In the Eye of the Beholder

In the picking world we see a lot of people's stuff. A LOT. I've only been doing this for a few years but I'll try to lay down an estimate of how many items I see on a regular basis. One of my haunts is ShopGoodwill. This is where I first started picking and where I did a lot of my brain training.

Every weekday my local Goodwill posts a minimum of 400 new items. And I look at Every. Single. One. Let's do some math here... 400 items a day @ 5 days a week is 2000 items a week or 8000 items a month.

This does not include all the items I see at thrift stores or estate sales. Suffice it to say I see at least 10,000 items a month. You can see how after 6-12 months it would be fairly easy to identify the common from the unusual.

Each time I spot something new, I go to eBay and see what people are asking for it. In the early days I spent hours doing this, looking up items every few minutes. Now I look up mystery items maybe once or twice a day. After a year or two you develop an instinctive radar for the odd man out.

This is an important part of picking. You can't always buy the stuff you know. You have to be looking for new trends and new categories to branch into, otherwise you risk stagnation. So it's helpful to have "oddball" radar. Often I'm attracted to an odd item just because I want to learn more about it. For a lot of pickers this is part of the excitement -- finding a weird object and figuring out what it is.

The great part about this business is that everyone's radar is different and often tickled by different things. I don't have the same mental catalog that the next guy does. Some things slip by my radar and other things slip by theirs. This is what makes an estate auction exciting... in real time you find out how committed the other bidders are to an item you want.

And sometimes you get a great item for cheap. In short, it slipped through everyone else's radar. Or the right bidders just weren't participating that day. Which is how I ended up with this:

Clearly most of the buyers looked at this and saw a kinda ugly pottery item. I had never seen one of these before but I know from my Etsy store that people like figural planters and sometimes they're attracted to ugly. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.

No one else would bid on it -- so I did. I bid $5. No one else even countered. I figured at that price surely I could make a modest profit on it.

Once I got it home I started researching. The only similar objects I could find were very old. Like 1800's old. And I was seeing some really high prices for those things. After running the info past hubby, we agreed that we needed an expert opinion. For $10 you can submit photos to ValueMyStuff.com and a pro will give you an appraisal. We decided to splurge and get one.

Our appraisal came back with the assessment that this is an 1870s era majolica item, likely made by Minton. Minton is probably the most collectible maker of majolica from this time period. Even with an old repaired leg, they gave this piece a $1000 insurance value.

Now obviously we didn't sell it for that! The retail value is closer to $500 and even that depends on how determined buyers are to have it. Given our low cost, we opted to go for the quick sale and post it for $299. After a couple of price tweaks we eventually got $275.

Lest you think that picking is all about big profit, I keep a silver bowl in my house as a humble reminder of bad radar. From the photos I was pretty sure it was an antique silver bowl. Unfortunately when I got it home there was a sticker underneath for Target, dated 2003. I keep it just to make sure I don't get cocky :)

Shabby Chic Polishing Technique for Vintage Silver

Vintage silver is a tricky beast for sellers. Some folks like their silver to have that aged look, others want it shiny like the day it left the factory. When you find a nice silver piece in the wild... it doesn't always look so nice. It might have spotty or weird looking tarnish. I've come up with a way of dealing with this dilemma that hopefully satisfies both camps.

I call it "shabby chic polishing"...

So here's an item we got in a box lot from Goodwill. It's a creamer made by Wallace in their popular "Baroque" pattern with pretty heavy tarnish.

This is a bit too dark to qualify for tastefully aged, so I'm going to give it my shabby chic treatment. The key to this strategy is to polish only the smooth surfaces. We're going to leave the fancy scrolled areas alone. This way I can bring out the shine but still leave some character.

Here's a photo of the same creamer with silver polish on it. You don't have to let it dry like I did, that just made the polish easier to see in the photo. Essentially you want to clean the white areas with your silver polish. Try to avoid buffing the areas with no polish - although you'll probably cross into them a bit. It's not important to be precise here, so don't fret if that happens.

Once it's clean your creamer should look like this one. You can see in this photo that the center section is much lighter while the handle/feet/rim are still dark. Now it still has some of that aged character that some vintage buyers like while still looking "clean" to the other buyers.

Here's a final photo for the actual listing which shows you how shiny and reflective the cleaned surfaces are now. It's basically a mirror, which is why the photos are taken outside instead of in a messy office!

I use Wright's Silver Cream for heavy tarnish situations, we also have Weiman's Silver Polish for light duty work. When polishing you need to wash and towel dry afterwards. Washing removes polish residue (that white stuff) and if you don't towel dry you'll leave water spots that over time turn into more ugly spotty tarnish. Also please don't use the aluminum foil dip method to clean silver, it can cause permanent damage.

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What's It Worth? Using eBay to Price / Value Your Vintage Finds!

I just recently created an infographic for a process I use a lot. When you sell vintage items, you need to figure out what price to put on them. Sometimes you can search on Google and see what other people are charging. Other times there just aren't similar items out there to find. I had this problem a lot when I first started.

Eventually I figured out how to get some of this information from eBay. Here's the graphic I created that shows how to do this:

Step One: type in your search and hit the "Search" button. Step Two: Click "Sold Listings" on the bottom left menu. The page will reload and eBay will show you sold listings instead of current listings. You can get a pretty good idea of what people are willing to pay based on these sales.

So what can you do if there are no matches in current or sold listings? Well you can try searching for a more generic version of the item you want to sell. That's not always a good option. In this situation, comparing to other Pyrex patterns wouldn't be useful information.

When I strike out on eBay I turn to Worthpoint. This is a paid service so it's probably not worthwhile for the casual eBay seller. The cost is about $20 a month. In return you get access to several years worth of price information from eBay and other online auction sites. You can find most products in their database of 300 million records.

The final option if neither of these work for you, go with your gut. What would you pay for this piece if you wanted one for yourself? Ask a few friends what they would pay if you like and form a consensus. In my family we tend to be pretty frugal. I figure if I'm willing to pay $50 for something, odds are pretty good that other shoppers would too!

Just be forewarned - if you are an avid collector your opinion probably isn't terribly valid. Collectors have a tendency to significantly overvalue their collection based on what they paid, not on what the current market will bear.