Good buying is the key
Many antiques dealers mistake taking money with making money. Trudging expensively from fair to fair with the same stock. An antiques fair is a great place to buy but increasingly a very expensive place, goods tend to all gravitate to a certain type and price point, you have little recourse if any item wrong of damaged (all our website goods are guaranteed). We are constantly keeping an eye on descriptions and tickets in the shop and if wrong we correct them, staff having over 100 years of experience in the trade.
The cost of particularly the large antiques fairs are huge both for selling and buying many times a trade buyer with early entry has costs of £200 before buying a thing. More is further afield with hotels etc as all have early starts.
We as dealers are always searching for the crock at the end of the rainbow, as fresh to the market goods always sell rapidly.
At Top Banana Antiques a high proportion of antiques we sell are sourced from often international buying trips and many from private calls and house clearance at Top Banana.
From our basement a Godwin trolley sold for £15 would guess value £50,000 a silver Georg Jensen jug for £4800 online price £12 to £20,0000. A Thomas Hope bench £3000 finally ended up a smart London fair £450,000, a golf club £7 sold for £2000, and millions of every day trading profits, a circular pot cupboard at time £850 sold for £50, Staffordshire cows £250 sold for £50. We all missed these and of course there will be many we never heard about. This year 3 cases of silver spoons from 2 new dealers sold as plate for a fiver each, and as I say only what we hear about.
With the private buying and newer to business dealers who are not influenced by literally market forces, goods are sold with a profit rather than the so called worth, and so our dealers want to sell and turnover their stock quickly, as space needed for the next lot.
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