From the Jazz Age to the Information Age: London Jewelers Turns 100

Editor’s Note: This story first appeared in the print edition of the 2025 Retailer Hall of Fame. Click here to see the full issue.

Anytime Mark and Candy Udell walk up to one of London Jewelers’ stores, they immediately focus in on the details.

A leaf on the floor, an earring turned backward, or—Mark’s nemesis—fingerprints on the doors or windows, there is nothing that escapes their attention.

They have “the Swiss eye,” a term Mark learned from Rolex, and they expect their employees to develop it too.

“It’s detail. When I walk in my store, I don’t see what’s right, I see what’s wrong first,” Candy explains during an interview at London Jewelers headquarters in Glen Cove on New York’s Long Island.

She continues, “It’s all about detail, and it’s not only in how you present yourself, but it’s how you work with your customers and how you work with your employees. We like to call it a London family and everyone’s part of that family.”

The London family includes customers, employees, and vendors, as well as actual family.

Charles London opened London Jewelers in 1926, eventually passing down the family business to his daughter Fran and her husband, Mayer Udell.

Mayer and Fran are Mark's parents, and in 1973, Mark and his then-new wife Candy started working alongside them in the store.

Mark and Candy bought the business from Mayer and Fran in 1990 and today, run it alongside their children, Randi Udell Alper and Scott Udell, and nephew, Zach Udell.

Mark and Candy are the third generation of the same family to run London Jewelers, while Randi, Scott, and Zach represent the fourth, sustaining a business that’s on the cusp of celebrating its 100th anniversary.

A Rich Beginning
London Jewelers isn’t the only Long Island institution celebrating its centennial.

“The Great Gatsby,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book about Jazz Age excess set in the fictional North Shore towns of West Egg and East Egg, turned 100 in April 2025.

While Fitzgerald’s seminal novel is a work of fiction at its core, the book is based on his experiences living in Great Neck, Long Island, in the early 1920s, and paints a picture of a place with fertile ground for a successful fine jewelry business.

London, a self-taught watchmaker who immigrated to the United States from Poland in 1923, got his start winding clocks on the massive estates along the North Shore of Long Island, called the Gold Coast.

Mark says these mansions had about 50 rooms and each room had an eight-day clock, which, as the name suggests, needs to be wound every eight days.

London, who was Mark’s maternal grandfather, had to go to 15 mansions every week and wind 50 clocks in each mansion, meaning he worked on more than 700 clocks a week.

“The people who owned all the mansions on the Gold Coast loved him,” Mark says, “people” whose family names are synonymous with American wealth and were Jazz Age titans—the Whitneys, the Vanderbilts, the Pratts, and the Morgans.

Eventually, London’s customers started asking him for rings, wristwatches, and chains.

“So that’s what he did. He started getting into jewelry,” Mark says.

London lived to be 83, and Mark recalls sitting on his lap as a young boy and watching his grandfather play chess and checkers with his friends.

“He would always have a bowl of fruit and he would peel the skin off of it. He had a knife and he would cut pieces of the fruit and give it to me and all of his friends—pear and apple, peach, whatever. I still do the same thing with my kids.”

(Perhaps the love of sharing fruit is genetic; Mark told this story seated behind a heaping bowl of berries and melon that the staff at London Jewelers had ordered for their guests.)

The Second Generation
London and his wife, Ida London, had three children, including daughter Fran, who grew up working alongside her father in the store.

Fran was born in Bialystock, Poland, in 1920 and immigrated to the U.S. in 1929 alongside her mother and siblings.

As a young woman during World War II, she drove an ambulance at Long Island’s Mitchel Field, then an Air Defense Command base.

After the war, she married a man she’d met on a blind date in 1939, Mayer Udell.

They had two children, Ira, who was interested in science and ultimately became an ophthalmologist, and Mark, who was interested in business and loved watching his parents work at the store.

