Over 50 years of Lacom

Two young men with itchy feet, Gerbrand (Ger) Luttik and Joost de Lange, find each other around 1970 in a shared urge for adventurous ways of earning a living. Boundary-pushing journeys take them deep into the interior of a West Africa that is still raw and nearly impassable.

Travelling on a shoestring, they reach the far corners of countries such as Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso (then still Upper Volta), Ghana and Mali. In countless villages and towns they keep discovering storehouses full of authentic wooden statues, masks, stools, gates, doors and other kinds of art objects in the form of jewellery and everyday utensils.

The objects are made for local use, mainly for tribal customs. They visit the places of production, where the artists, the craftsmen, usually bring the most beautiful creations into being with simple tools. All of it for traditional ceremonies or ritual dances, and otherwise simply for practical, everyday household purposes.

In West Africa especially, the craft of working wood, copper, bronze, glass and silver has been lively and flourishing since time immemorial. Within the tribes the craftsmanship is passed on expertly from generation to generation, from father to son, within families of repute.

Ger and Joost are received with open arms and see opportunities.

The first encounters feel so good that they decide without hesitation to take action straight away. In several places a hefty quantity of African art is bought in total.

Looking back in 2019, Ger says: “We came back to the Netherlands from that first trip completely broke”.

The two pioneers go through flourishing years: many journeys, with adventures; they keep buying, earning a good living and building a name.
Networks are built and expanded. In the world of authentic African art, “La Perle d’Afrique” is a household name. And customers queue up.

Yet in 1984 they part ways.

Ger, the specialist par excellence in the field of African art, leaves the Trademart and takes the name “La Perle d’Afrique” with him. He continues to develop, with even more passion, in the world of old and new African art. To this day he is known as a renowned specialist, a reference.

Joost de Lange carries on the business at the familiar Trademart. He continues under the name “Lacom”, a contraction of his family name Lange and Company.

Joost the traveller now also opens up new sourcing territories in India, Nepal and Thailand. He becomes interested in ethnic jewellery in particular, partly silver and natural stone. He has a nose for trends. In the best places he finds the right contacts, so that many shipments of colourful fantasy jewellery made of bone, bronze, copper, horn and glass find their way to Lacom Utrecht. And there the customers fall over each other to keep up the pace. Jewellery shops are booming in the busy shopping streets.

It is still the time of “the one-eyed man is king”, so little competition! Joost is sitting pretty. Lacom is a reference!

After ten flourishing years Joost has had enough. He calls it a day; it is time for new adventures. At the end of 1994 he sells the business to one of his customers: Chris van Son.

Someone with a hobby-like festival market stall. Not a big customer, but someone with whom a bond has grown through shared interests.
Conversations soon turned to development work in Africa, expeditions across the Sahara in cars bought to be sold on, and certainly also the peculiarities of other cultures.

The new owner still knows absolutely nothing about what, how, where, when and under which conditions which products can be imported. Until then Van Son has a permanent job as a lecturer in business economics at a university of applied sciences. The market stall can be seen as a modest sideline; moreover he has just become a father and the children are still a long way from school age.

And how familiar is he with the products? Can he tell iron from silver and zirconia from diamond? As the sudden owner of Lacom, are you not entirely at the mercy of the gods?

That is how boldly and almost unconditionally the spark can jump across. Or: naivety is a good counsellor.

According to Joost it will all work out fine. The work as an importer can be combined perfectly with the work as a lecturer, and Van Son can simply remain the father of the two young children.

Joost even says: “This is made for you! If your experience in Africa lets you find your way there, you will find your way in Asia too. Teaching gives you enough time and room to travel and to be in the showroom on Mondays. There is also expert and reliable staff, so you will be trained in properly. Bookkeeping should be no problem for you either; the rest you will pick up as you go along!”

Joost is convincing. The transfer is sealed as of the beginning of 1995.

Joost hands over the password of the accounting software along with the key to the business, and is gone: he emigrates to Africa, to his beloved Togo. He has lived in Baguida, on the coast, ever since.

The new owner’s first action: where is the light switch in the showroom? A telling search… A period of learning the ropes.

Around 1994 the jewellery trade is in a slump. Economically things are not looking good: there is high unemployment, there are cutbacks, and the jewellery trade is the first to feel it. It is also the time when people wear scarves rather than jewellery. Good to know: apparently it is one or the other! The staff are very willing to train the new owner and to acquaint him with the many rules of the game: it is one big school of learning!

