fine china, wood products and crystal pieces.

Ending that registry in 1999 after the move of the DeWitt store was a difficult decision, Dave said.

Costs for wrapping paper, boxes, cleaning, loss from breakage and shipping added up. Although their mom and many employees wanted them to keep the registry, the brothers decided to switch to exclusively selling jewelry.

“We struggled with making a decision to get rid of that because it was traffic,” Dave said. “People are still coming into your store, but you weren’t as efficient as the big box stores.”

Competition for jewelry is coming from more places than it did when Don Necker got into the business, when jewelry was more often bought in local stores. Chain operations, home shopping clubs, catalog showrooms, the internet and even cruise lines have eroded some business from the local stores.

But trust is still a major driver for jewelry customers.  

"But I think we're lucky to have a product people still don't feel comfortable buying online," DJ said. "There's still a trust issue when you're buying jewelry."

Over the past 35 years, the gross profit per jewelry item has dropped, DJ said, causing jewelry stores to need a higher volume of sales to stay afloat. The market supports fewer jewelry stores per capita than when their father got into the business. 

"We have to turn our inventory more often, we have lower profit, but there's less competition now," DJ said. "It's been good for us over the years."

A competitive advantage for Necker’s is being a full-service store with expert staff that can identify jewelry, give appraisals, and make repairs. But, it also makes it hard to have multiple stores with that level of staff knowledge.

“It does allow the independent jeweler to be usually very strong in their marketplace, but it’s also very hard to duplicate,” DJ said.

Custom jewelry is a big part of the business.

“If you can think of it, we can make it,” Dave said.

In fact, Dave has a hard time saying no to customers, he admits.

For example, Necker’s receives requests to put loved ones’ ashes into jewelry or engrave a family member’s fingerprint into a custom piece. The ashes require a jeweler to don a mask to keep out any dust and sift the customer's loved one's ashes into a piece of jewelry. 

And, the demand for bigger diamonds has grown, DJ said. 

Necker’s hosts events, too, such as holiday parties and whiskey tastings in its store, one section of which is a lounge area. A fully stocked bar lines one wall, which Dave says is a big hit and can help people, especially men, feel more comfortable shopping in a jewelry store.

The family also runs a jewelry consulting business, DN Promotions, for liquidations.

The lessons of running a small business

The Necker brothers banter easily and often. They say humor is part of the business model.

Asked what it means to be the third generation running the jewelry store, Dave joked, "I just wonder how intelligent we are. And whether we should work for someone else."

Weathering the challenges of running a small business is helped by trusted partners who balance each other's strengths, the brothers say.

“Working for yourself, I believe the biggest threat of a small business is being good at wearing all the hats,” Dave said. “Because you have to be good at everything. I was fortunate to have a brother who had an interest in the financial side of things, so we could divide our duties, which allowed us to wear more hats.”

It wasn't always smooth sailing. But, for good or for bad, the brothers always could make decisions and change the direction of the business. Working for a big company, you don't have that kind of say, the brothers say. 

“It was a challenge. There’s a couple times in the last 35 years that we almost lost everything,” Dave said. “It’s the ups and downs of business. And there’s challenges that you don’t recognize right away that can take you out of the game. And you just have to fight through it — gotta hustle a little bit faster and work a little bit harder. It’s important that you have a belief system in yourself that you can figure things out. But it’s also important to jump before you have all the answers to figure it out. If you wait for all the answers, you’re never going to get started.”

One unusual challenge came in 2020, during a night of civil unrest in Davenport. Nationally, protests and riots broke out after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd. Dave said people he knew offered to stand guard, armed, on the roof to protect Necker's from looters. But Dave told them no. More than 80% of merchandise is locked up every night in a vault, anyways, as required by the store's insurance to deter thieves, and Dave didn't want to put anyone in harm's way over property.

That night, surveillance video showed people approaching the store, one carrying a brick, before other cars arrived and a shootout started in the parking lot. More than 30 shell casings were found in the parking lot, but nothing on the building was damaged. 

Looking back, Dave is glad no one posted up at the store. They were lucky, or maybe it was karma, that the building was left unscathed. 

Family and supporting small business are important to Necker's

As it goes with family-owned businesses, everyone pitches in. Wives come up for big sales and holiday parties, kids pick up trash in the parking lots, mow the lawn and, once old enough, serve drinks at the bar. 

Now, Dave's daughter, Savannah Necker-Levesque, handles marketing and website development. 

"When you need extra help, you rely on your family," DJ said.

Dave said the business must always keep evolving. 

“We just can’t, because it got hard, we can’t quit and start a new job," Dave said. "This is a living, breathing organism that has to keep evolving,” he said. “One of our favorite sayings is, ‘if it’s not broke, break it anyway, figure out how can we do it better.’ We’re constantly trying to evolve and become better at what we do.”

Supporting local businesses is important to the Necker brothers.

Dave said he will run his car to empty to get to a locally owned gas station, he tries to shop at the local grocery store in DeWitt and he orders his prescriptions through Scott Drug Pharmacy. 

"It's important to support local as best you can because those are the ones that are really woven into your community," Dave said. 

Next transition on the minds of the Necker brothers

Retirement, someday, is on the minds of Dave, 64, and DJ, 61.

The key word being "someday." But being a family-owned business, it requires extra planning. Should they sell the business? Or keep it in the family?

It's something the brothers struggle with. For now, though, both love what they do and want to keep doing it, they said.  

"If you work for Deere, you just retire and get your cardboard box and walk to the door and thank you very much," DJ said. "Here, you always kind of keep your eye on the store and your business, and as long as your name's on it, it's still attached."

"And more importantly, part of our retirement is the success of the business," Dave added. "So, transition planning is really important because the next generation's got to figure it out. They have to take you out of the game. We can't just leave and gift it. We have to make sure to help it, make sure it's successful."

Dave thinks often about what his father told him about the jewelry business.

"My dad told me jewelry is a happy business," he said. "You get to celebrate with people, see their smiles. I thought, if you can go to work and be happy, that's worth it. I feel blessed to be part of celebrations in so many people's lives."