Helzberg Diamonds Brand Guidelines: A Kansas City Jeweller Owned by Berkshire Since 1995

A small shop and a teenage manager.

Helzberg Diamonds began as one small jewellery store in Kansas City, Missouri, opened in 1915 by Morris Helzberg, a Russian immigrant, according to the International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 2001). The family business soon passed to the youngest of his five children, Barnett Helzberg, who began running the store at the age of 14; English Wikipedia gives the same account. In 1920 Barnett opened a second, larger shop in a more expensive space, called the Shaw Diamond Shop. Within months it was doing as much business as the original store, which his brother Gilbert then closed to join him, and the new shop was renamed Helzberg Diamonds.

Advertising was part of the business from the start. The Directory says Barnett spent heavily on newspaper advertisements, some showing the two brothers under the line “Meet the Helzberg Boys, Wear Diamonds,” and offered promotions such as free car and aeroplane rides for customers making large purchases. By the mid-1920s he offered payment plans so that customers could buy on credit, and the brothers had a small chain, with shops in Wichita and Topeka, Kansas, alongside Kansas City.

The chain kept growing through the 1930s. In 1932 Helzberg doubled the size of its flagship store at 11th and Walnut Streets in Kansas City, which the Directory calls the single major business expansion in the city that year; the company also sponsored a weekly music programme on the radio and opened a store in Des Moines, Iowa. By 1940 it had five stores, and by the late 1940s eleven shops across the Midwest. In 1948 it opened House of Treasures, a three-storey store for jewellery, china and silver at the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, aimed at a wealthier clientele than its other credit-selling shops.

Downtown to the mall, and a button.

The next generation moved the chain out of town centres. Barnett Helzberg Jr. joined in 1956 and became president in 1963, when the company had 39 shops, almost all in downtown shopping districts, the Directory says. As suburban malls drew shoppers away, he closed the downtown stores; by 1970 the chain had shrunk to 15 stores, all in suburbs and shopping centres apart from the Country Club Plaza store. The company also sold its mail-order business and a division that ran licensed jewellery departments in other retailers, stopped selling watches and concentrated on diamonds and gems.

The signature of that era was a small piece of merchandise. In 1967 Helzberg launched the “I Am Loved” campaign around a lapel button carrying those words, given away in its stores. The Directory says the first run of 50,000 buttons went quickly, that the slogan spread to items from drinking glasses to golf balls, and that the company gave away an estimated 18 million of the buttons over the years. Its mall stores took an open floor plan, with the jewellery counter placed right inside the open shopfront so that shoppers who were only looking could walk straight in.

The chain changed gear again in the late 1980s. In 1988 it hired Jeffrey Comment, formerly an executive at a Philadelphia department store, as president, the first person from outside the family to hold the role, according to the Directory. Stores opened after 1988 were larger, and Comment introduced a superstore format called Jewelry3, named for offering three times the selection of most jewellery stores, which opened first in strip malls. Helzberg ended 1989 with 81 stores in 19 states. In 1998 JCK reported that Helzberg had renamed all of its free-standing Jewelry3 stores as Helzberg, so that its mall and free-standing stores shared one name.

Malls, counters and campaigns.

Jewellery chains in North America and Asia sell much of the same thing — engagement rings, wedding bands, gold chains and gifts — but they present it through the places they trade. In the United States and Canada the typical store sits in a shopping mall, often beside rival banners owned by the same group; in Hong Kong, mainland China and India, the chains’ own store pages often show gold jewellery at long counters and bridal sets as a category of their own.

Advertising carries much of the identity. American chains have long built their brands on television campaigns and on credit offers for buyers paying in instalments, and in recent years their campaigns have widened from engagement and anniversaries to everyday wear and self-purchase, as the trade press reports. Asian chains publish campaigns tied to weddings and festivals, and some name their collections after the occasion, the material or the craft rather than after a designer.

Ownership is often more complicated than the shop sign suggests. Several North American names that began as family businesses now belong to listed groups or to holding companies, and some have changed hands more than once, through mergers, takeovers and restructurings. Several Asian chains are listed on a stock exchange, and their corporate pages name the founders and the controlling shareholders alongside the listing.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, where and when, who owns it now, how it has presented itself in its stores and campaigns, and what rests only on the company’s own word. Store counts are given with the date of the source that reports them.

Berkshire Hathaway since 1995.

The family sold the company in 1995. Warren Buffett told the story in Berkshire Hathaway’s 1995 letter to shareholders: in May 1994 Barnett Helzberg Jr., a Berkshire shareholder who had just attended its annual meeting, stopped him on a street corner in New York and said he had a business Berkshire might want. At that point Helzberg’s Diamond Shops had 134 stores in 23 states, the letter says, and Berkshire completed the purchase in 1995 through a tax-free exchange of stock. The Directory adds that in January 1995 the Kansas City Business Journal had reported that the family was considering a public share offering, a plan dropped two months later when the sale was agreed, and that Jeffrey Comment stayed on as president. Berkshire Hathaway still lists Helzberg Diamonds among its subsidiaries on its website as of November 2026.

In November 2024 the company shortened its name to plain Helzberg. JCK reported that it was dropping the word Diamonds, as well as the form “Helzberg’s” it had used from time to time, and was switching its store colour from burgundy to blue with a new store logo; the chief executive, Brad Hampton, told the magazine that the company sells much more than diamonds. JCK described the chain at that point as a 163-store business with about 70 percent of its stores in malls, and called it an early adopter of lab-grown diamonds. English Wikipedia also records the 2024 name change.

The new look then reached the stores. National Jeweler reported in December 2025 that Helzberg had opened a new store concept in two locations the month before: a renovated store at Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, New York, and a new store at the Galleria in Dallas. The magazine described shades of blue in the design, a customisation bar at the back of the store where couples can sit and plan a custom piece, and large windows into the jeweller’s workroom.

For a design guide, Helzberg shows how a century-old family name can be kept while its colour, its full title and its store format are changed around it. Compare Ben Bridge, another jeweller owned by Berkshire Hathaway, and Jared, the superstore chain JCK set beside Jewelry3 in 1998. For this guide we use a deep blue, pale sky and a wine-red echo with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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