Why Vintage?

 


Well, why not?! Here’s five reasons why it’s a great choice for any home!

1. Uniqueness

   Most vintage items are singular finds. Each vintage item has lived a separate life, and because of that, most of the time, even if it was mass produced at some point, it’s unique circumstances have made it one of a kind. When adding vintage to a space, you’re adding an element that can’t be replicated easily. These add interest and depth to a space, as well as telling a story.  This is especially true with family heirlooms, things acquired in places that are special to us, or pieces that were just lucky finds.

2. Quality 

In a throwaway society, quality is available, but it is not always accessible on the average budget. Common things used to be built to last and to be enjoyed for many years and often many generations. Because these items are made this way, vintage is easy to maintain- and sometimes even gets better with age

3. Good for the planet

This seems like a no-brainer but it’s a big deal. The less demand for new items, the fewer resources used in manufacturing and transporting them. The less disposable goods we use, the less goes into landfills. That’s good for all of us, and future generations.

4. Fun to shop for

With sites like eBay and Etsy and Chairish and so many more, it’s easy to look for very specific pieces and find something that exactly fits the bill. The range in pricing also makes certain styles much more accessible for whatever budget you dealing with. If you enjoy shopping in person, what could be more fun than digging through local antique malls and flea markets and eclectic shops with vintage inventory? And then there’s the thrill of finding just the perfect thing- pure adrenaline! 

5. Supporting small businesses 

This is definitely another feel good aspect of purchasing vintage. Most businesses selling vintage are small businesses, run by a family or an individual. If you go the thrift store route, a lot of those support nonprofits. Your purchase makes a much larger impact for these sellers than for mass retailers. Everyone loves charming mom and pop shops. We all complain when areas become filled with chain stores, but without the community support, financially, this is a predictable outcome. Vintage stores are no exception.

I’d love to hear the reasons why you  sometimes choose vintage, please share in the comments!

Move in Day! Ways to Streamline Setting Up Your Vintage Booth

 

Knot on Main Street in Dunedin, Florida, The RiCharmed Life booth

So I recently moved into my second retail spot. I learned so much from my first one, especially because within that establishment I’ve moved to three different spaces. I have a few tips to share to help streamline the process. 

1. Read your contract thoroughly. If you have to redo how you price things or you are immediately in violation of some rule, it’s not a great start to things and it can really slow you down to have to stop and fix stuff.

2. Price everything in advance to getting into your spot. It takes enough focus to set up your space and get everything in a good place without also having to worry if you’re pricing things right and having to research things on the spot.

3. Do a trial run set up. Map out the exact size space you will have. If there’s not room in your house to do this, take it onto a porch or driveway or whatever you have to do. Set up the furniture and display pieces first. Add in your merchandise, starting with the largest items first and filling in around them with smaller pieces. This will give you a good idea if you have enough inventory to fill your spot or if you have too much. 

4. Take lots of pictures of your trial run. Both up close and from a distance so if your brain is totally fried during moving you can just pull up those pictures and reference them for how you want your set up to go.

5. When you load, don’t put in the heavy big stuff and pile the small things on top of it. You will need to pull out and install that furniture first so you want to make sure it is accessible, even if it means you have to take two trips. If you have a van or truck or a larger vehicle you can add stuff between and around these larger pieces but you really do risk breakage when you pile stuff on top because it just means moving it out of the way multiple times. (And it can slide around and we all know what a bad feeling it is to hear breakables sliding around!)

6. Bring help- but not too much! If you have substantial display pieces, you already know you’ll need assistance moving them into the store. Do not count on people being available at the store to help you unless you have specifically arranged for this. In general my muscle is not great at setting up so I also like to enlist the help of a friend who is more into that. If you’ve taken pictures of your set up, that helps because people can also just reference those and help you fulfill your vision. Otherwise it helps to have someone who has a good eye and can work independently. You may absolutely love a helpful friend but you know if certain people require a lot of supervision or are just distracting when you are in go mode. Avoid those people, it will be better for your friendship in the long run. 

7. Have a kit planned out and ready to go with a checklist. Make sure to include hammer, nails, hangers, price tags, sharpies, scissors, paper towels and cleaner, just everything you think you may possibly need in setting up your spot. Don’t wait till move in day to assemble this.

