She could sell eggs to the chicken that laid them," says one long-time friend and co-worker of Sissy Jones.
Sissy, of course, is the Sissy of Sissy’s Log Cabin, now in Pine Bluff, just lately in Little Rock, soon to be in Jonesboro and after that, Hot Springs.
If "life’s too short for ordinary jewelry," it’s also too short not to follow your vision, and Sissy (having reached one-name status, at least in Arkansas, like Madonna and Cher) always has a vision, a goal.
"If you don’t set a goal in your life, you’re not going to get anywhere," Jones says. "A ship doesn’t leave without a destination. That’s kind of what we have done at Sissy’s Log Cabin. I set a goal for this store every month."
When she refers to "this store," she’s referring to both stores, to the growing jewelry franchise that bears her name and that now employs the third generation of her family.
Many people know the arc of her enterprise – "Sissy’s Story" is on her website – her move into the literal log cabin in Pine Bluff where she sold first antiques and then jewelry.
That many people know of Sissy – it’s pointless to follow customary journalistic practice and refer to her as simply "Jones" – is one of several keys to her jewelry company’s success, but it’s probably the most important one: Sissy branded herself decades before every "how-to-succeed-in-business" book was pushing that concept.
Sissy, born Marguerite Louise Robinson in San Antonio, Texas, is now 72 and concedes she has slowed down a bit, if you call going from 100 miles per hour to, say, 80 slowing down. Her son, Bill Jones, is president of Sissy’s and a member of its board of directors. He has appeared with his mother, founder and CEO, in Sissy’s advertisements for several years and is integral to the enterprise.
"I’ve got old enough now that I want Bill to run the business," Sissy says. "I’m watching, of course, and I see what he’s doing and I’m not as in tune as I once But we don’t have to be because he’s trained enough and watched us and been in the business enough that he’s a great businessperson.
"He’s not going to do anything to hurt this business," she says. "This is his business."
Keeping It in the Family
During a somewhat hectic interview at Sissy’s in the Heights, Bill Jones and his mother demonstrate what seems to be an easy relationship, with a fair amount of teasing back and forth.
The interview is hectic because, despite being a Friday afternoon before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, the store is hopping with customers, and though it appears fully staffed, both Bill and Sissy are constantly getting called out from the store office to the showroom to help and talk to customers. There’s absolutely no hint of rudeness to the interviewer; it’s just that business is business.
So there are three more keys to the success of Sissy’s the company: hard, constant work, attention to detail and a commitment to personalized customer service. The success has allowed Sissy’s move into other markets, despite a battered economy.
Bill and Sissy decline to reveal revenue, but when asked to give some idea of the company’s growth from 2008-10, they say it averages 20 percent, maybe a little more. That’s 20 percent year over year each of those three years.
"The plans for the four stores were basically Pine Bluff and then Little Rock, Jonesboro and Hot Springs," Bill says. "A lot of that has to do with my boys." The boys are William, 20, Wyatt, 17, and for the last four years a young man Bill calls his "Blind Side" son, as in the movie: Joe Cook, now 24. Cook is set to go to the Jonesboro store along with Mark Sanders, Sissy’s vice president.
A calculation of how many family members help comprise the 55 or so employees of Sissy’s comes up with 15. That includes Sissy, Bill and Murphy Jones, secretary and treasurer. Murphy is Sissy’s husband and Bill’s father. Also among the kin are Bill’s wife, Sharri, his mother-in-law and brother-in-law, Sissy’s sister and brother-in-law, a niece, a nephew, a grand-nephew and a cousin.
Sissy and her family moved to Gillett (Arkansas County) when she was a girl. And despite having been born in Texas, she has deep Arkansas roots. Her grandfather, W.T. Champion, was a pharmacist in Fayetteville who moved to Gillett and became a farmer.
The Jonesboro and Hot Springs stores will share the log cabin motif found even in the Heights location, though the Heights shop is probably best described as "log cabin lite."
"Everything will be the same," Sissy says. "We’re not going to change it. Maybe it wasn’t exactly what people wanted in the Heights here. But it makes you know that this is the Log Cabin and we’re not a fancy store. We’re just good old home folks, and we’re not trying to put on an image of something we’re not."
LR Business Brisk
The Little Rock Sissy’s opened last year in the former Roberson’s Fine Jewelry store, after Roberson’s moved to west Little Rock. The building was remodeled inside and out. Inside, it’s brighter and more open with room for more jewelry displays and space for a small coffee and soda bar.
