tricityrevivals

[tricityrevivals]

Blog Chapter 2.2: So You Wanna be a Picker?

Nowadays, in the industry, everyone loves the self labeled title “picker”. Truth is that very few people do this full time. I’ve seen people with primary jobs anywhere from a doctor to a construction worker to a cop to a grocery store manager. Picking is more of a passion, hobby, or sidegig for the majority, but there are those out there who do it as a career and make a hell of a nice living for themselves. So how do you make that transition? Here’s our opinion based on some our real life experiences we’ve encountered so far.

I guess the question to ask is where do you draw the line? If you open up an antique store than you are pretty much a business owner. Self Employed, and you can call that your career. From that I would assume you can call yourself a picker, but the majority of antique shops I know usually get their inventory from antique dealers and aren’t out there actually picking. This isn’t the case for everyone, but I’ve seen it more often as of recently.

If you’re an antique dealer than you’re definitely out there in brunt of it picking every day, but I guess its picking in a different way. We’ve seen antique dealers at shows, sales, and auctions as well though. Also, at the same time, a dealer has his contacts who call him when they find stuff. The majority of dealers we’ve dealt with usually aren’t picking anymore but just getting calls from their contacts, buying their items for cheap, and than reselling it cheap to an antique shop so that particular store can also make money on the items. This doesn’t go for everyone in this career field but just the majority we’ve dealt with in the past. So what do you think? Picker or not?

So now for those others. The ones selling to the antique dealers. Based on our experience, we call those guys the weekend warriors. These are the hobbyist. Attending Flea Markets and Estate Sales every weekend. Most of them we’ve run into are either older and retired or it’s their side job/hobby on weekends. They’ll attend these sales and find cheaper (usually under $25 items) and sell them to the dealer to flip it and make some money. I will warn you about these guys. They all pretend to be friends, and in this small state everyone knows each other, but watch out when the doors open to an estate sale. We’ve seen people nearly come to blows over certain items. To compare, try and picture black friday when a store opens at midnight. Now picture everyone is 60+ years of age. It can get ugly. They call themselves pickers, but I wouldn’t give them that label personally.

Other sub categories I’d say associated with pickers are Auctioneers, Appraisers, and Restorations. All three definitely have the most knowledge out of the bunch, because these are all crafts that you can learn and be trained in. All worthy of mention, and definitely a job you can call a career, but I’d still refrain from labeling them a picker.

Before we go any further, lets break down what a pick is in my opinion. You need 3 things to actually go on a legit pick:

1. You need to find someone who has an extraordinary and overloaded collection of items. You need to find this person BEFORE anything they have is even for sale.

It’s a lot more difficult than it sounds. Where do you even start right? Plus, that’s hoping the person would even be open to selling some stuff. If you want to be a picker bad enough, you’ll find a way.

2. You need to be the so called “foot soldier” digging through that dwelling getting completely covered in dirt or dust to find those items.

Admittedly, we’ve been on both ends of it. We’ve shown up to a pick where someone has 10 items on a foldout table waiting for us, and we’ve been on picks where its a barn overflowing with stuff and the owner saying go ahead guys, go crazy. I know one of the top guys in this game said to us once “I dont go in barns anymore”. Well, picker status revoked my friend.

3. The items need to be in your wheelhouse.

We’ve been to houses where all the items were brand new. Unfortunately when people hear you pay cash for things they think all the stuff they have we’d want. A lot of sellers can make a good living selling stuff like this on ebay, but I wouldn’t necessarily call it a pick. People in this field call it “garage sale crap”. There’s a difference between garbage you throw out and garbage you keep. Once you can figure out the difference, you’ve got yourself a pick.

Those 3 things-The people, the stuff, and the work put in, and you can say you went on a legit pick. It doesn’t always go as planned, and sometimes people do have quality stuff but they don’t have a barn full of items. In that case you bought something. You didn’t go on a pick to get one item, you knew what it was and probably had pictures of it before you drove there.

So now that you have our opinion of what a pick really is, than what is a picker?