8. Do take lots of pictures while you’re setting up. This is great for social media and people love a good before and after. Make sure you absolutely take pictures of the spot in it’s final look. You will want to go back and look for merchandise holes or things you can go back to later and improve.

9. When you are finished, do go through with cleaner and make sure everything looks tidy. Make sure all your supplies are back in the kit bag. Thank you your help and go reward yourself! 

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Ask the Experts

 A few months back I won a gorgeous vintage brass table at auction. It has three moving pieces and each of these pieces has a glass top. The gentleman running the auction kindly offered to put it in my car for me. He did not realize that the glass was not attached and turned it sideways. The middle piece of glass slid out and shattered everywhere. I still took the piece, it was a steal, but then I was left with having to replace that piece of glass.

1970’s Milo Baughman Pace Style Tiered Swivel Coffee Table

I had a shop in mind to get the replacement glass, but then saw that they were out of business. I then took it to the Facebook “experts” and asked for recommendations there. I got places that were super far for me, places that ended up not doing smaller jobs and places that had also closed. I wasn’t really sure where to go from there. 

I am figuring things out as I go with selling larger pieces locally. I also know that there are a lot of nearby shops that sell similar pieces and I just figured they had to have a good source for glass replacement. So I asked. Immediately I got a recommendation for a shop that was right across the street from this particular dealer. Last week I took my little table in and they were super nice and professional and very reasonable. I have definitely found my glass person!

So the take away from all of this is some thing that my insightful friend (and motivational speaker, author, and kick ass business woman in general) Traci Bild* has long advised. If you see something that has worked for someone else, you can achieve results doing the same thing. How it applies in this situation is that there’s all these people in my industry that have already made the connections and know good local sources for stuff. They enjoy recommending and sending people to quality vendors who have done good work for them. I am definitely going to be taking advantage of that again, and as I add to my knowledge base, I hope people will come to me and I can pay forward the information. I really feel like good local businesses deserve great referrals.

*Traci’s books are available on Amazon! Her latest, The Short Cut, has really great, practical tips for people in sales.



Presenting Yourself

Nice to meet you! 
I’m looking forward to working together.

 Just a quick post, I am leaving in about five minutes for a business meeting. I have an opportunity to vend at a new store and today I am meeting with someone there. It has me thinking about how I want to present myself and I thought I would share some insights. (I have experience in human resource and recruiting. I earned a business degree with a minor in communications. I’ve been a shop manager and event coordinator as well as a vendor.)

 Within the vintage reseller industry there is a different sort of dress code and way to present oneself. I’ve seen all sorts of things. (This probably has to do with the fact that many of us also sell online where our appearance makes no difference.) The vintage gig can be a very dirty job, especially when picking in unkept places. There’s no dress code. Often a scrunchie, old denim, and steel toed boots are best! Also, setting up a space at a show or shop requires climbing, unloading, and sometimes even power tools so comfort is really key. But that’s where the schlubby looks should stay: set up and sourcing.

 When I work as a cashier at shops where I sell or at shows, I still dress comfortably because it is a long active day. It’s important to represent your business and the businesses you partner with well. Choosing clothing that is clean, comfortable and properly fits is the goal. This seems like common sense, but again I have seen a lot of people either just not care or think that an untidy appearance translates into being a carefree, unfussy person. (It doesn’t, it just looks like you don’t care about your business or your customers.) I like to wear weather appropriate casual dresses with low heeled footwear. Jeans or pants with a nicer top work just as well. (In general I try to stay away from knits as they tend to snag on rough edges.) If you can, it’s a good idea to scope out your location ahead of time and match the general vibe. Ripped jeans and a vintage rock tank are perfect for a night market at a bar, but would not be a good idea for a holiday craft sale at the country club. 

If you have a meeting, like I have today, it’s a fun opportunity to represent your space and your style. I plan on selling vintage merchandise from the 1950s through the 1980s so I’m  wearing a vintage patterned blouse with some slightly flared jeans. It would also be fine to wear something that doesn’t directly relate to what I’m selling, but it should still be neat and wrinkle free. I think it’s a good idea to wear attire similar to what you would if you were working in the shop or interacting with customers. This gives confidence to prospective partners about what they can expect from you.

