City jewellers TA Henn to sparkle with £100k facelift

And today bosses announced a £100,000 transformation in celebration of its 165th anniversary.

TA Henn bosses want to modernise the look of the Princess Street site.

And they said today that the project will kick off with a £1 million sale starting tomorrow to help raise funds for the refurbishment.

Managing director John Henn said the sale – only the second one that has been held in the company's history – will run for one week until October 13, at which point the first phase of the revamp project will begin. "We are going to start by creating a new-look window display with a completely new style," said Mr Henn, aged 51, who lives near Cosford.

"The second part will be done early next year. While the store is fairly modern already, we want to move with the times and give customers a more modern experience when they come into the store."

The first phase will be complete in time for the start of November, he added.

There will be 40 per cent off selected jewellery and 20 per cent off some Swiss brands of watches. "We don't do sales very often so it has to be something worthwhile and we thought £1m would be a good figure," added Mr Henn, who is the sixth generation of his family to run the store.

"The money brought in from the sale will go towards the refurb." The store held its first sale in 2007, again to fund a revamp of the store.

One item not in the sale will be a 135-year-old engraved silver tankard that was recently returned to the store by its former owner who lives in Spain.

Mr Henn has said he will never sell the antique pint pot, which was originally presented to John Wesley Henn in 1872 by his brother Silas, who was the great-grandfather of the current owner. But the tankard can still be viewed at the city centre shop.

Apprenticeship

"We're always happy to have old bits of memorabilia or anything from our past," he said. "We are trying to piece together the shop's past so it all comes in handy. Because the store expanded from number 40, to numbers 40 and 41, and eventually to numbers 38 to 41, it can be a bit difficult."

The jewellers was founded by Thomas Austin in the 1800s. Mr Henn said they dated the business back to 1847 as they have uncovered an old apprenticeship letter from the year – but said they suspect it may be even older than its official age.

Thomas Austin's father, Silas Henn, was a Tipton-based clockmaker. And it was his son, Thomas Wesley Henn, who eventually took on the business after leaving his position in the army as a radio operator during the First World War.

Buying up two adjoining shops in 1935, Thomas Wesley rebuilt the premises and doubled its size. By the 1950s, Alan Wesley Henn had joined the growing family business and within a decade they owned a total of eight stores. However, the recession in the 1980s put a halt to the family's progress and so the company was forced to return to the original branch in Princess Street.

John Henn, the latest in the family line to take on the job, has followed in his grandfather in his personal life as well.

In the 1930s, Thomas Wesley Henn climbed Mont Blanc using only basic equipment. Eighty years later, in May last year, John Henn climbed the same mountain for charity. He raised £10,000 for the Royal Marsden Cancer Hospital.