Together, Mayer and Fran took over London Jewelers, running the business from 1945 until 1990 when they sold it to Mark and Candy.

While the two couples worked alongside each other for decades, neither Mark nor Candy can recall a single piece of advice Mayer and Fran gave that they regret taking.

Candy says Mayer and Fran gave Mark and her the space they needed to make changes to the business, creating the type of open atmosphere that’s conducive to businesses surviving from one generation to the next. 

“We came in with new ideas. Some of them they liked, and some of them they didn’t, and I think they were gracious enough to accept that and listen,” she says.

Mark recalls his parents emphasizing the importance of charity—something the jeweler has continued to this day through Candy’s Rescue Paw Foundation and by supporting clients’ charities—and acting with integrity. 

“Everything we’ve built up here, I’d never do anything foolish to jeopardize that,” he says.

It has been more than 30 years since Mayer and Fran turned the business over to Mark and Candy, and Mark says they still run into people in Glen Cove who recall the kindness Fran extended to them. 
 

Customers would come into London Jewelers to buy a diamond ring and Fran would encourage them to splurge a little bit and then would let them pay it off over time—no interest charged, no questions asked, no funny business.

The store had a little book where Fran would keep track of all the IOUs. Every week, when the customer who owed money came in to give another $10, it would be deducted from the amount owed and dated.

“People to this day tell me what your mom did for us was something beyond belief because we never would have been able to buy what we wanted to buy,” Mark says.

While the two couples generally got along, that doesn’t mean there weren’t a few times that Mark and Candy’s ideas raised eyebrows, including one involving the watch brand that changed the course of the store’s future.

Retail Lessons
Mark and Candy met as students at the University of Miami in the early 1970s; he was studying business, she, marketing and communications.

On Saturdays and Sundays, Mark worked at the Mayors store in Dadeland, Florida.

At that time, the Getz family still owned Mayors, and Dadeland was a rural community.

Yet the store carried brands like Rolex, Cartier, and Patek Philippe and, more importantly, it sold them to a wide variety of customers, opening Mark’s eyes to the possibilities for his family’s jewelry store.

He tells it like this: “It was a really good education because in the store they carried Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe, and I would watch what was going on there.

“It was farm country, Dadeland, near Miami, and there were cowboys, farmers, coming in and buying this stuff like crazy, in 1971, ‘72. It was crazy.”

He took copious notes on the things he thought Mayors was doing right. All the while, a vision began taking shape in his mind for his family’s own business.

If they could sell product like this in Dadeland, Florida, why couldn’t London Jewelers do the same on the wealthy North Shore of Long Island?

Mark and Candy married in 1973, the same year Mark graduated from the University of Miami. 

He returned to London Jewelers. Candy also came north, transferring to Hofstra University to finish the final year of her marketing degree.

Initially, she had little interest in working at London Jewelers, but Mark eventually talked her into giving it a try. She went to work at the store one day, “and then I never left,” she said. 

At that time, London Jewelers was a single-store independent, one of six in the town of Glen Cove. The store sold custom jewelry and giftware along with Accutron, Bulova, and Seiko watches.

In those early days, Mayer and Fran limited Candy’s responsibilities to polishing silver and cleaning shelves, as they felt she needed to learn the business. 

She also was deployed as a secret shopper, of sorts.

“I remember Mark’s mother used to send me out to go look at the other stores to see if they had people in them, if they were doing business. I was like the spy going up and down the street,” Candy laughs.

Mark, meanwhile, was a young man on a mission.

As soon as he returned from Florida, he began what would become a two-year quest to convince Rolex to open an account with London Jewelers.

The watch brand was a tough get. Even back then, Rolex wanted to know what other brands a jeweler carried before it would consider opening an account. 

Mark says he called Rolex’s local sales rep “nonstop” for two years until he finally agreed to come to the store.

“He came out to see me and he said, ‘Listen, you do not stop calling me. You are so persistent.’ He goes, ‘I’m going to open you up because of that.’”