I think if you asked 100 people you’d get 100 different answers. I know what everyone sees on TV. I know Mike and Frank have set the bar way high for anyone in this field to live up to. I also know as much as television shows may be scripted or faked, that Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz are legit without a doubt. They only have an hour of airtime to show you the coolest of the cool and the funniest parts, but they’ve done this way before cameras were on them. It’s definitely entertaining, and they’re definitely the reason we even started this whole thing as I’ve said in previous blogs, but trust me “Picking aint easy”.

The fun you see picking on TV? Absolutely. We’ve had so much fun doing this. We love it, wouldn’t want to do anything else. The stuff they don’t show is what knocks people out of this game. For every great transaction you deal with, there is 5 bad transactions. As much as we love our customers, you also deal with bad apples as well. Scammers, Spammers, and Frauds. You also have people who love to tell you their opinion on every item we have for sale. I’ve personally never understood this one. I was brought up that if you dont have anything nice to say, than dont say it at all-but people just love to shoot you down all the time. They feel the need to tell us our price/shipping is too high just to name one example. We pride ourselves at trying to be more than reasonable and usually list stuff lower than what it’s worth, but people just can’t help themselves I guess. They never intend on even buying it, they just want us to know there opinion. Get 5-6 emails a day about this and it gets frustrating. Frustration goes away a week later when someone buys it for asking price. 

We’ve been doing this on and off for a while, but it wasn’t until recently when we started going full throttle that we realized a bunch of people with the same story. I was talking with a guy I met through an online auction one day. We bought one of his items, and soon after became friendly when he would buy some of our stuff as well. Anyway, he basically told me what I hear all too often from the full time pickers. 

“I was working a job I didnt enjoy, one day decided I’m going to quit, and do this full time.”

This was 3 years ago, and he’s still here doing what he loves. Some may call him crazy. No guaranteed paycheck, no benefits, and no guaranteed longevity or retirement plan, but it was a risk he took and so far it has paid off. There’s always the unknown though I guess. Where will he be in ten years? At the same token, I’ve spoken to people that are 70 years old who have that same story and lived a good life picking for 50+ years. I guess it’s a crapshoot. On the other side of it I also know people doing this for a living who are self admittedly broke.

Being a picker is never about being a millionaire or owning a multi million dollar corporation. If you can make a good living, and this is truly what you enjoy, then what else can you ask for? Sure, there may be safer career choices, but would you really enjoy what you’re doing or will it be a prison sentence counting down the days until you retire? I think one thing we have going for us is that we’re friends. There’s plenty of guys out there in business together who are partners, but only partners because they’re in the same industry. We can go a week talking without talking business, and just bs-ing. We both know each other and what we have to do to make this thing keep rolling. Both of us bring more to the table than anyone else I know that’s doing this right now, and I know that for a fact.

After a year of success doing this I’ve had several newbies to the game reach out and ask “How?”. How’d you do this? How’d you do that? What did you do with this? A year of doing this full time and people want our input? Why not reach out to someone doing this 20 years? It’s because the game is changing and we’ve figured out what to do already. Not being cocky at all, but with social media, internet, and the various tools that are available now its leaving the older style of doing things in the dust. Things aren’t selling the same way they used to, and even the people doing this 20+ years are asking us for advice now. We brought a whole different angle than anyone else is used to and it shows.

So you wanna be a Picker? Here’s what to expect from the things you won’t see on TV. Long hours and no set schedule. If someone calls you better believe if you dont respond you’re going to miss out on a sale or a lead. Road trips. You can’t stay in one little bubble and expect everything to come to you. Tons of researching and listing. If you want things to sell you have to know every piece of information about it, and you have to list it on multiple sites which is very time consuming. Boxing and shipping. Break a few high dollar items in transit and you’ll learn how to package really well! We’re on a first name basis with Fedex, UPS, and USPS. Cleaning. Everything we buy is “barn fresh” thus it hasn’t been touched in decades. If you saw our cleaning concoctions you would think we owned a cleaning service business. Lastly, storage. Luckily Luke lets us use his basement as our main headquarters. Both that, along with his garage and mine, is 75% full of Tricity Items. 

