Editor’s Note
This article explores how Matthew Stuller built a billion-dollar jewelry business not through romance, but through an unrelenting focus on logistics, manufacturing, and service—a strategy born from a teenage impulse to buy an engagement ring.
Louisiana wholesaler Matthew Stuller has built his ten-figure fortune with a relentless focus on fast delivery, manufacturing, and customer service.
Matthew Gordy Stuller was 15 years old when his mother dropped him off at his hometown library in Lafayette, Louisiana, so he could catch up on his studies. As an indifferent student, he left the books to walk around downtown and saw an engagement ring in a jewelry store window that he thought could win over a particular girl. He convinced the store owner to sell him the $39.99 ring, which managed to charm the young woman, for a $5 down payment and $5 per week.
However, sentiment has little to do with how Stuller, now 73, has become the king of wholesale jewelry in the United States, with a net worth that Forbes estimates at over one billion dollars. Instead, he has built his fortune through a relentless focus on manufacturing processes, logistics, and meeting all the needs of his retail customers.
Stuller earned that five dollars a week by delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, and washing cars. He would show up every Saturday at ten in the morning at the jewelry store to make the payment and then stay to help.
Soon after, he had a paid part-time job at the jewelry store, where the jeweler taught him how to polish jewelry, measure rings, and set stones.
In his senior year of high school, Stuller would lock himself up late at night in the janitor’s closet of his father’s dental office, repairing jewelry and experimenting with the lost-wax casting technique (used by dentists to make bridges and crowns) to fabricate missing pieces, like brooches and links. He still needed to buy certain items. However, when he called the big distributors, he found them rude.
Stuller knew he could do better. So, after graduating 68th in a high school class of 69 and spending one semester at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, he dropped out of school to start selling wholesale to jewelers from the back of his new 1970 Datsun 240Z.
Shortly after, he found a jewelry business in New Orleans that was closing and bought its inventory and rolling display cases with a post-dated check for $4,500, which he barely covered with a loan from a local bank where, not coincidentally, his father was a major client. A few years later, when his father retired, Stuller bought his dental offices to house his ever-expanding collection of equipment, which included furnaces, polishing devices, and a centrifugal casting machine.
His father also helped him with a key piece of advice: never hire a partner.
Today, half a century later, Stuller’s namesake company, which remains 100% family-owned, is still headquartered in Lafayette, where it has its largest production complex: 600,000 square feet of labs, manufacturing, and packaging, employing 1,500 workers.
Adding in production from smaller plants in Mexico, Thailand, and India, Stuller fulfills an average of 6,000 orders per day, including nearly 130,000 items, some of which come from other manufacturers. A main ingredient: gold bullion. Stuller melts enough to produce over 200 pounds per day of gold alloys for casting.
The company records annual sales of about $800 million and generates between $80 and $100 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), Stuller says. Forbes estimates its value to be at least $800 million (the rest of his fortune comes from profits he has taken from the operation).
Stuller’s website highlights its wide range of products: jewelry tools, loose gemstones, engagement rings, custom bracelets. He says all jewelry retailers buy from him, even Tiffany, Harry Winston, and Cartier. His largest customer is Signet Jewelers, the parent company of mall giants Kay Jewelers, Zales, and Jared.
His secret ingredient? Logistics. For years, Stuller personally transported hundreds of small boxes to the post office. Then he started hiring messengers on Greyhound buses. In 1981, he had a moment of inspiration when he met Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx, which was then 10 years old. Today, dedicated FedEx and UPS planes wait on the runway at Lafayette’s airport until Stuller’s last-minute packages are loaded at 8 p.m. If customers in the continental U.S. place orders before 5 p.m. local time, Stuller guarantees they will receive the items the next morning, provided they are not custom-made.