The commercials for Little John’s Derby Jewelry are funnier than the late-night sitcom reruns they interrupt. The campy spots are full of highly questionable acting — and then there is “Little John” himself. At 108 pounds and a hair taller than five feet, John Tan somehow stands out. One of his most popular spots, shot a couple of years ago, features a cop, a construction worker, a cowboy, and a Native American singing, to the melody of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.”: “We’re going to Little John’s today/To take our jewelry in and get our cash today/You will get a good deal/And you get paid for real/So bring it to Little John.”
The camera cuts to an impeccably dressed Tan leaning on a desk in an office. He is in a brown dress shirt and a tailored gray suit. Tan wears brown a lot because the color makes a person look warmer, which he says is something he read in the 1980s about Ronald Reagan. In fact, Tan could be channeling the Gipper in the “Y.M.C.A.” clip. In the commercial, Tan has a presidential air about him as he explains in a serious tone that gold is trading at “an awesome” $1,500 an ounce, “but not for long. Now is the time to sell your unwanted jewelry.” The ad ends with Tan dancing in front of his jewelry store with the gaudy group. It is an odd juxtaposition, the diminutive jewelry store owner and the large, colorful singers. It is like a sight gag out of an old Hollywood movie. Since a fan uploaded the clip to YouTube in 2011 it has garnered more than 10,000 views. How many people usually go out of their way to watch a commercial?
Little John’s Derby Jewelry is in a small storefront catty-corner to Churchill Downs at Fourth Street and Central Avenue. Large display cases full of neatly aligned jewelry dominate the front room. One case contains nothing but gold crosses, another rows of diamonds rings, and so on. There are three to seven employees working in the store at various times, and some of them, including security guard Shawn Grant, carry guns. Tan, 49, sits behind a big desk, merchandise and papers hiding its surface. Tan’s 24-year-old son, Johnny, waits on customers. Bring jewelry in and the staff will test the quality of the gold and make an offer. When a reporter for Louisville Magazine was at Little John’s, a woman brought in a gold chain and walked out 20 minutes later with five $100 bills. During the last Derby Festival miniMarathon, runners received a map of landmarks they would pass. Little John’s was included on the list along with Churchill Downs and Wagner’s Pharmacy. Tan says tourists from all over the world come to visit. Many of them have discovered his commercials on the Internet.
Other Little John TV extravaganzas include a “Richie Rich” ad, in which a young guy asks his mother, “Mom, what are we going to do with all this unwanted jewelry?” “Sell it to Little John, of course,” Mom replies. This one ran when gold peaked at $1,900 an ounce two years ago. The latest TV ad, which ran a year or so ago, featured an imitation Marilyn Monroe with a backdrop of a broken-down car on a dusty road. She sings, with lyrics written on the screen, “Diamond/They are a girls (sic) best freind (sic)/but now he’s gone and left me/And I gotta sell them/To Little John/Dont (sic) need a pawn/I get my cash today.”
All of these wacky advertisements — including the music and lyrics — sprang from the mind of Melissa Tan, 45, Little John’s wife of 25 years. “I never wanted to be writing commercials,” she says. “I’m just a take-control-type person. It needed to be done, so I did it. But it is kind of fun.” Melissa says she is writing all the time, on planes or during quiet moments in their Bullitt County home, where she works on the jewelry store’s paperwork. Melissa prefers to stay behind the scenes, never appearing in any of her own commercials and only making an appearance at the store to do payroll. But she is the one who insisted Little John’s start advertising five years ago. Tan didn’t want to do it. He had always depended on word of mouth and believed ads amounted to begging for business. But he changed his mind for practical reasons, after the store started getting competition from companies that allowed customers to sell jewelry through the mail.
“The first commercial wasn’t funny,” Melissa says. “I just had a woman going to the mailbox, and then John came on. We came up with the slogan, ‘Don’t mail it, bring it in, and get your cash today.’ We wanted people to know they could get their cash immediately and not have to wait for the mail. It was pretty straightforward.” It was scheduled to run once, on a Friday at 4:30 p.m. on WDRB-41. Twenty seconds into the spot, people started calling the store. Twenty minutes later, they were walking through the door. “I’ve never seen anything so dramatic,” John declares. “It was like putting food coloring on an egg and watching it turn blue or green. It was that fast. From then on, it was on.”
For that first campaign, the couple had a $2,000-a-month ad budget that lasted two weeks. (A 30-second spot starts at about $600). The Tans were pleased with the uptick in business. For the second commercial, Melissa created the character of Super Goldman, a flying Superman knock-off who sings, “I’m Super Goldman/The fairest in the land/I’m taking you to/ Little John’s/Broken, bruised, or smashed/He pays you cash.”