Business at Sissy’s Little Rock store has been brisker than expected, Bill and Sissy say. They credit its success and that of the entire company to the previously noted customer service and a friendly air that’s not always associated with fine jewelry stores.
"Because there’s not a lot of pressure, there are a lot of people around," Bill says.
"I think people get the misconception that we’re really high dollar, but that’s not true," Sissy says.
Still, 20 percent annual growth for a retailer of fine jewelry – how has Sissy’s flourished in the worst downturn since the Great Depression?
"We have not felt it because we try to keep things very affordable," Sissy says, adding that they also work hard to offer what people want.
And, Bill says, if a customer wants to buy something, Sissy’s will do everything in its power to make that happen. "We do layaway, charge, in-house charge, bank financing. We do everything," he says.
"But I tell you, we offer a lot of value because we work extremely hard in buying great values, in buying deals," Bill says. "Most jewelry stores, they don’t own anything. They just kind of floor-plan stuff," he says. (Floor-plan financing is a revolving line of credit typically extended to dealers of costly goods, with the goods serving as collateral. Once those goods are sold, that loan is repaid.)
"We buy to own," Bill says. "We do multimillion-dollar deals. We go in and make sure it’s a phenomenal value. We’ve got a reputation with a lot of these wholesalers. When they need money, they’ll come to us, and we’ll get some phenomenal deals. We were originally estate dealers, so we have that estate philosophy. We flip things.
"I’ll never forget coming home from auctions with my mother, and we had to sell everything out of the trailer before Monday morning because she couldn’t cover the check," Bill says. "And we’re only talking about maybe $5,000 or $6,000."
And that is another important key to the success of Sissy’s Log Cabin: liquidity, being able to pay cash to get the best possible wholesale price. That and flexibility, employing a can-do philosophy.
"Our answer to everything is ‘Yes, we can do it.’ And we want to do it," Sissy says. "There’s not anything that can’t be done."
Vicki Taylor of Pine Bluff, a longtime friend and co-worker of Sissy responsible for the chicken and egg quote, says, "She’s probably the best businesswoman in the state, you could probably say the South. She’s always got a vision."
‘If You Can’t Forgive, You Can’t Be Forgiven’
A reporter has to ask: What’s that 19-year marriage to Murphy Jones, divorced for 13 years, remarriage to each other thing about?
Sissy has been open about it in other articles. It doesn’t seem like a sore point. In fact, when son Bill pops back into the office, his mother says, "She wants to know about Murphy." Bill laughs and says, "You mean Dad’s hiatus."
The as-short-as-we-can-make-it version:
Sissy Robinson and Murphy Jones met in college, at what is now the University of Arkansas at Monticello. Murphy became an engineer, graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The couple married. Murphy had an opportunity for engineering adventure, a job in Johannesburg. He wanted to go. Sissy, with a young son and daughter and a growing business, didn’t.
"He wanted adventure," Sissy says. "I said to him, ‘Go with my blessings, but I’m not going.’ So he did."
"Murphy and I always remained friends," she says. "We were very good friends, and we both remarried in that interim time, that 13 years, which was a complete disaster for both of us. Every time he came home from Africa…he came to Thanksgiving, Christmas at my house always. And regardless of whether I had a husband or not, and I did, he still came. And that was just the way it was. And that was understood on the front end. We never, ever spoke badly of each other. That’s just not something you do."
If Murphy happened to have a lady friend, he brought her along to Arkansas and they stayed with Sissy.
In 1988 – Murphy and Sissy were both single again by this time – Murphy told Sissy he wanted to come home, that leaving her had been a horrible mistake, that he wanted to remarry her, that he wanted to see his grandchildren. Sissy prayed about it with her children – she prays about most things – and together they decided he could come back.
Murphy and Sissy remarried on Nov. 27, 1988.
After Murphy’s return, Sissy says, "he got up in Sunday school, and he said, ‘Well, I’ve been on a 13-year vacation, and I’m so glad to be back.’ He said, ‘My advice to each one of you is this, if you think the grass is greener on the other side, you need to stay home and water it where you are.’"
"We both had to grow up a little," Sissy says. And she sees the episode in a positive light. She loves her work, and if she’d been married during that entire 13-year hiatus, she wouldn’t have been able to give her business her full attention and might not have succeeded as she has.
And then there’s this: "If you can’t forgive, you can’t be forgiven. And that’s something I had to learn."
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