In business, success is typically measured by what gets launched, opened or expanded. For New York jewellery designer Jade Trau, however, two of her most important decisions involved choosing to stop.
Closing a successful store
Trau opened her first dedicated boutique on Jobs Lane in Southampton, part of the Hamptons’ affluent cluster of coastal communities on New York’s Long Island, in 2021. Yet after the death of her father during the summer of 2024, Trau found herself unable to give the seasonal store the energy its clients expected.
“I could go to the store, but any time someone would walk in and say, ‘How are you?’, I would start crying,” she says. “You want to be able to say you can separate your personal life from your professional life, but we’re women, we’re people. How do you separate it? You can’t.”
Trau stepped away from the shop to grieve and spend time with her family. At the end of the summer, she made the decision not to reopen. The choice was all the more difficult because the store had been commercially successful.