Hygiene is important. Again I shouldn’t have to say it, but shower or bath shortly before a business meeting. If you’re working a show and know you’re going to get sweaty and/or dirty setting up, change right before the show into something clean. If you get dirt under your nails, clean it out. You might think people don’t notice, but they definitely do.  I have curly hair so it’s never going to be perfect, but it does look like an attempt has been made. My make up is daytime appropriate. Attention to detail and proving that you can get yourself together and be on time is a good indicator of what working with you will be like. The idea is to seem competent and professional. That is the type of person that owners and organizers want to partner with. Lastly, brush your teeth- few things are more off putting than scuzzy teeth and bad breath! 😉 


PS Social media just came up in this discussion. That could almost be its own post,  but here’s a few quick thoughts. Customer confidence is huge when selling online. They want to know that what they are purchasing is accurate to what they receive. They want to know that you are detail oriented when packing their item and can ship within the expected timeframe. If you present yourself online as scatterbrained, sloppy, and spastic, it doesn’t send a great message. Cute, quirky, enthusiastic, but put together-  this translates well and will work towards sales, not against them.  

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The Panic

Just listed this Happy Buddha- 
maybe I should hang onto him 
until my mood lightens! 😉 

 So when one is leaving a steady paycheck to be their own boss, there are definitely days when The Panic sets in. I believe that a positive mental attitude is everything to success so I actively work to stay in that place. But… I will admit that sometimes it’s hard. 

Right now sales are down across all online channels. The sites themselves won’t admit it but when you talk to other sellers, everyone is experiencing a major downtrend. I had more sales last year when I was barely listing anything at all and just old stuff would sell every other day. It was automatic, list something and a couple hours later I’d get a sale from the shop, usually not even the item I listed. Now, I can list 5 to 10 items a day and it’s crickets for two or three days. It’s really alarming. Fortunately, I do have multiple sales channels and I haven’t had a day where I didn’t sell at least one thing somewhere. 

But the mortgage payment went out today, as well as our beefy monthly insurance payment. I had to transfer a little money from savings and that put me in a very bad place mentally. I have done well overall, but we’ve also been spending a bit and I booked a trip for both our anniversary and spring break. I think I just need to adjust the spending for a bit until things pick up again and just have faith that all my hard work will pay off. There’s a lot going on globally and domestically that has people not spending as much and it’s just a matter of waiting that out and making sure I’m covering my bases before I’m sourcing more or buying people’s dinners, ha ha. 

My point in making this post is just to say it’s very natural to have days where we question and analyze and even worry a little bit. I think a good, healthy response is to use this to examine how we can do things more efficiently, where it makes sense to adjust behavior- not out of fear, but out of pushing ourselves to do better. Keep in mind that we can’t allow ourselves to be overcome by these thoughts or to entertain them habitually. Once we’ve address the concerns, we have to not dwell on them. The best thing to get past it is to get to work and bury oneself in what is going on at that very moment. For me, right now, that is listing away- and doing a little laundry, ha ha.

PS it’s been a minute since I posted it, but you can find my listing from today on TheRiCharmedLife.etsy.com. 

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Having It All




  Today is the sort of day that I go to bed a little early for. Days like today are what I had in mind when I launched away from a more structured day. Here’s the rundown: take kids to breakfast, dropped them off at school in Largo, heading home to ship out eBay orders, do an hour workout class at the gym, go to a St Pete museum with a friend, pick the kids up from school, make dinner for them, date night with my husband in Tarpon Springs, see a friend’s band play, end up at the local karaoke bar. And if there’s gaps in that- a little free time, I will list things. I try to list or update two items every single day.

  There’s a great debate among women today about if you can really “have it all“. I think it comes down to what you consider “having it all“. For me, it’s having time for the important people in my life, making a living doing what I love & having time to enjoy beautiful moments whether that’s a solitary walk on the beach or a cultural experience or a girls weekend away. I think it’s easy to see that time is what matters the most to me, and the ability to make the most of that time, which, let’s be honest, requires funds often. 