Overall, there’s perks and downsides to everything in life. Do the perks outweigh the downsides to it all? With what we are doing, the answer is yes. It’s hard to put a label on a picker, and this whole blog is our opinion based on our real life experiences. We’re not here trying to be the “Picker Police” and tell anyone who they are, or who they aren’t. We’re just simply trying to bring notice to one of our most loved career choices. It’s a cool job, it’s fun, its interesting, and it’s something we love. People automatically think you’re Mike and Frank when you say you’re a picker, but it goes way deeper than what you have seen. Even with all the nonsense you have to deal with we wouldn’t trade it for anything. We encourage everyone whether it be picking or something else you’re passionate about to take that leap and go for it, because ultimately this is the direction we’re headed to, and it’s coming fast.

[tricityrevivals]

Blog Chapter 2.1: The Journey Continues..

Exactly one year ago I wrote our first of now twelve blogs: “Chapter 1.0-The Journey Begins..” and it’s crazy to look back and read that blog and see where we were at that point in time, and remembering our mindset. This year has gone by so fast and it’s been filled with twists and turns along the way. I don’t even really know where to start with this one. Here’s our newest blog as our journey continues with a glance into the past and upcoming year of Tri-City Revivals.

We admittedly didnt know much about A business starting off. Where there’s a will there’s always a way. We knew how to make money selling things, and we translated that into “lets open a business doing this”. It’s pretty funny and crazy to think back and just say hey we can do this based off of that idea, but we took a shot, and it paid off. 

The amount of knowledge we’ve learned this year is insane. Neither of us were really interested in college or schoolwork because the subject matter wasn’t of interest to us, but when we are interested in something we become geniuses. We still have a lot to learn, there’s always room to learn more and more each day. I can say absolutely we can school the majority of people double our age on picks about a bunch of items. They just look at us with the “wtf” look. How do these kids know all this stuff?

A year later we have an amazing instagram following, a tremendous website, an inventory of items that fly off the shelves, and an a pick list that’s double sided upcoming.

Our instagram community has been amazing. From making sales and interactions with all our followers to getting feedback it’s been a very powerful tool for us. There’s no magical social media potion we use, but it’s more of a place to display the work we put in and image of us. The majority of that credit goes to Luke and his keen eye and photography skills. I know the work we put in, but I just don’t know how to translate that into a photograph for our viewers, he does. Our followers have went from 0 to 3,000+ in 1 year. It speaks volumes, and we appreciate every single person who at least gives us the opportunity to see what we are about.

Our website gets compliments from everyone who visits. Our view of what we wanted was completed by NJ Tech Team. Specifically Vin and Jess. Since we graduated High School with both of them, they knew us, our personality, and also listened to what our vision was. They worked their magic, and gave us exactly what we wanted. We could not have been any happier with the way things turned out. Looking forward to this year, expect our website to take it up a notch. We don’t want to give anything away so stayed tuned. Its going to be much more interactive for those visiting the site.

As far as picks- we’re expanding our search. There’s still plenty in our area but we’ve been traveling up and down the East Coast as a test run recently, and expect that to go full throttle in the new year. People are finding us now, as opposed to us finding them. Word is spreading quick on Tricity Revivals and we couldn’t be any more stoked about it. They’re finding us several different ways- from friends of friends, or seeing us at shows/sales, or finding our business card in a local eaterie. That ones always funny.

“Hey I saw your card at this bagel shop and figured I’d give you a call because I have some stuff you may be interested in”

Trust me its not always this simple but it has happened before more than once.

One thing that really sticks out in my mind this year: We had so much fun. All too often you hear about the dreads and sighs of going to work and its really unfortunate. I mean we had a blast-just looking back and remembering certain moments could still crack me up. I couldn’t even count on two hands how many times we were doubled over laughing throughout this year in all the different situations we were put in. We’re friends first, business partners second. We’ve spent a lot of time together throughout our lives but this past year it was more than ever. I can’t wait to do it again next year.

