As New Yorkers try to slash even the smallest splurges from their budgets, it would seem like a difficult time to try to persuade them to buy a $22,000 pair of 17-carat diamond-encrusted hoop earrings. In fact, Dalyah Duek-Flaks acknowledges that opening her new Madison Avenue diamond store, Dalyah, is about as well-timed as opening a cake shop on the eve of the French Revolution.
But there she was at the gala opening of Dalyah on Thursday night, as about 185 friends and fashion veterans took turns squeezing into her tiny jewel box of a shop. They sipped chardonnay and sparkling wine, nibbled on chocolate truffles and cooed over the trinkets sparkling from her jewelry cases. Ms. Duek-Flaks wore her 4.5-carat engagement ring, which she typically keeps locked in her safe at home.
Her father, Moshe Duek, who runs the parent company providing the diamonds and flew in from South Africa for the party, nervously nodded as guests congratulated him on the opening.
“The timing is terrible, but we did the deal last year,” he said while sipping a glass of chardonnay. “What can we do?”
Ms. Duek-Flaks’s tale of unfortunate timing is one that plays out with surprising frequency across this city of small businesses. Even in the depths of the recession, new stores and restaurants open almost weekly, in neighborhoods wealthy and poor. Hers happens to be wealthy, but that does not mean that the odds for success, at this moment at least, seem greater.
Ms. Duek-Flaks, a diminutive 35-year-old, arrived in the United States in 2007 to work as a 47th Street diamond wholesaler just when the subprime markets showed their first signs of indigestion. She decided instead to go into the retail business and signed the lease for her shop weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed.
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