This may involve some simple online searches on sites such as eBay and Etsy, digesting content from the antique market and using tools such as Google Trends to find what people are looking for. Here are some things you can do to find the best niche for you: For example, on glass, ceramic, and metal antiques you may find identifying marks on each item to help you understand where and when they were made. Once you’ve decided on your niche, research how to ensure the antiques you’re buying are authentic. It’s also crucial to learn how to identify authentic antiques. This is because a large part of running a successful business in this space is being able to identify items which are being sold for less than market value and then selling them at a profit.įinding a niche can help you gain the knowledge you need to successfully make a profit. When it comes to antiques and collectables, the more you know, the more money you can make. This means that you’re more likely to spend a considerable amount of time finding and buying new stock. Unlike most online stores that stock large quantities of individual products, when selling antiques you will typically deal with one-offs, or very small numbers of each product. “We are OK to be patient to find the right home for them.By far the most important step in creating a successful online antique store is sourcing antiques that people want to buy. “We believe that there’s no reason they would not be worth even up to $1m in the context of other collectible things like rare watches, art by famous artists, rare comic books and sports memorabilia.”Īnd who might have the money to make such an investment? “I could see a wealthy eccentric person buying them and then wearing them from time to time like people that wear million-dollar Paul Newman Rolex watches,” Stevenson said.īut the ideal buyer would be “someone that will then offer them on permanent loan to a highly visited museum like a Smithsonian or the Metropolitan Museum in New York so that people could see them in perpetuity” as a part of American history, Stevenson added. He thinks the 1880s pair is worth “no less than $150,000 and potentially quite a bit more”, he says. Stevenson, who runs Denim Doctors, a Los Angeles business that repairs well-loved clothing, became interested in the material when he worked at a shop selling vintage Levi’s and realized they were selling for more than the brand-new pairs at a store a few doors down. The wearability “is a big part of why we believe they are so extremely valuable,” even if “they could use a little mending in a couple of spots”, Stevenson wrote to the Guardian in an email. They’re still fully wearable, according to Zip Stevenson, who paid 10% of the cost the other 90% was covered by Kyle Haupert, a 23-year-old from San Diego, the Journal reported. “I’ve become a sort of archivist and historian.”ĭespite their historical significance, you might not know that the jeans were nearly 150 years old if you encountered them in a thrift shop. ![]() The material can sell for hefty sums, but “I’m not focused on the money,” Harris wrote. Photograph: discovering scraps while looking for antique whiskey bottles, Harris developed “a sort of obsession” with antique jeans and is now what he calls a “denim miner”. “When a miner got a new pair of work pants, he’d cut up the old ones and use them for lagging around pipes, so there were a lot of antique jeans buried out here,” he wrote in the 2015 piece.Ī pair of Levi’s jeans from the 1880s. Levi’s were worn by silver miners in the west, as Harris wrote in the Guardian in 2015, and miners lit their way with candles, the Journal notes.Īll this explains why Harris found them in a western mineshaft. ![]() In the 1890s, the company said, “we reversed our policy and company leaders began speaking out against the nation’s racist policy.”īeyond the design elements, the jeans’ age is also clear from the wax spattered across them. “Levi’s also used advertisements and printing on our products to declare that our products were ‘made by white labor’, thinking it would improve sales and align with the views of consumers at the time.” In the 1880s, “there was significant social pressure not to hire Chinese workers and adopted an anti-Chinese labor policy,” the company said in an emailed statement. The exclusion law, which established a 10-year ban on Chinese laborers seeking to immigrate to the US, became the first major restriction on immigration in the US.
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