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Friday November 9, 2007

Brazilian jeweler dies at 85

Hans Stern, a poor Jewish immigrant from Germany who used Brazilian precious stones to construct a global jewelry empire, died Oct. 26 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 85.

The cause was not immediately known, said Betti García, a spokesperson for his company, H. Stern.

Born in Essen, Germany, in 1922, Stern fled with his family at the outbreak of World War II and arrived at age 17 in Brazil, where he fell in love with the country’s abundance of colored gemstones, according to a biography the company released.

He started working for Cristab, an exporter of minerals and precious stones based in Rio. Traveling inland on horseback, Stern got to know the miners and the lodes of tourmalines, amethysts, topazes and other semiprecious stones in the backwoods of Minas Gerais State.

In 1945, he founded H. Stern as a gemstone trading business to harvest the potential he saw in marketing Brazilian gems — a trade then practically nonexistent.

As the company grew, Stern trained dozens of young jewelers who worked for him and raised the Brazilian jewelry trade to international standards. His company grew to become a chain of 160 stores in Brazil.

He also established a network of partnerships in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. Today, 170 stores are franchised in 26 countries.

Stern especially loved the tourmaline, a multicolored semiprecious stone common in Minas Gerais. His jewelry was featured in magazines such as Elle, Vogue and Marie Claire, and in shops in New York, Paris, Frankfurt and Tel Aviv.

Stern married in 1958 and is survived by his wife, Ruth, and their sons, Roberto, Ricardo, Ronaldo and Rafael. — ap

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