Greg Terry, a 56-year-old retired Louisville Metro police officer and star of most Little John’s ads, played the cop in the “Y.M.C.A.” commercial and Super Goldman. Terry also appeared as Super Goldman in the 2011 Pegasus Parade and on a 2012 WAVE-3 telethon for victims of the Henryville, Indiana, tornado. “My granddaughter is six years old and she still thinks I can fly,” Terry says. “When I am at restaurants or out in public, sometimes people will point at me and say, ‘That’s the guy from the Little John’s commercials.’ It has made me kind of a local celebrity.” Terry met John and Melissa several years ago while investigating a robbery at the jewelry store. He befriended the couple and eventually started working security for them. After Melissa determined Terry could sing, the Tans cast him as an elf in a Christmas commercial. “Melissa said she liked the way I handled myself on camera,” Terry says. “After that, it became a regular thing. She is like some kind of creative genius. I always trust her, no matter how out-there the concept seems, because she makes it work.” Terry says his favorite commercial is a send-up of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” Dressed as Thriller-era Jackson, complete with Jheri-curl wig, Terry dances in front of Little John’s while Jefferson Tarc Bus, the local and now-defunct metal cover band, wails, “You can’t beat him/Little John’s can’t be defeated.”
A few years ago, Little John’s Derby Jewelry got some national shine when the Super Goldman ad ran on a local station an hour before the Super Bowl. Somehow, ESPN got ahold of the clip and sports announcers named it one of the best Super Bowl spots of the year. Tan has received even more notoriety. Admiring fans stop him all the time to have a picture taken with Little John. Kids act like they’re seeing a Disney character.
One Valentine’s Day, the Tans showed up without reservations to a packed Jeff Ruby’s Steakhouse. They were being turned away when a member of the staff recognized Little John. Ten minutes later, the Tans were sitting at a table. And Louisville isn’t the only place where he gets treated like Hollywood royalty. “I was on South Beach in Miami a few years ago,” Tan says. “I’ll never forget this. We had just been making commercials for a little over a year. There were these three rappers that were promoting their CD. One of them saw me walking down the street and said, ‘That looks like that guy from Kentucky.’ They had watched my commercials on YouTube. They were supposed to be signing autographs, and they wanted my autograph.
“I am little, and I have a characteristic look that you can remember. It’s like Jay Leno. I would recognize Jay Leno if he was across the street walking. He has a half-moon face,” Tan says. “Plus, when you’re small like me, you appear harmless. People are not afraid to come up and talk to you. When you’re approachable, you can communicate with more people and that helps a lot.”
A common question Tan gets from fans is about his nationality. Folks ask if he is Native American, Latino or Indian. He was born in the Philippines, the son of a mechanical engineer and a chemist. His family moved to America when Tan was three, settling in Chicago for a few years before moving to Jeffersonville, Indiana. Security guard Grant, a former Jeffersonville assistant fire chief, grew up with Tan. “We’ve been friends since high school. Their house was the place where everyone went to hang out,” Grant says. “It was a close-knit group, and I feel like John has re-created that at his store. Most of the people that work here are family or friends.”
Tan’s interest in jewelry began when he was 15, during a family visit to the Philippines. His aunt, who owned a jewelry store, took him to work with her. That’s when he started learning the basics of the business. It took him awhile to put the knowledge to use. His first sales job was at Cardinal Dodge on Dixie Highway. By all accounts, he was one of the worst used-car salesmen in the history of the industry. “John is sometimes honest to a fault,” his wife Melissa says. “That’s why he likes jewelry. Jewelry never lies; it’s worth what it’s worth. When we met 25 years ago, he was trying to sell me a car. He called me later and said, ‘I can’t sell you that car. It is no good.’ He promised he’d find me a good car. That’s how we started going out together. After we got married he was bringing home like $80 paychecks, because he wouldn’t sell cars to people if he didn’t think it was a good deal for them. I told him it was time for a career change.”
His knowledge of jewelry landed him in the pawn business, at a store called Value Pawn in Hikes Point. It is now a Cash America, a chain that took over while Tan still worked there. Weirdly, the store happened to be looking for a Filipino salesman because, prior to Tan, the star employee was a Filipino man named Rico, who had left to make a dollar more an hour some where else. The whole time Tan worked at the pawn shop, customers were constantly talking to him about Rico. He decided that he had to find out what made this guy so special. When they finally met, Tan understood. Rico had a way of making people feel comfortable.
