(Editor’s note: This is the 15th installment in a monthly series highlighting some of the region’s unsung manufacturers that make products essential to the economy and, in many cases, our way of life. See previous installments here.)
Decades ago, when Rhode Island was commonly called the jewelry manufacturing capital of the world, Snow Findings Co. easily manufactured over a million jewelry pieces per week, every week, says company Vice President Randall “Randy” Snow.
That was considered a small output for the time.
Like Rhode Island’s jewelry industry, that output has changed over the decades, with many giants of the state’s once-boisterous sector now long-shuttered or greatly reduced in operation.
But this industry hasn’t disappeared in the Ocean State. And though Snow Findings was always smaller in scale, compared with its former Rhode Island peers, a pattern of adaptation and resiliency has made the company a surviving holdout more than 70 years after its founding.
As recently as 10 years ago, things almost took a very different turn, with Snow’s father, Robert, owner and operator, then in his early 70s, ready to retire and sell the company. His father, William Snow, had founded the business out of his garage in 1951 and made his own tools.
With a buyer lined up, “I asked him if that was what he really wanted to do, to kind of see that go, what had been a family business employing my grandparents, my aunts and uncles,” said Randy Snow. “Everyone in the family had put their life’s effort into this endeavor, and I didn’t really like the idea of seeing it all disappear. And I don’t think he did either.”
Father and son eventually decided that Robert Snow would step back from operational leadership, handing the reins over to the younger Snow. The arrangement allowed his father to “do the work that he enjoyed without having all the work on his shoulders,” Randy Snow said.
The younger Snow had only worked in the family business briefly as a teenager, and prior to stepping up at Snow Findings, built houses for 15 years. Despite a different professional background, the decision has proven fruitful for the family and business. Operations continue – the company now produces around 40,000 pieces per day, and has a staff of seven – and Robert Snow, who turns 81 in December, continues to work at the company three days a week.
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STARS ARE BORN: Machine operators Dora Estrada, foreground, and Marina Pena sort through star-shaped jewelry pieces on Snow Findings Co.’s production floor.
PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
It’s a scaled-back landscape, with slowed production, less travel and a smaller payroll – at the company’s height, it employed around 28 people – but the reason for staying with the work, as Robert Snow puts it, is rather simple.
“This is something I’ve done for 60 years,” he said. “And it’s my life.”
This long-standing dedication is also something of a family tradition, with Randy Snow recalling that his grandmother worked at Snow Findings until she was just a few weeks shy of her 90th birthday.
While much has changed within the company and industry as a whole, relics of the past are everywhere on its production floors. Almost all jewelry designs, while sourced from in-house, were produced by a previous generation.
But that generation left a lot to work with. Snow Findings offers a catalog of items ranging from clasps and magnetic jewelry fixtures to metal stampings in the shape of hummingbirds, teacups, horses, harmonicas and much more.
Millions of these metal stampings are shelved in boxes throughout the building and can be made into jewelry pieces such as necklaces, earrings and brooches.
While production involves many of the same machines that have been used for decades, digitization has also crept into the industry, which Randy Snow tries to stay on top of without losing the industry’s craftwork.
“Some of my challenge is to try to adapt modern means of computer controls, machine processes to match with what was being done in a very manual and imperfect way, and to try to make those two things work together,” he said.
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THE BEE’S KNEES: This is one of various styles of pins produced by Snow Findings Co.
PBN PHOTO/
MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
In addition to preserving Snow Findings, Randy Snow has overseen the acquisition of two other companies that have weathered similar industry shifts. Eight months ago, Snow Findings moved from its West Warwick facility to 101 Venturi Ave. in Warwick – the location of its recently acquired jewelry equipment manufacturer Unit Tool Co., which now contributes to Snow’s manufacturing with its own 20,000-item product line.
Not long afterward, Snow Findings also acquired Providence-based Eagle Tool Co. That business is now in the process of moving into the Warwick facility, Snow says, with many of the details still in the works.
The three companies are united by a similar background, Snow says, navigating a constant need to innovate and adapt to the modern state of Rhode Island’s jewelry manufacturing.
And while Randy Snow isn’t quite ready to think about whether he’ll still be involved with the company in his 80s, as his father and grandmother were, he says he’s dedicated to keeping the business and its recent acquisitions going strong.
“Part of the reason I decided to come into this industry and take on this family business myself [was] to learn from my dad, while I had the opportunity to do so, what my whole family had committed their lives to learning and putting together,” Snow said, “trying to hang on to some part of that myself.”
On a broader scale, “all sorts of these other family businesses are just collapsing over time,” he said, “and a handful of companies are trying to hold onto those pieces, all that time and energy and creativity.”