  I think the biggest struggle in my “have it all“ is my earning keeping up with my spending. It’s my biggest source of stress. But I’m working on this. I’m reading books and taking suggestions from people who do this well and I’m learning as I go and I don’t let my stress overwhelm me. Three authors who have helped me a great deal in balance (and the second two in business as well) are: Eckhart Tolle, Tony Robbins, and Traci Bild. It’s easy to feel alone when you’re self-employed, reading helps and also gives outside perspectives and ideas. I highly recommend carving out 20-30 minutes to read every day. I’m working on that too! 

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Keeping It Fresh


  Today my mind is on my vintage clothing sales. I ran down to the shop this morning to swap out some inventory. I tend to pack my clothing racks a bit too much! What I’m doing now is making sure I only have a certain amount of hangers and then swapping out new inventory to the amount of empty hangers or items I need to bring home and put online. 

  I’ve set up a clearance eBay account that I use as a “last chance“ inventory dump. I list stuff at the price I paid for it plus shipping and a small handling fee to cover materials and fees that I have to pay to eBay. It’s an attempt not to take a loss on an item. Most of the time stuff does sell but after it’s been up a month, if there’s still no interest, it gets donated.

 
That fitting room glow…

  The clothing inventory I have in the shop is not online so when I do swap things out, I list them on Etsy first. I love the shop dressing room lighting so I usually snap a few pictures there and it ends up being less editing for me later. After a month on Etsy, it goes to eBay.

  I find that creating a cycle helps me keep my inventory fresh no matter the platform or place that it is. It also takes the guesswork, about where something will sell, out of it because there are multiple opportunities lined up. I think I need to figure out where Mercari or Depop could fit into all this. If you have experience with vintage clothing on either one of these sites, I would really love to hear about it. I dipped my toe in Depop and didn’t have much success but it was never my focus so that probably has something to do with it.



Planning the Day

 I always love finding stained glass.
 It’s one of my favorite things to sell!

 When you are self-employed, it can be very easy to have the day slip by and not have accomplished much besides surfing social media, catching up on TV shows and eating snacks uninterruptedly, lol. I have to guard myself in this regard as I am fairly distractible. 

  I have to structure my day in a way that works with my natural algorithm. I’m not a morning person but I have to take the kids to school so I found that running errands while I’m already up and out works best. My brain is more awake and focused in the afternoon so that’s generally when I list. Dinner time is family time when we all gather at the dining room table so that is a consistent part of the day- and I’m the only chef. After that I go to the gym and get my self-care in. This the a general structure of my week days. 

  As far as sourcing goes, I do try and structure that around where I have to be anyway. This morning I am having brunch with my best girlfriends in a quaint local town nearby. I’m going to take advantage of being there to walk around and see if any stores there would be a good fit for me and are accepting vendors. I also see these shops as an opportunities  to pick up well priced inventory. 

  Because of my plans, I switched things up and did research and posted several high value listings on eBay. Flexibility and working with what the day brings me is also a big part of maximizing my time. There’s not one set structure that works for everyone, but I think a big part of not getting burned out is finding ways that both agree with your nature and pull the best results out of your efforts. This is working for me now, but I will have to switch it up in the summer- and that’s fine! We should always give ourselves the freedom to go with whatever is working for ourselves in the moment, but be ready to change when it’s not.

Beginning Again… Again



My room in Safety Harbor, FL

 Well, it seems I have 470 blog posts already and I really thought maybe there was only a dozen still up. I’ve had this blog for pretty much a decade, maybe longer, and I keep reinventing it and leaving the old stuff too. I don’t know how wise that is since I have changed a great deal and find some of my older post to be judgmental and hyper religious which I am not anymore, ha ha ha. So my intent now is to chronicle my time as a full-time vintage and antique dealer. It’s going to be a part journal, part informational.

Here’s where I am now: I quit my full-time day job to pursue dealing full-time. I am currently contracting a room at the Safety Harbor Galleria here in Florida. I also have three online Etsy shops and two eBay businesses. I sell from Instagram and Facebook as well. My goals, and what I will write about on here, is getting into a couple more local stores and listing and selling enough inventory to close down my storage unit and clear out the inventory I keep in my home. I would love to get to the place where I source and immediately list and don’t have “dead piles“. (Dead piles is a morbid term for inventory that is just sitting around waiting to be listed but that you never seem to get to.)

