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In Memoriam: Scott Wayne Kay, Designer And Visionary | December 10, 2014 (0 comments)
New York, NY—The jewelry industry reeled with shock last week as word spread of the death of designer Scott Kay, 57. Kay died of a heart attack December 4, leaving behind a wife, three children, and his eponymous company.
Scott Kay Inc. closed last Friday in memory of its founder, but reopened Monday with a goal of forging ahead with the designer’s vision. Kay, a prolific designer, left enough product ideas for the next decade, according to an article in National Jeweler. He recently had added a roster of industry talent to his company’s ranks, including three former employees of David Yurman.
Kay was known throughout the industry for his larger-than-life personality and his willingness to take risks. In an industry where new ideas are often greeted with “who else is in?” before someone will get on board, Kay was a pioneer who went where others said it was impossible to go.
He was the first designer to embrace platinum in a huge way, even before the Platinum Guild International re-launched its American office in 1992. At the time, industry trade shows were rife with flash-for-cash designs and deals on tennis bracelets, not costly platinum. There were no luxury-focused jewelry shows and the designer sections of the Jewelers of America show and the then-nascent JCK Show represented only a small footprint of the show floor. Retailers of the time still by and large viewed the idea of branded jewelry with suspicion. The few jewelers who sold platinum jewelry were ultra-high end; most used it only for holding diamonds and gems in place, not as a design statement in its own right.
Yet Kay dove right in, offering both platinum and branded bridal jewelry to an industry that hadn’t thus far been interested in either one. But that’s what Kay did: he went where everybody else wasn’t.
Laurie Hudson was the founding president of the American PGI office. Not surprisingly, she and Kay worked closely together in business and became good personal friends.
"He gave new meaning to the concept of innovation. It's been said by many in our trade but it's a fact that Scott's business and marketing tactics became an aspirational blueprint for so many other companies,” she told The Centurion. “We had a bond that truly couldn't be broken. I do not know a single human being in our industry or any walk of life that was like Scott. He is a genuine one a kind. His beliefs and passions were unstoppable. I loved that about him.”
She recounted a 1994 trip to South Africa’s platinum mines with Kay, and other designers and retailers. “Scott was a highlight of the group and the trip. His larger-than-life personality and enthusiasm were a total shocker to the buttoned-up mine executives who had never experienced Scott firsthand! Scott's unselfconscious enthusiasm and swagger took them by surprise.”
Hudson soberly recalled three other renowned platinum designers who passed before their time: Rudy Erdel, Steven Kretchmer, and Michael Bogosian, all of whom she called “smart, eccentric iconoclasts who have made our world a more beautiful place.” She also credited the late retailer Marion Halfacre, whose store Traditional Jewelers, was a stone’s throw from PGI’s original offices in Newport Beach, CA, with being one of the first to embrace and sell the category.
Kay, whose name became synonymous with platinum, stunned the industry again years later with an embrace of palladium and other contemporary metals at a time when the industry was seeking relief from the double whammy of the recession and platinum prices. While these metals were in use for fine jewelry, Kay was one of the first to convince luxury jewelers the category was relevant for them, too.
“After I left Platinum Guild at the beginning of 2003 we stayed in touch. We discussed his alternative metals concept and I knew it would be a winner,” says Hudson.
A meticulous craftsman, Kay also was one of the early adopters of CAD-CAM for manufacturing, according to MJSA. His focus was on detailed design and innovative solutions: indeed, as the recession hit and jewelers began looking for ways to trim costs, he came up with the idea of making a ring lower, rather than narrower. Nobody would notice a few millimeters shaved off the height of a ring, but everybody notices if it’s narrower, he told this author at the time.
In recent years, Kay was working to reposition the brand as a lifestyle company, not just a bridal or fashion company.
One of the things that drove Kay so hard was a tough early life. According to this article in JCK, the son of an alcoholic mother and absent father had no original ambition in jewelry, but found his calling after fashioning a lug nut he found in the street into a ring. After applying to—and being rejected by—New York’s famed Fashion Institute of Technology, Kay took his lug nut ring and his formidable determination straight to the office of the man who’d signed his rejection letter. He got in.
From there, the rest is, as they say, history. Reaction to his death was swift and stunned, of course, and many cited Kay’s visionary pioneering spirit on the Scott Kay Facebook page and other places.
Jeweler Susan Eisen of El Paso, TX, wrote in Kay’s online guestbook at Legacy.com, “He was an inspiration to all of us retail jewelry owners, showing us that fine design is what mattered most. He was the master of it. I wish I would have told him how much I respected him and how talented he was when he was alive. His designs made a lot of my people happy, and that is what counts.....what he left behind for everyone to enjoy.”
“I met him many years ago, and then he told me, ‘differentiate or die,’” observed Mark Rozanski, president of Goldart Jewellery Studio in Ottawa, Canada.
“I met Scott when he first started travelling in 1985 with his beautifully designed 18k yellow gold line, before he decided to start his iconic platinum bridal line,” recalls Pasadena, CA jeweler Nelson Holdo. “He was truly a visonary, and committed himself wholeheartedly to creating a consumer brand. The jewelry industry has lost a great pioneer, and I mourn the loss.”
Jeffrey Skaret, a longtime sales executive in the luxury jewelry sector, wrote, “One would rarely meet someone as passionate as Scott Kay and I am blessed to have worked with him during my career. He was a distinctive and unique soul.”
Kay is survived by Regina, his wife of nearly 30 years, and three children; daughters Tiffany and Jordan, and son Troy. The family has vowed to carry on the business with the same asks that donations in his memory be made to Jewelers For Children.
The designer’s motto, both in his marketing and in his own life, was “Never compromise.” His sudden death shocked and saddened the industry but he lived—and died—by that motto.