We’re excited about what the next year may bring. I think we’ve exceeded everybody’s expectations except our own really. There’s no one else doing this the way we are. There’s no business plan we can mimic off of, or no monthly subscription payments to be accepted. No latest and greatest equipment we can buy to make our jobs easier. I think we’ve dealt with those circumstances pretty well, and have thought up pretty much any idea thats associated with us or how we do business all on our own. Whether it’s a minor change or a major one, we’re always the ones bringing that to the table and we can only hope it shows to our audience.

There’s always more work to do and more knowledge to learn. With anything new in life you need that grace period to learn the ropes and make adjustments. I feel like that was this year. Neither of us knew what to expect, but we figured it out pretty quickly. We’ve experimented with different methods and formulas. Some worked, others didn’t. Either way we kept pushing forward. There will always be mistakes but you have to capitalize on them.

There weren’t many mistakes this year but we are far from perfect. I won’t even call it a mistake I’d call it a lesson learned. To name one:

We overestimated the value of a bunch of items on one of our first picks in the beginning of the year. The items were great and we just thought we could sell them for a lot more than we bought them for. It was a mixture of our error and the seller being greedy or delusional. He was a lifetime collector and he knew there was no money for us to make on the items but he continued to sell them to us for over retail and promised someone would pay the moon for these things. Lesson learned. We’re human. You live and you learn. It obviously didn’t break us and made us look at things a little differently going forward. It has never, and will never happen again.

No need to harp on that in this blog. Just trying to give a glimpse showing it hasn’t been neat and dandy all year.

It’s hard to write a blog and find compliments for yourself and your business, especially when our mindset is that we can always be better, but I have to say we made it a year and we’re gaining more and more momentum with each day, each pick, and each restoration job.

Speaking on restoration- Most people don’t realize this is one of our services, and just see us as pickers. We did get our start restoring free furniture but we can do much more than that, and have restored some great items this past year. Especially when we have our full Tri-City Team with us. Let’s be clear we’d rather not touch the item at all. It’s only original once! I’d say instead of calling it Restoration we deal more (and enjoy more) of doing Rust-orations. It’s the biggest trend in this game right now, and its exploding. It’s basically restoring something so that its in working order, but the outter part is untouched or touched up very slightly. It still gives that original look. As I said, its only original once. People dont want something that looked like it did brand new in 1950. They want something that looks like it was made brand new in 1950 and survived to 2018. We love it and couldn’t agree more.

What to expect of 2018? 

I honestly don’t know what 2018 is going to bring for us. I know we’ve had conversations saying we feel like we’re coasting a little bit at times. Admittedly, as we always say and think, we can be doing more, but if this is coasting than watch out if we’re going 110%. There’s a lot of things upcoming that we have to be excited for. We have a lot of really interesting and enormous opportunities that are ahead of us coming from all different ways. Some may work out, others may not, but it’s going to be an exciting time either way and I’m pumped to see how everything plays out. The relationships we’ve built throughout the past year will continue to hopefully form a stronger bond. All I can say is, I feel bad for the other side of those relationships if they choose to forget us, because eventually you’re going to remember the name. 

As our best friend and Tri-City Team Member always says, “You guys are playing chess, everyone else is playing checkers”. We’re two steps ahead already even though it may not seem that way. We’ve always got a plan.

Besides that, we are excited at the thought of finding new items this year. We’ve sold over 400 different items this year approximately. Every single one of those items we found in a barn, attic, garage, or home. We’ve shipped items all over the United States and Internationally as well. People will stop in from time to time at Tricity Headquarters and its always the same question

“Where the hell is all your stuff?”

“Gone. Sold”

Every single item we found we learned the background on, educated ourselves, and that’s where the knowledge I was talking about previously comes into play. Every item we shipped to someone who appreciated that piece which makes it all the more special. Everyone isn’t out there getting dirty and looking in barns or attics for it, but they will spend their hard earned cash on it. That speaks volumes to us. 

