NATIONAL JEWELER 27 EARLY GOALS Born and raised in Bentonville, Arkansas, then a rural community, Mortensen attended the Univer- sity of Arkansas and majored in fashion merchandising, thanks to her father. Mortensen says it was her dad who pushed her to explore other options besides becoming a teacher—a com- mon career goal for women in the 1960s and 1970s. Because she had always liked fashion and had even made some of her own clothes growing up, she picked fashion merchandising. She graduated and started her first job in May 1977, in the management training pro- gram at Sanger-Harris in Dallas, then owned by Federated Department Stores. She stayed there for eight years, working her way up to become a buyer for fashion accessories. In 1985, Mortensen got a job with another Dallas-area company, Zale Corp., and began buying for the more upscale Bailey Banks & Biddle chain, which at the time was part of Zale. The job served her well in two areas. First, it taught her the fundamentals of fine jewelry, a business she would come to love and work in almost exclusively for the next 25-plus years. Secondly, it would teach her how to grapple with a constant in both retail and life—change. Alittle more than a year after Mortensen came on board, the Zale and Lipshy families gave up their months-long fight to fend off an acquisition, agreeing in November 1986 to sell the business toToron- to-based chain Peoples Jewellers and Swarovski International Holdings based in Zurich, which partnered in order to push the deal through. Zale Corp. transitioned from being a family-owned business, as it had been since its founding in 1924, to one controlled by two large, foreign entities. Mortensen also moved around within Zale. After her start with Bailey, Banks & Biddle, she did buying stints for the Zales and Gor- don’s Jewelers brands, and then moved back to finish out her time as a senior buyer in bridal at Bailey, Banks & Biddle. She reflects: “I think [at Zale]—more than any time in my career —I learned to manage change because we went through so much [of it]. There is one thing you can always be sure of, and that is change.” Mortensen’s next move was to catalog retailer Service Merchandise. Then in June 2002, she took a job with her hometown retailer,Walmart, overseeing the merchandising strategy for jewelry and watches. Both Dave Meleski, president of Richline Group, and John Hall, a consultant to the industry with U.K.- based Sustainable & Responsible Solu- tions, got to know Mortensen when she was working at Walmart. At the time, Meleski was CEO ofAurafin (which was purchased by Berkshire Hathaway and merged with Bel-Oro International to form Richline in 2007) and Hall was working on external affairs and responsible business practices for RioTinto’s diamond business. Mortensen, Meleski, and Hall worked together on a new line of responsibly sourced jewelry for Walmart called “Love, Earth.” Each piece in the line came with a number the buyer could enter online to trace it from a Rio Tinto mine through Aurafin manufacturing to the store itself. Walmart introduced Love, Earth in 2008, just before the Respon- sible Jewellery Council launched its certification system (in fact, Mortensen says a lot of the work they did atWalmart with their NGO partners and consultants was presented to the RJC to consider in building its certification standards).That same year, De Beers launched Forevermark inAsia (the brand didn’t come to the U.S. until 2011). Hall calls the Love, Earth project “pioneering,” noting that it was the first time a mine-to-market tracing program had been done at any sort of scale and sold at mass-market prices. Basically they were making it up as they went along, he says, and part of what made it work was Mortensen’s preparedness to tackle something different and her nothing-is-impossible attitude. “If Pam hadn’t had that kind of mindset, it wouldn’t have been possible,” he says. “Whenever you are pushing the envelope, what- ever it is, you need to have that mindset. And that’s another thing I admire about her.” MODERN TIMES Today, Mortensen is the senior vice president and general mer- chandise manager for jewelry, watches and fashion accessories at “Change is inevitable and if you can’t learn to adjust, you’re not going to survive.” – Pam Mortensen Of all she has accomplished, Pam Mortensen says her biggest point of pride is her family. Pictured here are her sons Jonathan (left), an officer in U.S. Cyber Command, and Jeremy, who will graduate from West Point in May. Mortensen, seated far left in the black dress, with her J.C. Penney family at the 2015 Women's Jewelry Association gala, where she received the Lifetime Achievement Award. Continued on page 30