Our Story

Robert was a firefighter when we met.

He doesn't like us to say that first. He thinks it sounds like we're trying to make it more dramatic than it was.

But it's the truth. He pulled us out of a burning building on Abercorn Street one night in 1965. My whole family. And two years later I married him, which my mother said was either the most romantic thing she'd ever heard or the most predictable.

We still argue about which one she meant.

After a few years on the force, Robert said he wanted to do something with his hands that made things instead of fighting them. We drove through Savannah one Saturday afternoon and stopped at a small shop on Broughton Street. An old man named Earl was working behind the counter. Pearls, mostly. Beautiful, quiet things.

Earl let Robert watch. Then he let him try. Then he taught him everything he knew over the next two years, slowly and without shortcuts, the way people used to teach things when they believed the learning mattered as much as the result.

When Earl retired, he offered us the space.

We said yes the same afternoon.

That was 1968.

Since then we have made pearl jewelry by hand for the women of Savannah and beyond. Weddings and anniversaries and ordinary Tuesdays. Daughters who came back years later with their own daughters. Women who sat across the counter and told us things they said they'd never told anyone.

Robert still goes to the bench every morning.
His hands are slower now. I tell him it's time to rest.
He says he'll stop when he stops enjoying it.
He hasn't stopped yet.

For fifty-eight years, the only way to own something Robert made was to walk into our shop on Broughton Street. Women kept asking us to put it online. We kept saying no.

We finally said yes.

Everything here is made by Robert's hands, one pearl at a time, the same way Earl taught him all those years ago.

— Robert & Linda Mitchell
Broughton Street, Savannah GA — Since 1968