Longtime Roswell jewelry store gets multimillion-dollar face-lift

Sara Beth Prendeville spent her childhood in the Roswell jewelry store her father founded more than five decades ago, cleaning display cases and wrapping gifts.

Now, Prendeville, president of the family business Brown & Co. Jewelers, has led a more than $5 million renovation of the company’s flagship store along Holcomb Bridge Road that has operated since the 1970s.

“It’s where all the magic happens,” Prendeville said in an interview. Brown & Co. over the years expanded to Buckhead with another location and a standalone Patek Philippe boutique, but the Roswell store maintains the company’s back offices and is the home base for its in-house jewelers and watchmakers.

“It’s the machine, if you will,” Prendeville said.

Prendeville, a Roswell native who took the helm of the company in 2022, said the renovation project remade the store from floor to ceiling: “Literally everything you can imagine, we touched it and made it perfect.” The store remained open during construction.

The renovation comes ahead of the crucial holiday shopping season and at a time when rising prices have pressured some consumers, though overall spending remains resilient. The National Retail Federation predicts U.S. holiday retail sales will top $1 trillion for the first time, growing more than 4% from last year.

Prendeville said she feels confident heading into the holidays and that she’s seeing the average price point of transactions go up at the company’s locations. “Our customers are wanting assets,” she said. “They want pieces or items in their lives that are meaningful and have a memory behind them.”

In Roswell, the retail showroom that spans more than 6,000 square feet was transformed with a new layout and showcases. There are dedicated spaces for luxury watch brands and a Cartier boutique, along with a new bridal salon that expands engagement offerings to an entire room.

A new service counter now features a glass wall where customers can watch the company’s jewelers and watchmakers in action. This provides transparency to clients who may be dropping off special family heirlooms, Prendeville said.

“The customers can put their eyes on this. … We do it all in-house,” she said. “I love craftsmanship. I love art. I love being able to peek behind the curtains of whatever a creative mind is doing, and so I think that it allows that very intentional experience for our customers as well.”

Prendeville’s father, Frank Brown, founded Brown & Co. in Roswell in 1974, following in the footsteps of his grandmother, Marie Burns, who ran a jewelry store in Spokane, Washington. Brown moved the business to its current location in Roswell just a few years later.

Prendeville, the youngest of his five children, began working at the business when she was just 9 years old, even selling behind the counter at Christmastime, Brown told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a statement earlier this year.

But Prendeville would later go off on her own, working in the jewelry business in San Francisco and New York, before coming back to Brown & Co. as sales manager and, ultimately, president.

“We were very fortunate that she came back to Brown & Co. after holding several other roles in the industry,” Brown said. “I’ll admit, I was a little worried she might never return from New York — every major brand is there, and everyone wanted to work with her.”

In recent years, under Prendeville’s leadership, Brown & Co. in 2023 relocated its Buckhead store to the upscale Buckhead Village development, taking a prime spot near the headquarters of shapewear brand Spanx.