Our Story

Family Owned. Bakersfield Grown. Since 1994.

Meet The Owners

Armando & Natalia Elizalde

Elizalde Jewelers began with a simple belief: when someone trusts you enough to buy something as valuable and personal as gold, you should give them complete confidence in what they are buying.

That belief has guided our family for more than 30 years.

What started as a small jewelry shop inside Mercado Latino in Bakersfield has grown into a family business of more than 40 people, four professional jewelers, a dedicated watch team, and one of the largest selections of gold jewelry in the area.

Through all that growth, we are still in the same place where our story began.

Bakersfield is home.

Our Story

Our story starts with Armando and Natalia Elizalde.
Armando grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he learned the jewelry trade as a teenager. Jewelry began as a way to make a living, but over time, working with gold, learning the craft, and connecting with customers became something much more important to him.
After moving to California, Armando worked as a salesman and jeweler at a small jewelry store in Bakersfield. He had a natural ability to connect with people. Customers regularly assumed the young man helping them was the owner, even though he was only in his early twenties.
Eventually, with Natalia by his side and the support of the jewelers and connections he had made throughout his life, Armando decided to build something of his own.
In 1994, Armando and Natalia opened Elizalde Jewelers inside Mercado Latino, just off Edison Highway in Bakersfield, California.
It was small.
The original shop had inexpensive glass display cases and a modest selection made up largely of silver jewelry. Armando and Natalia handled everything themselves.
Within a year, those same cases and walls were filling with 14K gold.
More than three decades later, that original location is still our home.
Built On Trust

Building the business meant earning the trust of Bakersfield one customer at a time.
Armando approached jewelry differently. He focused heavily on gold, transparency, craftsmanship, and personal service.
Customers could understand what they were paying for. Gold was sold by weight with transparency around the price of the metal and the labor involved in making the piece. If someone could not find exactly what they wanted, our jewelers could create it.
That philosophy became one of the foundations of Elizalde Jewelers.
We want you to know what you are buying. We want you to understand its value. Most importantly, we want you to feel confident coming back to us years later.
Every gold jewelry piece we sell is genuine solid gold and never plated, backed by our lifetime authenticity guarantee.
Trust took decades to build, and protecting it remains one of our greatest responsibilities.
Made By Real Jewelers

Craftsmanship has been part of our family story since the beginning.
We currently have four professional jewelers working on site with more than 50 years of combined experience. Some of the craftsmen who helped teach Armando the jewelry trade when he was young in Guadalajara now work alongside our family at Elizalde Jewelers today.
That is something we are incredibly proud of.
Our jewelers size rings, restore worn jewelry, perform gold repairs, create wedding bands, make custom pieces, and bring old jewelry back to life.
Many of our personalized gold name pieces are still created using traditional bench jewelry techniques. A jeweler begins with gold, carefully forms and cuts the name by hand, then finishes and polishes the piece until it is ready to wear.
Every name has a person behind it.
Every ring that needs sizing is handled by a jeweler.
Every repair has someone at the bench examining the piece and deciding how to properly bring it back to life.
Because our jewelers work on site, many jewelry repair services can be completed remarkably quickly, with certain repairs finished within the same hour.
It is one of the reasons jewelry repair in Bakersfield has become such an important part of what we do.
Taking Elizalde Jewelers Online

For most of our history, shopping with us meant coming to Bakersfield.
Over the years, we started noticing how many customers were driving from other cities and even other states because they had trouble finding the same selection of gold jewelry closer to home.
A lot of them told us the same thing. They wanted a place with a large selection of real gold where pricing was straightforward and they felt comfortable with the people selling it.
In 2025, we finally brought Elizalde Jewelers online.
The goal was simple. We wanted someone anywhere in the United States to be able to shop our gold selection without having to drive all the way to Bakersfield.
The website is new compared with the rest of the business. The people behind it are not.
The orders placed online are being handled by the same family and team that our local customers have been coming to for decades.

Scroll down

And Then There Are the Watches

We should probably mention that we really like watches.

There is a dedicated group on our team that handles the watch side of Elizalde Jewelers, and they are genuine watch nerds.

They know the collections, movements, specifications, history, and usually the reference numbers without having to look them up.

Watches have become an important part of our store because the people working with them actually enjoy them. Whether someone is looking for their first good watch or already has a collection at home, we want them talking to someone who understands why the little details matter.