Fleur-de-lis helps jewelry store thrive
OLD NEW ORLEANS SYMBOL IS NOW `BADGE OF COURAGE’
By Rukmini Callimachi
Associated Press
San Jose Mercury News
NEW ORLEANS – Every New Orleans lady, or so it’s said, owns at least one piece of Mignon Faget jewelry — adornment as central to a lady’s wardrobe in this city as a piece from Tiffany in New York.
But after Hurricane Katrina made landfall Aug. 29, destroying huge swaths of the city and dispersing her clientele, Faget (pronounced fah-ZHAY) was forced to lay off 72 of her 80 employees. She assumed her business would fold.
Instead, she’s thrived, almost entirely because her signature motif on necklaces, brooches, earrings and bracelets is the fleur-de-lis — a stylized lily with three petals drawn together at its base. The symbol of New Orleans adorns everything from the mayor’s business card to city trash cans, to the football uniforms of the New Orleans Saints.
“People want to wear it as a badge of courage,” said Faget, whose family settled in the city in the 1700s. “It has never been more meaningful to us.”
Faget fled the city one day before the storm, barely taking time to board up her three stores and lock the jewelry in a vault at the company’s business offices, a former bank building.
Though looters made off with cheaper pieces left in the downtown store, they never broke into the vault, where Faget’s treasures survived the storm unscathed.
Using a laptop bought at a store along her evacuation route, the company’s vice president, Virginia Saussy Bairnsfather, 39, began fashioning an amateur advertisement for the local newspaper, announcing the reopening of the flagship store on fashionable Magazine Street on Oct. 12.
As a show of support, Bairnsfather’s mother came to buy a ring on reopening day — and found a line, each customer hungry for the fleur-de-lis. By the time the second of the three stores opened Oct. 28, the line at that store in a suburban mall was so long it wound around the shop and customers were asked to take a number.
The third shop has yet to reopen, but even with just two in circulation, Mignon Faget sold more than 20,000 fleur-de-lis pieces in 2005, five times the number she sold the year before.
Faget has been able to hire back all but a handful of employees, one fleur-de-lis at a time. And the company donated 10 percent of all fleur-de-lis product sales through the end of 2005 to the city’s reconstruction effort.
“People seem to want to hug New Orleans right now, and this is one way they can do it. It’s almost like a patriotism toward the city,” said Arthur Hardy, 59, an expert on the city’s culture.
The demand for fleur-de-lis jewelry is spilling over to other jewelers in the city, many of whom say they can’t keep up with demand.
“It’s been an explosion. We’ve tripled our sales of the fleur-de-lis,” said Brandy Whisnant, who with her husband owns Wellington & Co. in the French Quarter, which sells its own fleur-de-lis bracelet, pendant and cuff-link designs.
Symmetry, a high-end jeweler that has made fleur-de-lis cuff links for Saints players in the past, had its best Christmas ever, all due to the fleur-de-lis, said owner Richard Mathis.
For the 72-year-old Faget, the flower, which she’s used as a motif since the 1970s, has taken on new significance.
“We read on the Internet that the fleur-de-lis was born from the tears of Eve when she was driven from the Garden of Eden,” she said. “We decided this city is our own personal Garden of Eden.”