As long as time on earth continues, there is always going to be a market for vintage or antique items. Years go by, people don’t like the new stuff being made, so they go with something vintage. Or they just have great memories of something they had in their past and it’s not being made or sold anymore, whether it be decor or a functional piece. I wouldn’t say its a fad or a trend. This has been going on for much longer than we have been doing it, but the key is that now it’s in the spotlight. Not everyone can do this. I know plenty of people that do the same thing as us but they can’t sell an item to save their life. You can have a storefront, a big name, and a following but that doesn’t make you successful. Your reputation and work ethic will lead you to success. You have to put in the work, test out the market, learn the history, and be smart with your decisions. As long as we keep doing that Our Journey Will Continue.

Lastly, and on a side note: We want to thank everyone who took the time to help us out this past year. Family, Friends, and Relatives who were supportive from the beginning when all of this was just an idea. Spouse’s and our Fur Children who sometimes get put on hold when we are leaving you in the dust running out of the house for a pick or on our phones negotiating a deal or finalizing business opportunities-It doesn’t go unnoticed, and we cannot thank you enough for dealing with us. Even something as small as you giving us a like, or a follow, or a call, or bought something from us you have all had a hand in where we are at today. Thank You! God Bless! We look forward to sharing 2018 with you!

[tricityrevivals]

