Department: Craig Drake and All That Glittered

To answer the question, Drake grew up during the Great Depression, the son of a Germantown watchmaker. Entrepreneurial from the get-go, he delivered watches for his dad at the age of seven. He had three brothers, all of whom died, and a sister, Nancy, who went to the Stevens School with Grace Kelly. He held a series of odd jobs as he worked his way through Penn, and eventually landed a gig as a salesman for Proctor & Gamble, hawking soap to grocery stores in South Philly. But what he really wanted was to go into the jewelry business.

On his deathbed in 1961, Drake’s father showed his son how to properly work with precious metals, how to deftly twist a wire to take the tension out of it. Drake began fashioning bracelets and knocking on jewelry-store doors to sell them. “So one day I took them up to Cartier, and the guy says, ‘These are the prettiest handmade bracelets I have ever seen. But we don’t buy silver, we only buy 18-karat gold. Can you make them in 18-karat gold?’ And of course I said, ‘Yes,’” Drake recalls. “I got a monster order. The profit on it was double what I was making at Proctor & Gamble in an entire year. And I’d made it in a month.”

And so Craig Drake Manufacturing was born, eventually settling into cozy quarters at 1529 Walnut, where Drake began to court wealthy private clients and sell them distinctive custom pieces, while at the same time building his primary business, crafting rings, wedding bands, bracelets, necklaces and pins to sell wholesale to retailers. He hired Eagles cheerleaders as salesgirls. It was a good business, and the schmooziness that would become Drake’s stock in trade blossomed as he wined and dined clients with cosmopolitan flair.

He got married, had three kids, but in what would become a leitmotif in his life, he wanted more. A lot more. What he wanted was to land his jewelry in the prestigious baby blue boxes of Tiffany & Co. Every week he plunked down $4.25 for the round-trip train fare to New York, pushing through the door of the hallowed Fifth Avenue store with his leather jewelry case, and invariably leaving without a single order.

Eventually, Tiffany hired a new buyer who snapped up $5,000 worth of Craig Drake’s baubles. A month later, the order was for $50,000. “The quality was excellent, or else we would never have bought it,” says Robert Swanson, who was a buyer for Tiffany during the late 1960s and eventually became a friend of Drake’s. “Craig was extremely well-liked around the whole country  —  around the world.” His pieces eventually found their way into Tiffany’s advertising  —  the snooty jewelry trade’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. A Kansas City jeweler asked Drake, “Who are you sleeping with at Tiffany’s?”

Craig Drake hadn’t just succeeded; he’d arrived. “I must have called on Tiffany at least 20, 25 times. But I never quit,” he says. “I never quit.”