Jared Brand Guidelines: Sterling’s 1993 Superstore Format Inside Signet

A superstore idea from Sterling.

Jared did not grow out of a family shop. It was built inside a larger company. Sterling, the American jewellery retailer based in Akron, Ohio, launched stores under the name “Jared – The Galleria of Jewelry” in late 1993, according to a 1998 report in the trade magazine JCK. That report credits the idea to Nat Light, a former Sterling chairman, and says the concept was put on hold in 1995 while Sterling’s parent company remade itself and Sterling changed its management, with Terry Burman appointed as its chairman.

Sterling itself was much older than Jared. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1910 by Henry Shaw at LeRoy’s Jewelers in Lorain, Ohio, and that it was acquired in 1987 by the British group then known as Ratners. English Wikipedia also says the Ratner Group, founded in 1949, grew through a run of acquisitions in the late 1980s and early 1990s before it took the name Signet Group in 1993, the same year the first Jared opened. JCK described the years between 1992 and 1997 as a turnaround period for the parent, in which it closed stores, cut its costs, brought in a new management team and changed its name from Ratners to Signet.

By the spring of 1998 Jared had full backing again. JCK reported that there were then seven Jared stores, in Akron, Denver, Las Vegas and Orlando, and that Sterling’s chairman described the format as the company’s main route for expansion in the years ahead. The magazine put the stores beside Sterling’s mall chains, chiefly Kay Jewelers and a group of regional chains, and noted that Sterling had shifted its main advertising from print to national television, with Zale the only other jeweller then advertising at that level.

Free-standing, near the mall, and on television.

The Jared format was defined by its building as much as its name. In 1998 JCK described the stores as free-standing and sited near malls rather than inside them, with about 5,800 square feet of floor space, almost half the size of the original Jared stores, and roughly five times the size and stock of a typical mall jewellery store. Sterling told the magazine that it saw the stores as “destination” shops for people setting out to make a particular purchase, while its mall chains served browsers, and that it saw no significant overlap between Jared and Kay. The same year Sterling chose the property company Captec Net Lease Realty, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, as national developer for the stores, which Captec would buy or build and lease back to Sterling. The 1998 article also noted that Helzberg Diamonds, then the only other major superstore jeweller, had just renamed its own free-standing Jewelry3 stores as Helzberg.

Television carried the name. JCK reported in 2018 that the US trademark registration for the slogan “He Went to Jared” lists its first use as 2001, and that the line had run for at least a dozen years. In November 2018 Signet retired it. The replacement campaign, “Dare to Be Devoted,” was launched on 5 November 2018 across television, radio and online by the agency McKinney, which called it a “top to bottom rebranding campaign.” JCK said the work was aimed at millennials and showed couples of all ages and types, including same-sex and interracial couples, while sister chain Kay kept its own long-running musical tagline.

The format also spun off variants. English Wikipedia says that in 2012 Signet bought ULTRA Diamonds and converted most of its stores into Jared Vault and Kay Jewelers outlet stores. In May 2015, JCK reported, the first Le Vian by Jared boutique opened at Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, New York. It carried only the jewellery house Le Vian’s ranges, and the magazine described it as the first Signet-owned location to showcase a single brand, a shop-in-shop idea taken one step further.

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.

One of Signet’s core brands.

Jared has always belonged to a group. Its operator, Sterling, is the American arm of Signet Jewelers, which English Wikipedia says moved its primary stock-market listing from London to the New York Stock Exchange on 11 September 2008, took the name Signet Jewelers Limited the same day and moved its legal domicile from the United Kingdom to Bermuda, while keeping its headquarters in the Akron area of Ohio. The group also owns Kay Jewelers, Zales, Blue Nile and other chains.

In recent years Signet has narrowed its focus around Jared. In September 2025 the group’s chief operating and financial officer told JCK that the company’s attention was on its “big three” of Kay, Zales and Jared, and that it was working to set its Diamonds Direct stores apart from Jared. In March 2026, JCK reported, Signet said it would have four core brands, Kay, Zales, Jared and Blue Nile, folding the James Allen website into Blue Nile as a collection and making Rocksbox a collection within Kay.

For a design guide, Jared shows how a retailer can build an identity around a building type, a full formal name and a single broadcast line, and then rework all three as its owner’s strategy changes. Compare Kay Jewelers, its Sterling sister chain, and Zales, another Signet chain. For this guide we use deep ink, ivory and soft gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Jared’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.