Blog Chapter 2.0: Road Trippin' it to Hershey So as you can probably already tell we do things at a moment's notice. There's no telling where we will be or what we will be doing even if we have plans already made that day. Things come up, and you need to move quick on them or you can miss out. This was kinda the case with our last minute trip to The Hershey AACA (Antique Automobile Club of America) Fall Swap Meet.  We knew it was coming up but we weren't going to be vendors at this one. It just so happened a past customer and friend of ours bought two of our big money items. Another gas pump and the enormous Coca Cola Sign we had. After having the Coke sign "sold" multiple times, we couldn't wait any longer for no show buyers. Unfortunately even the most seemingly trustworthy people go ghost with no explanation, and everyday they don't show is a day you miss out on money. They know that, and we know that. After holding the sign for over 4 months we couldn't wait any longer. The only problem was that our new buyer is from South Carolina. The good news is he was going to The Hershey swap meet. We made the decision that since he was a return customer and an all around great guy we're going to take the three hour trip to Hershey, PA and meet him there to exchange the two items.  Two days before we were contacted by another interested buyer in our six foot Texaco sign. He was from Blairstown, NJ and that just so happened to be on our way to Hershey. Things were looking up. The day before we are getting ready, making a gameplan for the next morning and doing our everyday routine, when we get a text from a random number. "Have 8 Antique Wine Barrels and a Grape Press...Interested? Has to be out by 4pm tomorrow" Now this is literally at 4pm when we are just about to wrap up for the day. We've been working since 9am, and I still haven't slept since working my other job midnight shift the night before, so I'm going on about 32 hours of no sleep. We negotiated a price, and basically said unless you can do this price we can't do it today and tomorrow we are gone all day, so we're going to have to pass.  "That price works you can come now heres the address" Well, I guess the end of our workday would have to be pushed back a little today. We picked up and started heading to the location about 40 minutes away. It was too good of a deal to pass up, and once we got there we realized it was a repeat person who we had picked about a year ago and changed his number. It was good to see him. This is the last thing we wanted to do before a big trip to Hershey but we just had to.  The next day I was by Luke's at 7am. Now the challenge is that we have an 8 Foot by 4 Foot Sign, and 6 Foot in Diameter Sign, and Gas Pump- with only a 6 Foot Pickup Truck Bed to transport this all safely. We figured out the signs pretty easily but than came the pump. If you've ever transported an old gas pump, you would know these things are heavy as hell! We usually only need 3 guys to lift it, but we've never tried it with 2. Today was the day we tried it with just the two of us. I would estimate from what I've seen online it weighs anywhere from 6-650 pounds depending what parts are on it still. This just so happened to be a complete pump. Goal- lift it just the two of us four feet into the air onto the pickup truck bed and ease it down so it didn't crack or ruin the porcelain signs. It only took us two tries, but it took everything we had, and we successfully didn't break anything in the process. We were finally en route to one of the biggest Swap Meets in the East Coast. We stopped in the Blairstown area and dropped off the Texaco Sign to the first buyer. The actual town name was Allamuchy, NJ and we swore it was a made up town that we were just getting lured into to get kidnapped. Nice guy though, newer collector and he was ecstatic about the sign once he saw it in person. Always good to see satisfied customers. We continued onto Hershey Long road trips are fun and brutal at the same time if that makes sense. Luckily we're such good friends that it doesn't really seem like work or a job, and time does go fast but there is a lottttt of time to kill. We literally talk about the most random things and go down this wormhole of topic to topic and scenario to scenario. It's definitely entertainment at its finest and I cant really explain it unless cameras were rolling and you see it for yourself. Maybe one day. Our music of choice for this particular ride was Lady Gaga, like literally every song she has ever done. So if you can picture these two bearded, tattooed, backwards hat wearing men with a gas pump and Coke Sign sticking out of their blacked out pickup truck bed, windows down, blasting Lady Gaga. Some of the reactions we saw when people pulled up next to us were priceless, but that's who we are. Its always an adventure. After about another hour of that we finally pulled up to Hershey. The best way to describe it is that its a playground for older adult men. Ever see a child in a toy store? That look on their face? Running around all happy touching and playing with everything they see? Now picture that, but a 50 year old men doing it.  Literally everyone has some sort of motorized scooter and they are zipping around left and right going from aisle to aisle. This is probably the biggest show we've been to. I think they said around 9,000 vendors were there. It so big you even have to cross the overpass of the highway to get to the second side of it.  There was some top notch stuff here. They line up all the cars which is anything from Dodge Brothers to Muscle Cars to Wagons to Ice Cream Delivery Trucks. All vintage. All completely restored. All amazing in their own way. It's really something to see someone's prized possession vehicle that they put so much time and effort into, and now multiply that by like 10,000 and that's Hershey. There's also 9,000 vendors. So you have your petroliana booths with signs and oil cans, also other booths with car parts and car related items, and than you have various other different booths like chrome plating booths, tools, bicycles, replica signs, and coin ops. I'm never too fond of the repop sign booths, but as long as they're upfront and honest that their signs aren't original that's fine with me. It's just more unfortunate that those signs are out there now and being sold as original down the road.  There's something for every type of collector here if your a fan of "Mantiques". The only problem is you're going to pay retail and possibly more than retail at most booths. There's no "wiggle" room for resellers like us. Granted, if you're looking for a rare sign, or a car you've been searching for you WILL find it here, but you're going to pay for it. It was kinda fun just being a spectator again, looking at things, making some new contacts, seeing how things are being priced and definitely meeting new people. Speaking of meeting new people. While we were walking Luke heard a voice that couldn't be mistaken. He has heard this voice at least 100 times before. He looked to his right. "There he is" "Who" "Look its Robbie Wolfe" Yes it was the American Picker Robert Wolfe. Mike Wolfes brother, a huge car guy, and a regular at shows like this one. He was standing right beside us and Luke picked him out after hearing his voice having a conversation with his friend. We went over. He shooks our hands like we had been friends for a long time, and we had a short convo with him. He kept it moving which we completely understood, and we didnt want to blow up his spot in a crowd of 10,000+ people. As he was walking away we said to ourselves we should have taken a picture with him. Luckily, a few other people recognized him and took some pictures with him. Luke decided to make the move and I was a little hesitant.  "Robbie can we just get a quick pic with you?" "Sure guys" We got our picture. Had another brief convo with him and he kept it moving like before. All I have to say is what a great guy. Truly a standup guy, very generous, and so down to earth. He took the time to talk to everyone who approached him and took pictures with anyone who asked, when all he was trying to do was check out some cool stuff at different booths. Never complained or said no to anyone. It was a great experience meeting him, and it was an extra bonus for our trip. We were always huge fans of him, but after this encounter and actually getting to meet him and talk with him we can't say enough about him.  After walking probably 15 miles the entire day, meeting new people, and window shopping, it was around 6pm and we were spent. I swear I pulled a hamstring, and Luke's feet were killing him from the boots he was wearing. We called it a day. We met our buyer and swapped out the pump and coke sign from my truck to his, we put on the Gaga, and began the three hour trip back home. Overall, we had a great time and I highly recommended checking it out next year even if you're not intending on buying anything. It's definitely a sight to see, and you never know who you're going to run into. Well most likely definitely be back next year. Maybe we'll get a booth next year or maybe not. Either way you should definitely plan on going to check it out. Hershey AACA Show 2017 was a success!