Is there a target group, how to approach customers, what about defective products, colours per season, orders, where to buy what; what about discounts, competitors, VAT, etc.

Travelling in Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, India, Thailand and Nepal, everything goes exceptionally well. Travelling and discovering the right business addresses soon prove to be the most interesting and pleasant sides of the work.

Slowly but surely, through trial and error, all the parts of the whole become clearer; rhythms, consistency and balance emerge in the running of the business! There is challenge and enjoyment, with pleasant contacts.

It is 1 February 2004. A second showroom is opened, this time at the Trademart in Brussels. A building with a somewhat more chic and cosmopolitan feel than the Trademart in Utrecht. It is a pleasure to be able to open a showroom there without too much preparation. The preparations consist mainly of moving the surplus stock from the Trademart Utrecht showroom and from the garage in Rotterdam to the new little showroom in the Trademart Brussels, at the foot of the Atomium.

At that moment, demand for showrooms there exceeds supply.

This coincides with the end of the teaching job. The focus is now entirely on the business.
It turns out well! Out of nowhere, customers come walking in. There is footfall from all over Belgium, in very small doses at first, but slowly but surely a customer base emerges that grows and keeps coming back. It exceeds expectations!

So in Belgium too there turns out to be demand for the typical Lacom jewellery: ethnic in flavour, somewhat striking to eccentric, and with the strength of sharp pricing, certainly compared with the competition.

Capable staff are recruited, the customer base grows quickly, the name “Lacom” becomes known, and before long the business moves to a larger showroom.

A takeover of an existing business on 1 January 2008!
Lacom digs deep and buys, in Utrecht, the larger Gem Import/Export, also located on the sixth floor. That leaves Lacom with one competitor fewer. Gem Imp/Exp, also founded around 1975 and specialised in silver without natural stone, enjoys great name recognition with a prominent market share at the Trademart.

It means an addition to Lacom’s range, where until then the emphasis had been exclusively on silver with natural stone. This brings economies of scale, interesting new challenges lie ahead, and the competitive position has become stronger. Standing still would have meant going backwards. Better, too, to take over a business than to be taken over, or: eating beats being eaten..

Growing turbulence.

The takeover contract is signed! The shares of Gem have come into the hands of Lacom bv for what was, at the time, a reasonable sum.
It is the end of 2008. And then it happens!

The ink on the takeover contract is barely dry when a worldwide crisis breaks out, with far-reaching consequences in every layer of society. The jewellery sector in the luxury segment runs into heavy weather, and suddenly things look bleak for Lacom’s businesses (3)! First, in 2009, the “financial crisis” erupts, followed as a consequence by a prolonged “economic crisis”. A great financial and economic hurricane rages across the world. Banks collapse, consumer spending falls away, investment declines, companies go bankrupt, unemployment rises; stock markets and housing markets crash, there is little confidence in the future.

For the “accessories” trade, including silver, natural stone and fantasy jewellery, the consequences are overwhelming.

The price of silver shoots up, as investors flee from stock market investments into hard precious metals. Importing silver jewellery becomes unaffordable.

Consumers stop buying luxury items.

The consequences for the jewellery and accessories trade are disastrous. In a short time, demand for jewellery at Gem and Lacom plummets! At the same time another revolution is taking place. The new phenomenon of web shops begins to take root at an accelerating pace. Ever more professionally developed webshops spring up like mushrooms in every layer of society. In import and wholesale circles too, and certainly in retail. It soon looks as though the chances of survival in the longer term are slim unless the switch from physical to digital is set in motion quickly and energetically.

“Everything is going online!”

The doom to be expected looks as follows:

• Retailers buy online from importers; physical visits are a thing of the past.
• Retailers import themselves from the producing countries China and India; even consumers buy directly from China.
• Retailers visit international trade fairs in Italy, France, Germany; the wholesaler is skipped.
• Demand for “brands” increases, people look for certainty; demand for “free-style” jewellery decreases.

What remains of the old importer, the wholesaler in the logistics chain?

What remains of the trade centres, such as the Trademarts, in the sector?

Which companies will go under, and where can the right changes be implemented successfully?

The crisis begins in 2009. The years that follow are marked by depression, with major rounds of cutbacks, unemployment, stock market crises, sinking markets such as the housing market. The consequences are visible and tangible for everyone.

