Aboca Beads and Jewelry owner Judy Dumont stands in her Damariscotta store. A landmark business for beading enthusiasts, Aboca Beads offers classes in jewelry making and design. Meeting with a people or small group and designing an experience just for them is always a pleasure, Dumont said. (Sherwood Olin photo)
More than once, while talking about her business, Judy Dumont finishes her point with some variation of “I just love what I do.”
Dumont is an entrepreneur, wife, mother, business owner, artist, and teacher who owns Aboca Beads and Jewelry, at 157 Main St. in Damariscotta. She was a longtime customer who bought the business in 2018 when the owner at the time wanted to retire.
According to Dumont, the opportunity came along at just the right time in her life. Judy and her husband, Larry Dumont, were becoming empty nesters and Judy was wondering whether she wanted to return to her high-powered accounting career.
“The timing was just right,” Dumont said. “I kind of was looking at a shift in my life, because my youngest was going off to college and I had a lot of ideas and thoughts of where I was going to go, and this opportunity kind of landed in my lap.”
Aboca Beads is Dumont’s first attempt at operating her own business and it’s been a delightful learning curve, she said.
“I had never run a retail store before, so it was just kind of exciting using my brain to figure it all out,” she said. “It was very stimulating that way.”
Today, in addition to the glass beads the shop is well known for, Aboca Beads repairs jewelry and offers customized private classes in jewelry making. Meeting with a people or small group and designing an experience just for them is always a pleasure, Dumont said.
“It’s a very interactive store, she said. “It’s very service based so it’s not like we are sitting at the counter and just ringing up people that buy things. We’re very engaged with customers. We work with customers. Yes, we teach big, formal classes, but we also are often just explaining to people how to do what they want and what they’re looking for. So the days fly by.”
Born in The Hague, Netherlands, Dumont had a peripatetic childhood. Her father was a high-ranking executive with Exxon-Mobil and the family moved so often, Dumont said it’s still hard to answer the question “where did you grow up?”
Her father’s career stopped long enough for Dumont to graduate high school in Westfield, N.J. From there it was off to college where she earned an accounting degree and became a certified public accountant.
She was already making jewelry for sale when she was in high school, and while she had an artist’s heart, she also had eminently practical parents.
“My parents grew up during the Depression, so they were very practical people,” Dumont said. “And my mom was an artist, so she knew very practically how difficult it was to make a living.”
Dumont toyed with the idea of a science-related career, but she knew her heart wasn’t in it. She did like numbers and she loved learning about business.
“I kind of found business administration, professional accounting, as a place where I knew I wanted to understand business,” she said. “I didn’t know I was going to end up owning a bead store, but I knew I’d probably end up running a store or a restaurant or something at some point in my life, and I wanted to really understand business thoroughly, and so that’s the path I took.”
Dumont said she enjoyed the work but it was intense. For a time she was employed by Arthur Anderson, at one time one of the “big five,” among the largest accounting firms in the world. In 2002 the company was enveloped in the Enron and Worldcom scandals and it collapsed almost overnight.
By then Dumont had long since left the company and was raising her family in California. She recalled watching the news on television and thinking about the good, honest, hardworking people she knew at the company.
“From an outside view, it was a fascinating thing to watch,” she said. “You know, it was horrible knowing what was happening to folks that really didn’t have anything to do with it. But it really showed how important ethics is. I mean, like law, journalists, anything really, anything in life.”
Dumont moved to Lincoln County in 2010 with her husband Larry Dumont and their two daughters, Claire and Elise. At the time Elise was in the seventh grade at Great Salt Bay Community School and Claire was just entering high school. Judy was already familiar with the area, as her husband was born and raised in Newcastle.
“When Chris and Bernie (DeLisle) opened the store, I was one of those summer people bringing my little kids in to make jewelry,” she said. “It never crossed my mind in a million years, I’d be doing this, especially here, but life evolved. We ended up moving here, and things just kept evolving.”
Judy was living in Boston and Larry was living in California’s Bay Area when they met. They managed a long distance relationship for a time until Judy Dumont arranged a transfer to San Francisco through her employer. By that point she was specializing in accounting for large health care systems and the Bay Area was rife with such businesses.
The couple married in 1992. Over the next 18 years, the California they moved too in the 1990s was overcome with new arrivals and miles of track housing, Dumont said. Still, they loved the area and might have stayed longer than they did, but their aging parents brought the couple back east. They landed in Newcastle, near Larry Dumont’s father.
“We intended to retire here, and we just saw that as our parents aged, we wanted to be closer, so we expedited the move and moved here in about 2010,” Judy Dumont said. “For Larry, it was moving home and that was wonderful. For me, it was a new adventure.”
Dumont works long hours, especially between June and December, but whenever she can she likes to get outside and enjoy Maine’s charms.
“We enjoy a lot of things Maine,” Judy Dumont said. “We enjoy hiking, we enjoy camping, we enjoy skiing. We do all those things. We enjoy traveling. Our kids are always living in different places, so we get to visit them in different places.”
One annual highlight mixes business with pleasure that is the Dumont’s near annual trip to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. That event is really multiple shows, spread out around Tucson, Ariz. over the course of a week in February.
“We hand select all our gemstones and freshwater pearls, and I find other cool, different, funky stuff,” Dumont said. “That is just so much fun. We go out for a week and it’s a very intense week. There’s so much going on that you kind of have to put blinders on and just focus in on what’s relevant to what you need. You want to be everywhere first, because you want to get the best stuff first. So you’re just boom, boom, boom, boom; and then, when they close at the end of the day, we go back to our hotel rooms and crash. We do that every year, which I love.”
They typically come back from Arizona brimming over with ideas and new products and excited to rub shoulders with people who liked the same things.
“It’s a real great energy boost for us every year,” Dumont said. “We end up coming back with a ton of new inventory for our customers, which is great, and tons of new stuff for us to make things with.”
Eight years after she made the decision that changed her life, Judy Dumont said she has no regrets. She did think she might have a little more time for metalsmithing, she said, but that’s a good problem to have.
“I would say I’m much busier than I expected,” she said. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m bummed that I’m doing all this stuff.’ I love what I do, and so I feel very blessed that we have a lot of great customers and customers that come back every year.”
At some point Dumont might retire, but at the moment that decision is a long ways off, she said.
“I know it’s something I need to think about, but right now, I just love what I do,” she said. “I think of those in the finance world, it’s a very stressful, demanding world, and that would be something I’d want to retire from. But here I just, I really can’t imagine not doing it. I don’t see myself stopping this anytime in the near future.”
Located at 157 Main St. in Damariscotta, Aboca Beads and Jewelry is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. For more information, go to abocabeads.com or call 563-1766.
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