Today I have already been to the shop and set up a new jewelry display that I hope will encourage more sales. I’ve made jewelry for years and I also have a penchant for vintage pieces so I’m hoping this is a good way to display both.

This vintage style frame has a padded burlap background. I’m using golden pearl headed pins to keep the jewelry on the board.


Strange Currencies, Story 3

(This is terribly long, but I wanted to get the whole thing out while I was motivated.)


After I got rid of the items in question, it stopped. But first, let’s talk about what led up to that point. These  are true things that happened to my husband and I in 2006-2008. 

The first happenstance we remember was something simple and kind of funny but really unexplainable. I’d been searching all day for a ring of sentimental value to me. I’d run out of places to search and things to look in and under. In desperation I turned to my small Pekingese and teasingly implored him to find it for me. We headed out for the evening and when we returned, I immediately spotted the ring– on the dog’s pillow! We definitely would’ve noticed had it been there earlier and there was no logical reason for the ring to be on the pillow to begin with. We laughed it off as our dog being amazing and maybe psychic, but didn’t think on it too much.

 The next thing that happened was a lot harder to laugh off. My husband collects bobble heads and had a Spiderman one on his desk. The desk was against the wall and the bobble head was on the side that butted up against the wall. We were in the living room watching television when we heard a crash from the home office. We both jumped up at the sound and found the bobble head smashed on the floor- on the opposite side of the desk! It had always sat securely on the far side of the desk and, to have fallen where it did, would’ve had to have been picked up and thrown. This was alarming as we really had no explanation for it and it was such a forceful act.

The next experience was even more baffling. Again we were in the living room when something shattered in the kitchen. I went to investigate and found a mug smashed on the kitchen counter. I glanced up to see the cabinet door was firmly closed. (These are old cabinets that stick shut. You have to give a good tug to open them.) I tested the cabinet door and it was completely closed, and yet there was the mug smashed on the counter as if it had fallen off the shelf –  through the door! This was when we started to take notice and wonder if there was something unseen in the house doing these things. There was no logical explaining it.  No one else was around- our young son was asleep in his crib. 

Weeks later, there was another crash in the middle of the night in the bathroom. I assumed my husband had gotten up to use the bathroom and had knocked something off the sink counter so I just went back to sleep. The next morning I was confronted with our bathtub soap dish smashed in front of the sink. However the sink is not next to the shower and the shower curtain was pulled closed. The soap dish would’ve either had to travel over or through the curtain and past the toilet to end up in front of the sink. 

What is strange to me is that with all this going on, we never felt a presence and we never felt in danger and we never felt the need to call someone to investigate.  There was a feeling of waiting: was whatever it was going to move on or were things were going to continue or even ramp up more?  It was more curiosity than fear at this point.

The kitchen was again the site for the next disturbance. I had a slim pottery tray that held some odds and ends and  sat far back on the counter. I came home one day to find it smashed on the ground. I felt annoyed and aggravated, but what took my breath away was that everything that had been in the tray was strewn across the counter as if it had been flipped over and then flipped onto the ground. No one was home when this happened. We do not have central air or anything that could have even blown all that stuff out of the tray. It was utterly unexplainable, again. 

One of the eeriest moments was the morning we woke to find a cluster of helium filled balloons stuffed into our shower. The night before my husband had securely anchored them in the kitchen to keep them from drifting into any of our ceiling fans. He had done this after everyone had gone to bed and our son was still small enough that he slept in his crib and would not have been out during the night.  Yet, come morning, the balloon bunch was in the shower, curtain pulled, bathroom door only slightly cracked open.

Even though I had concerns about my son being around something destructive, whatever it was seemed more mischievous than malevolent, even with all the broken stuff. My son’s special sleep toy is a small half bunny, half blanket toy. It had been missing several days much to his dismay and our frustration. One Sunday morning, as we were preparing to go to church I glanced into the crib and the missing toy was on his pillow. Not tossed or thrown as a child would have done but placed sitting up on his pillow. 

