Antiques market or flea market clues in the title.
Good Antiques Come from Good Antiques Shops
We all dream of finding a Picasso at a flea market for £10.
And, to be fair, it does occasionally happen. So does winning the lottery, but neither is really a sound business plan.
The reality is that good antiques usually come from good antiques shops.
At the very top end of the trade, a dealer may be spending hundreds of thousands of pounds — sometimes far more — on stock every year. When everything is expensive, margins can become surprisingly tight.
The middle ground is often a rather happier place.
A good dealer spending thousands on stock, rather than millions, can still buy interesting, quality pieces and leave enough room to make a sensible profit without having to charge the earth. That is where the customer can often find real value.
At Top Banana, we have sold many, many bargains over the years. Not because we did not know what we had — we rather hope we would have gone out of business by now if that were the case — but because buying well gives you options.
You can make a fair profit and still offer the customer something at a genuinely sensible price.
And there is another advantage. A good antiques shop has already done much of the hard work. We have looked through the auctions, fairs, markets, collections and houses. We have bought some excellent things and, on occasion, some things we have probably looked at later and wondered what on earth we were thinking.
That is antiques.
But the point remains: you do not have to find a £10 Picasso to buy a bargain.
Sometimes the best place to find good antiques at sensible prices is exactly where you would expect them to be.
In a good antiques shop.
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