Elysium to close storefront but will continue online

♦ Store will remain open through June with afternoon hours.

Elysium, a jewelry and accessories boutique owned by Nancy Brown, is closing after 14 years in downtown Rome.

The shop at 226 Broad St. will remain open to the public until sometime early in July with limited hours — 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. hours Monday through Saturday.

While the brick and mortar shop is shutting down, customers will still be able to shop for high quality handcrafted Mexican sterling silver jewelry on the website, www.elysiuminc.net.

“For whatever reason it has seemed like we’ve had less traffic on Broad Street,” Brown said. “People are wanting to pay cheaper prices for stuff and internet things. It’s just the numbers, then the pandemic hit and that was kind of the nails in the coffin.”

Brown has operated a wholesale business for Mexican silver jewelry for years with customers all over the country and around the world.

“That’s what I have done since 1974 and will continue to do,” Brown said. “The store was something I did because I could and I enjoyed it and I have access to so many things because I know so many people all over the world.”

The website strictly offers the Mexican silver jewelry and not the gems, minerals, fossils and clothes.

Brown started handcrafting jewelry just for fun while she was in college at the University of Georgia in the 1970s. She started to sell items through shops in Athens before deciding to open her own business.

By the mid 1980s, she was setting up booths at gem and mineral shows and just continued to grow.

Brown’s husband Jerry Maschinot, an artist himself, still has a studio on the second floor of the building on Broad Street.

“Since his studio is in it I hate to just sell the building out from under him so we’ll probably keep the building and try to find a nice tenant or two,” Brown said.