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CELEBRATIONS
Bryant & Sons’ 50th Anniversary
BY JAMES BUCKLEY
Q
uestion:
What kind of business gets to stay in business for fifty
years and counting?
Answer:
Only the best.
And, one of the best and most successful jewelers around happens
to be Bryant & Sons Ltd, which is celebrating fifty years of continuing
success this year. In 1965, Bob Bryant founded Bryant & Sons and
built it up from a small storefront on State Street to a sprawling high-
quality emporium for the crafting and sale of fine jewelry. Bryant &
Sons, Ltd has not only prospered during the following 50 years, the
company has also grown considerably and occupies two floors of its
now 4,500-square-foot space.
Bob retired some years ago but the transition has been seamless:
his son, Michael (Mike) Bryant, took over the operation upon his
father’s retirement and business is robust as ever.
And “robust” is the correct adjective to describe Bryant & Sons, as
its founder, Bob, who began his Santa Barbara life selling memberships
to a local health club, maintains his fitness and boasts the rock-hard
body of a man half his age. Retired, he not only acts as ambassador for
Bryant & Sons Ltd, but he is also an inveterate traveler and hiker, as
is his wife, Patty. Together they founded the Daniel Bryant Youth and
Family Treatment Center in honor of Bob’s son, Danny, who died of a
drug overdose.
Nearly every year since 1999 (with a three-year hiatus after
the events of 9/11), their “Summit For Danny” has enticed fellow
enthusiasts to climb mountains such as Kilimanjaro, Mount Cook in
New Zealand, Maglic Mountain in Bosnia, and Mont Blanc in France;
the mountains of Argentina, Bhutan, Ecuador, Peru, and Canada have
all been tackled in honor of Bob’s son, Danny, and as fundraisers for
the treatment center.
Mike Bryant was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and came to Santa
Barbara with his family when he was just a toddler; he was eight years
old when his dad opened the small jewelry store at 812 State Street.
“It was a small studio at the beginning,” Mike explains as we sit
in the back room of the expansive jewelry emporium. The street-level
showroom now occupies some 2,000 square feet of prime retail space
and an additional 2,500 square feet upstairs where the workshop and
accounting offices are. Bryant & Sons operates another showroom in
Montecito’s upper village, which opened 15 years ago.
Mike has spent a good part of his life in the jewelry business. He
began at Bryant & Sons as a teenager in high school and “helped out”
on Saturdays. When he graduated from Westmont (with a business
degree), he began working at his father’s shop full time. He did spend
one year at the Gemological Institute of America “to learn about
diamond grading, colored-stone identification” and other nuances of
the jewelry trade, he says, but the courses could be done over weekends
and he only occasionally had to go to Santa Monica, where the
institute was based; it is now in Carlsbad.
Bryant & Sons has a large and wide-ranging selection of jewelry,
with “lots of different price points. We try to have something for
everybody,” Mike says. “We have items that aren’t expensive, and then
