Foster & Lee Jewelers

Foster & Lee Jewelers has been a fixture in Oviedo since the early 1990s, founded in 1991 by Jimmiesue Foster and Mike Lee, whose combined experience in the jewelry trade now runs well past four decades. The store operates out of a suite on Winter Springs Boulevard and focuses heavily on diamond engagement rings and certified loose diamonds, a category where the founders lean on their own stated philosophy that the most important thing they sell is their reputation, rather than pushing volume through unfamiliar or uncertified stones. Beyond engagement and bridal jewelry, the shop handles custom design work for customers who want a piece built from scratch rather than chosen off a case, along with a full slate of repair services including jewelry repair, watch repair, engraving, and pearl restringing, services that have become harder to find locally as more jewelry shopping has shifted toward big online retailers with no repair counter at all. The store carries several established designer lines, among them Benchmark, Romance, Triton, and Imperial Pearl, giving customers recognizable branded options alongside the custom and one-of-a-kind pieces the shop is known for. To make higher ticket purchases more manageable, Foster & Lee offers financing through Synchrony as well as in-house layaway programs, a practical touch for a category of retail where a single purchase, particularly an engagement ring, can represent a significant financial commitment for a customer. The business remains independently owned by its founders, and while it has grown to include a second location at Mashpee Commons on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, the Oviedo store remains the original location and the one most closely tied to the founders’ roots in Central Florida. That kind of longevity, more than three decades in the same general area of Oviedo, is relatively rare in independent jewelry retail, a sector where family-owned shops have increasingly given way to national chains and online-only sellers. For Oviedo area customers, having a locally owned jeweler with real repair capability and custom design experience, rather than having to ship a ring out of state for resizing or repair, is a meaningful convenience, and the shop’s decades of continuous operation in the same community suggest a level of trust built up over multiple generations of customers coming back for anniversaries, repairs, and new pieces alike. Independent jewelers of this vintage also tend to hold onto institutional knowledge that a rotating chain-store staff simply cannot match, remembering a customer’s ring size or a family’s preferred settings from one visit to the next, and being able to speak plainly about a stone’s actual quality and value rather than steering every conversation toward whatever piece carries the best margin that quarter. That kind of straightforward, relationship-based approach to jewelry retail is a large part of what has kept Foster & Lee a trusted name in Oviedo for more than thirty years running.