The shopping streets are laid waste. Many retailers go under. For the small one-man businesses in particular there is no saving them, certainly when the transition to a webshop proves a step too far.

Countless jewellery-related shops collapse. It is as if an entire generation is falling over: started in the ’70s, years of prosperity, and now, getting on in years, no longer able to turn the tide. For many “it is fine this way”.

At the same time a generation of mostly young entrepreneurs rises who know how to embrace precisely the advantages of the webshop. The impact of the crisis and the rise of webshops have major consequences for the big trade centres in European countries. Fewer retailers coming in, and one import and wholesale business after another closes its doors.

Between 2010 and 2023 the world of trade has been turned upside down in many respects. Consumer behaviour has changed, the old structures of trade have been abandoned, and with them the occupancy of the Trademart has correspondingly fallen sharply. Of the six fully occupied floors of old, three are still partly occupied in 2022. The annual decline in the number of exhibitors since 2009 is only halted in 2022. For the year 2023 a few new exhibitors have signed up again, new showrooms are being fitted out again..

In ’23 it is of course still too early to speak of a turnaround. That turnaround never came: after the Retailbeurs of autumn 2025, the Jaarbeurs ends the permanent showrooms in the Beatrixgebouw.

From early 2020 the usual trips to the Far East are impossible because of the worldwide developments around the coronavirus. In the Netherlands and Belgium, retail sales are shut down for agonisingly long periods.

Several retailers close their business.

Others switch, as best they can, to running a webshop. Many manage to keep their sales going in all sorts of creative ways: for a long time nothing is certain!

But with some support from the government, a dose of perseverance and the necessary creativity, the vast majority of Lacom’s customer base turns out to survive the crisis.

Drawing the customer to the showroom and tempting them with ever new designs that arouse interest, large stocks and reasonable prices proves, for now, to work. There are few suppliers who go about it the same way. Is Lacom back to square one: the one-eyed man in the land of the blind?

We at Lacom keep working on it.

We prefer the beautiful handcrafted products from India to the soulless container products from China; we go for a showroom in which the customer can imagine themselves in another world for a while; where the customer is surprised by an offering of eye-catching silver and natural stone jewellery and ethnic art. Jewellery with character, with expression, with pizzazz, a touch eccentric for one and ethnic for another.

Situated in the middle of two neighbouring countries, with the possibility of stocking an entire shop with saleable jewellery in a short time. Where browsing, picking and choosing remains a pleasure, with the joy of coming home with a bundle of surprises for the customer.
The showroom as an inexhaustible source of beautiful jewels: can that last?

At the end of 2025 the curtain falls on the permanent showrooms on the second floor of the Trademart Utrecht. After 51 years in the Beatrixgebouw, Lacom moves to the World Fashion Center in Amsterdam. The showroom at the Trademart Brussels stays.

And the webshop that Lacom deliberately did not start during the crisis years? It arrived after all in 2026, run in-house: lacomgems.com. A place to browse a selection of the collection at leisure, from several angles. Suddenly new items catch the eye again! Retailers from all over Europe can now find their way to this digital showroom, to order directly or to prepare for their visit to the physical showroom.

Because seeing is buying remains the starting point. Anyone who already knows the way to Amsterdam or Brussels is still as welcome as ever. Only the way has become shorter, and contact with customers even more direct. A WhatsApp message, an email, a phone call: you get a reply, and quickly. Besides the regular opening days, an appointment is easily made. And it catches on!

The range has grown along with it. Anyone who wants their own design in silver, a logo, a city crest, a sketch, has it made at Lacom: our partners in Asia first draw it out and then make it by hand. And at the other end, the unique pieces: one stone, one shape of its own, never two the same. They are in the catalogue to look at, but only go over the counter. Some things you simply have to see in real life. It is where it all began over fifty years ago: masks and statues, each one unique. Seeing is buying.

Something else has changed. For over thirty years Lacom was a true one-man business, with Chris van Son as the face of Lacom for customers and exporters alike. Since 2026 his son Bart has been working alongside him in the Amsterdam showroom every Monday, and on top of that runs the digital side: the webshop, the site, the photos, the emails.

What was that about sparks jumping across?

From Ger and Joost to Jan Burges, from Joost to a market stall holder who could not yet tell iron from silver. And now from father to son. Naivety is a good counsellor, a second generation a better one?