To start selling Rolex, London Jewelers had to buy, up front, a package of 45 watches that included all-steel and steel and gold watches, as well as two all-gold watches, one men’s and one women’s.

The men’s gold “President” retailed for $2,750 in 1973. 

Mark showed his father and told him they had to buy this nearly $3,000 watch as part of the package.

“He said, ‘How are you ever going to sell a watch for $2,750? You’re crazy.’ I said, ‘But we have no choice. It’s in the package, you have to buy it.’ He said ‘OK, I’m leaving it up to you.’”

How Much Is That Rolex in the Window?
London Jewelers’ first-ever Rolex order came in and they stocked it on a Thursday, Mark recalls. They put half the watches in the showcases and the other half in the front window.  

At about 5 p.m. that same day, one of London Jewelers’ customers, a local doctor, was picking up takeout from the Chinese restaurant next door.
 
While he was waiting on his food, he strolled by the jewelry store’s windows to see what was new, then called Mark out of the store, asking to see the gold Rolex President.

Mark recounts what happened next.

“He came in, I took it out of the window, I put it on his wrist, and he said, ‘How much is it?’ I said, ‘$2,750.’ And he said, ‘You know what, I’ve always wanted this, today’s your first day [selling Rolex], I’m gonna buy it.’”  

After making the sale, Mark says he walked to the back of the store to size it. 

Mayer was back there, and Mark mouthed “first watch” to his father, letting him know the store’s gamble was looking like a good bet.

Looking back, Mark says landing Rolex was “100 percent” what put London Jewelers on the course to becoming the retailer it is today.

Candy notes that at that time, the store didn’t really have any major watch companies, with the exceptions of Bulova and Accutron.

“Once Rolex approved us, we started advertising on a wider basis across Long Island and the tri-state area,” she says. “It really helped to bring in all the other companies, like Cartier, and we had Audemars Piguet, we went to Patek.”

The store got in on the brand game early, and it was a prescient move indeed considering how heavily major brands can factor into the success (or failure) of independent jewelers today.

Next year will mark 50 years since London Jewelers began stocking Patek Philippe. 

The store also started carrying six now Richemont-owned brands before they were owned by the luxury conglomerate: Panerai (acquired by Richemont in 1997), Piaget (acquired in 1988), Cartier (acquired in 1993), Van Cleef & Arpels (acquired in stages between 1999 and 2003), Buccellati (acquired in 2019), and Vhernier (acquired in 2024).

“I think one of our high points is the vision that both of us had,” Candy says.

“All six of those brands were something that we had in our stores before Richemont purchased all of them. We actually built these brands in our marketplace and on Long Island. Having a relationship with all these brands was very important to London Jewelers and it really escalated the brands in our marketplace.

“It was really a win-win situation.”

From One to Two
As any business owner knows, where there are peaks, there are bound to be valleys. It’s the natural flow of a business, and of life.

“There were a couple times [that were hard],” Candy says when asked to name a low point.

“But nothing crazy,” Mark interjects.

“Nothing crazy,” Candy agrees.

There was the Veterans Day weekend in 1990 when the manager of the retailer’s Glen Cove store was kidnapped while closing the store, a terrifying ordeal for all involved.

There were also, of course, the larger historical events that affected everyone, like 9/11—Candy remembers a customer who purchased a baby shoe charm for his expectant wife but never came back to pick it up—the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme scandal, the Great Recession, and COVID-19.

For Candy, though, one period of time that sticks out as particularly fraught came early on in their career, when they decided to expand London Jewelers from one store to two.

When London opened his jewelry store in 1926, he choose a spot on School Street, one of the main streets in Glen Cove’s quaint downtown.  

He later moved it across the street, to 24 School St., which is where the store still was in 1973 when Mark and Candy joined the business.

The following year, they moved the store down a few doors to 28 School St., where it is today. 

It was after this move, in 1975, that the business started taking off, positioning the store to begin expanding.  