Another incident having to do with our son’s toys happened during the holidays. We had a little nativity that we let him play with. We would re-set it up every night for him. One night two of the pieces were missing. We looked everywhere and it was as if they had just vanished into thin air. The next morning the figures were sitting in front of the nativity facing each other. My husband thought that I had found them but when he asked I had no idea what he was talking about. Again our son was too small to be out of his crib. There was no one wandering about at night except for our geriatric Pekingese. (It was always strange that he never growled or barked or showed any indication of any presence either. )

Around that same time I came home to find a bowl had seemingly been snatched off the counter,  flipped and thrown into the cabinets below. This was a very heavy bowl and I did not keep it or other breakables near the edge of the counter because my son was beginning to pull himself up on things. And- had it somehow been on the edge and fallen, it probably would have cracked into a couple of pieces. It was a thick pottery bowl, over a foot in circumference. It looked like it had been flipped and slammed into the cabinets below. There were marks on the cabinet door and the bowl had smashed into small shards. This really scared me and again my concern for my son continue to grow but I wasn’t sure what to do. 

My husband and I are Christians and this sort of thing is not something you bring up in Sunday school class. I’m still not sure why I didn’t think to reach out to paranormal investigators or even someone at the church. I do know I didn’t want to talk about this much because I didn’t want people to look at us differently or think we were kooks or, even worse, attention seeking liars. And this stuff was unreal- if someone was telling me these things I might have thought they might be exaggerating.  My husband felt that at least, because we are Christians, we had some sort of protection from physical attacks against us. And it is true that we never felt threatened and nothing ever touched us or even physically appeared in front of us. 

I did do some research on our house, a solid little Florida ranch built in the 1950s. I could not find any news or reports or anything that indicated that anything violent or bad had ever happened at our address. I had a strong feeling that it was not the house or anything to do with the house that was the cause of this. 

The final incident happened a few days before my parents were due to visit. I had a small tabletop cabinet that I kept in the kitchen. It had a magnetic closure that kept it very securely closed. When the doors were opened, there was a  distinctive squeak. There were door pulls that would also swing and make a little clattering noise if you open it quickly. I heard the cabinet door squeak and so I looked around the corner to make sure my son wasn’t messing with it. The door was swinging in wide arcs, the pulls bouncing against it. No one was there. My son was asleep and my husband was not home. At this point, I did feel fearful and just desperate for some explanation and for this to stop. 

It began to occupy my mind more and I would feel a sense of dread when I walked in the front door at what we might find next. It was still fresh in my mind when my parents came and I started telling my mom all about the strange things. She suggested I tell my dad about it. 

My dad is a very educated man and good at reasoning things out. My parents have lived overseas for a while and have encountered many different cultures and unusual things in their time abroad. As we sat talking, he looked around and pointed out several art pieces that had come from India and Thailand and Indonesia. I definitely only saw them as art, but he informed me that they were carvings of deities. He went on to explain that a lot of temples and “holy people” sold things of this nature. Sometimes before offering them up for sale, objects will be ceremonially blessed and have spirits invited to inhabit them.  He suggested that perhaps we were dealing with some thing or things that had attached to one or more of these items. He suggested we get rid of them immediately. 

 I took his advice and sold them as quickly as I could. (Yes, I mentioned to the new owners that it was possible that the items also came with “friends”. This was not a deterrent to any of them.) And- as I started this whole story- once the objects were gone, things stopped happening. 

As we look back on it, and this was over ten years ago, we find ourselves in disbelief that this happened to us. These were things that both of us witnessed. This wasn’t a case of one person’s active imagination or staging things. There has been pounds of broken ceramics and pottery as proof. As it was going on, we mentioned it to just a handful of people but this is the first time I’ve written it all down. I wish now that we had had the presence of mind to take pictures, but this was before the Instagram age. I also kind of wonder what would’ve happened if we had tried to contact it with a Ouija board. A previous experience as a kid with a Ouija board has made me very averse to them and I’d vowed never to touch one again so that didn’t even occur to me as an option. While I remain a collector and dealer of vintage and antique things,  I absolutely stay away from anything that could be temple artwork or artifact! 

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