b"CRAIG & JUDD ROTTENBERGA photograph of Thomas Long associates from 1929 left behind at Longs Braintree storeBloomingdales, and Gap Inc., use technology in decision making. Modern-day Longs Jewelers, which now has six freestanding Thats where I rediscovered my love of retail and specificallystores, started, like so many businesses in the 70s and 80s, as a mall how businesses were changing and growing, whether using technolo- jewelry store. gy or just evolving over time, he says. During the holiday season, then-teenagers Craig and Judd would Longs had been growing over the last few decades that wedsell best friend charms or Italian horns.owned it [and] it needed more business help. At that point in myEvery once in a while, wed get lucky and sell a chain with that, or career, it made sense to come back, and I joined the family businessmaybe a watch, Judd recalls.on the business side.A scene many children raised in the jewelry industry can relateTHE MALL EXITto, Craig and Judd both recall working in the stores as teenagers,Its four current suburban stores, located in Burlington, Braintree, jumping in to help at Christmas or in the summer.and Peabody, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire, now sit Their natural interests at the time foreshadowed the roles theywithin a few hundred yards of the malls they once occupied. would take on at Longs later in life. Though the distance is short, the transition took more than 20 years. Judd was always the better salesman, no question, says Craig,Part of our evolution has been going from a mall jeweler to being a and I ended up helping out in the corporate office, even at aContinued on page 18young age, which then became our paths later on.A LONG'S HISTORY While Long's Jewelers has been in the Rottenberg family since the 1990s, its history extends back more than a century. Silversmith Thomas Long first opened his namesake store in Boston in 1878.While theres a period of the stores existence thats lost to history, the company eventually ended up in the hands of Montreal-based Henry Birks & Sons Ltd., alongside other storied American jewelers like Shreve, Crump & Low, J.E. Caldwell & Co., and C.D. Peacock. Around 40 years ago, Birks ran into some financial trou-ble and that is when Bob bought Longs Jewelers. Bob had been working for Ross Jewelers in Lynn, Massa-chusetts, a store his father, the late Hyman Rottenberg, opened in 1962.Bob (also a National Jeweler Retailer Hall of Fame induct-ee, class of 2010) expanded the business from a single store in Lynn, a Boston suburb, to seven stores across the area.Ross Jewelers and Longs Jewelers coexisted for a time, but the family eventually consolidated, converting some Ross stores to Longs while closing underperforming locations.16 RETAILER HALL OF FAME 2024 A receipt for goods purchased from The Thomas Long Company in 1896"