Tan left Cash America after a year to work at Uncle Miltie’s Pawn Shop on Southern Parkway, which is owned by Melissa’s father, Loren Johnson. (Melissa grew up in Bullitt County around the pawn business, and her sister still owns a pawn shop there.) In 2005, John and Melissa decided to go into business for themselves. To fund their new venture, they took out a second mortgage on their house through a local loan company, getting close to $14,000 in seed money. John wanted to name the store Derby Jewelry, for its location, but Melissa thought his short stature would be good advertising for the business. They settled on Little John’s Derby Jewelry. “We don’t really have a lot of friends because he is always working. Even when we’re having dinner, we’re usually talking about work,” Melissa says.
Tan’s exit from Uncle Miltie’s caused some hard feelings with his father-in-law. Tan says Johnson was unhappy Little John’s was opening so close to Uncle Miltie’s. Johnson, for his part, claims he fired Tan in 1999 over a money dispute. They have not talked for eight years. “I don’t have anything good to say about John,” Johnson says. “I think he is a fence.” Tan and Melissa chose not to comment on Johnson, except to say that they don’t consider their store to be competition for Uncle Miltie’s. From the beginning, the Tans decided to focus exclusively on jewelry because prices are usually stable and they’d be able to turn around merchandise quicker than a pawn shop, which has to hold property for at least 60 days before selling it. As a jewelry dealer, Little John’s can resell an item or melt it down for the metal immediately.
Because the store doesn’t have to wait as long as a pawn shop to recoup its money, Little John’s usually offers customers a little more for their items than a traditional pawn shop. But business was so slow during the first seven months that Tan considered switching the store to a pawn shop. Business started to turn around once visitors to Churchill Downs realized the store was there. Now Little John’s offers a 10-day hold on property to customers who just need some quick cash before the ninth race. (Johnson likes to say this means Tan is operating a pawn shop without a license.) Tan says the store made a $125,000 profit in its first year and makes 20 times that now.
Tan also buys merchandise from estate sales, which has led him to getting involved with antique currency. He recently sold some Civil War-era Confederate bills for a few thousand dollars. Tan also tells a story about how he came across a gold cup that belonged to King Charles II of England. Tan sold it through the auction house Sotheby’s for $5,000, though he believes he should have gotten more for it, that he started the bidding too low. Some of Tan’s employees spend their time researching his finds to see how much they are worth. His biggest sale was a diamond ring that fetched $27,000.
In 2012, a producer from 44 Blue Productions, the company behind shows such as Family Court With Judge Penny, called about a reality show based on Little John’s Derby Jewelry, then filmed a 45-minute pilot last year. In addition to son Johnny, the Tans also have a 23-year-old daughter named Victoria, who has two children of her own. The pilot captures the family interacting with each other and with customers in ways similar to popular shows Pawn Stars on the History Channel and Hardcore Pawn on truTV. In one bit, a longtime customer named Carl tries to sell Little John a pillowcase full of useless old camcorders. Tan says the pilot tested well but got put on the back burner by the production company after the producer who commissioned it took a job elsewhere. (44 Blue Productions did not return an interview request.) “I might get a call any day that they want to do the show,” Tan says. “It would be life-changing for my family and friends. But even if we don’t make it to national television, we’re doing all right.”
Even if national television doesn’t come calling, there are still the Little John’s commercials. The Tans have shot eight so far, but not all of them have aired. Melissa still writes the majority of Little John ad campaigns, but John has also worked with local stations to produce several spots without her. The latest, “Too Much,” is on WBNA-21 and features the return of Super Goldman. The premise is that Little John just has too much stuff, that he needs customers to help him get rid of it. The spot runs mainly during Deadbeat: Kentuckiana Child Support Court, a 30-minute legal program that began airing nightly in June and takes viewers inside Jefferson County Family Court, where judges Sean Delahanty and Erica Lee Williams preside over child-support cases.
Melissa is getting into local politics, currently working on her first non-Little John ad. But her husband need not worry. She also has a few new Derby Jewelry ideas, one of which features Tan dressed up as a cowboy, rescuing someone from a train track with a bomb attached to it. The tagline: Little John is blowing up high prices.
“I kind of do my commercials like a movie,” Melissa says. “It’s not just someone talking; there is a story. We have a friend that has been begging to be in one of our ads for a while, so I’ll probably find something for him. The funny thing is that we don’t really need to advertise as much anymore. Everybody knows who Little John is.”
Written by Michael Jones, images courtesy of Aaron Kingsbury
This article appears in the September issue of Louisville Magazine. To subscribe to Louisville Magazine, click here.