In 1980, London Jewelers opened what Candy described as their “second baby,” the store in Wheatley Plaza. (It was also the year their first actual baby, daughter Randi, was born.)

And, as anyone who has more than one child can attest, that second baby is a lot.

Candy recalls the difficulties involved in creating new systems and hiring more people, all the while still running the Glen Cove store.

Mark remembers feeling stretched thin.

“When you have one store, I knew every square inch of that store, I knew every repair taken in, I knew every piece of inventory. When we opened the second store, I started spending some time and developing a clientele there.

“After a month, I’m going, ‘What am I doing? I don’t have enough time in the day for the Glen Cove store and now I’m going to start developing something here?’”

Mark eventually delegated the store’s operations to his assistant store manager and staff, popping in only two or three times a week.

They also tried something then radically different with their merchandise at the Wheatley Plaza store.

They gave each brand—David Yurman, Cartier, Rolex, Patek, Ebel—its own little boutique area.

“It used to be,” Candy says, “that when you merchandised the store, all the jewelry would go together, all the watches would go together, and it was mish-mosh. Nobody separated their jewelry from the other brands at that time because they weren’t really brand brands.”

London Jewelers’ third store opened in 1984, the same year son Scott was born. Originally located in the back of the Americana Manhasset shopping center, the store moved to the front in 1996.

In 1996, they also started their expansion east into the Hamptons, beginning with a London Jewelers store in the town of East Hampton. While it was still an exclusive area at that time, the stores were more local and less corporate.

As Candy recalled when she was inducted into the Retailer Hall of Fame in 2023, when London Jewelers was opening in East Hampton, a neighboring store owner remarked, “We don’t have any stores here with gold letters above the door.”

Today, London Jewelers operates 16 stores on Long Island and in New Jersey.

The company ranks as one of the largest fine jewelry retailers in North America when it comes to number of stores, sitting at No. 36 on National Jeweler’s 2025 list of Top 50 Specialty Jewelers.

A Solid Future
The year 2026 will officially mark London Jewelers’ 100th anniversary, and Candy says they will be celebrating all year long.

A book is being written about the store, which also will publish a special 100th anniversary edition of its catalog. 

It is working with some of its brands on specialty merchandise, and there are plans for parties and activations at its stores in New Jersey and Long Island.

There is also a big industry honor coming London Jewelers’ way next year.

In July, Jewelers of America announced that Mark and Candy will receive the 2026 Gem Award for Lifetime Achievement, an honor that recognizes a career of contributions that have ultimately made the jewelry industry better.

They will be presented the award at the Gem Awards gala, scheduled for March 13, 2026, in New York City.

So, when the calendar turns to Jan. 1, 2027, and London Jewelers’ centennial celebrations are over, will Mark and Candy retire?

A succession plan is in place, with London Jewelers set to pass to the next generation of Udells, Randi, Scott, and Zach, who are all more than capable of running the stores.

“We’re hoping it goes another hundred years,” Candy says. “Our kids have the passion … and they’re good at it. They’re really good at it.”

They’ve worked hard for more than 50 years, expanding a single mom-and-pop store into a mini luxury empire. 

Mark was inducted into the Retailer Hall of Fame in 1992, and Candy in 2023.

Despite all this, the answer to the question of retirement is a quick and emphatic “no” from both of them.

Candy sums it up like this: “I don’t play cards, I don’t play golf. I’m used to getting up and getting dressed every day and going to work and meeting people and having interesting conversations and seeing what’s going on.” 

The fulfillment she derives from going to work every day doesn’t make it easy. 

Running London Jewelers—juggling all of their stores, employees, and vendors—is hard work, Candy acknowledges.   

“There’s a lot of aggravation at times and sometimes we look at each other and we go, ‘Oh my God, what are we doing, this is crazy.’ 

“But somehow a new day comes, and sometimes things are a little better and sometimes they are not. You just gotta stick through it.”