[tricityrevivals]

Blog

Chapter 1.9: Being an eBay Power Seller

Ebay is an amazing tool for buyers and sellers of the world. We’ve literally found people across the world that were interested in our items which is amazing to think about. We found something cool in a local barn, took a chance that someone would buy it, and at the same time someone in Germany was constantly checking to see if this certain item was found and for sale on the internet. We connected with someone we would have never met otherwise, and it’s all because of eBay. But its not all rainbows and butterflies selling on this site. We have been dubbed an eBay power seller, this is our experience on the road to that title.

For starters, the first 3-4 months we created a personal account. Not knowing much about the site, and selling thru other online sites was our bread and butter, so we said lets give it a test run. Initially, we were bringing in loads of money and soon realized that this was probably going to be a key part in expanding our business. Our items were now offered worldwide, and not just in the East Coast. Literally everything we listed was sold within a month period. What we didnt know about an ebay personal account is they charge higher percentage fees when you sell an item. 

We saw our paypal account rising daily. We were all smiles, but heres where reality set in for us. For example- Say we sold a $100 item. We probably paid $50 for that item because we did the research and knew we could sell it for $100. Ebay takes 10% of the final value of the items you sell on their site. Paypal also has a fee of 2.5%. So they are taking about $12.50 from your $100 sale which leaves you with $87.50. Subtract the initial $50 you paid and your making $37.50 for that $100 sale. It’s still a very good profit margin but heres where we would get jammed up. Sometimes you find these items, they are dirty, broken, need repainting or polishing, rewired or just need to be given some love. Restoration. People aren’t accounting for the $5 in paint here or the $7 brass polisher there, it adds up. This is on top of all the man hours you put in to just post the item. Everything needs to be cleaned, taken pictures of, research what they’ve sold for, write a description of the item, and than finally post it. None of this is including the cardboard, tape, and bubble wrap you need to use on every single item to ship. Another additional cost. Lastly, eBay “recommends” roundabout shipping for certain items, so we were just going with their recommendations at first. Until we go to print a shipping label and it’s an extra $10 to ship. We soon learned after getting burnt on a bunch of items eBays shipping system and to this day we rarely ever have to pay out of pocket anymore. I figure on every $100 we make we profit about $20-25 take home if everything goes as planned. Oh, and this doesnt include all the taxes we have to pay for selling items.

It’s what we enjoy doing. Learning the history, making something mechanically or physically working again, but there’s just a lot more that goes into it than you would think. It’s not just buy low and sell high. 

Once we got the hang of eBay we decided to open an eBay store. It’s a monthly cost to keep it open but it cuts down costs on final value fees by about 3%. Its completely customizable and you can interact with your buyers and remain more organized among other things. Every little bit helps. 

I can say what we love about eBay:

1. The following- You have eyes from across the globe on your product and your brand. This is the biggest and best site to sell on.

2. The customers- Sure everyone is looking for a bargain but we have met some great people along the way, and have had return buyers. Plus we get satisfaction out of seeing our items go all around the world.

3. Easy Use- Whether listing an item, or tracking it, or printing a shipping label it’s not complicated at all once you learn the ropes. Some other sites we’ve tried are like torture trying to post a single item. Also as an ebay shop owner it helps being able to see the analytics and financial reports to help grow your business.

And now what we hate about eBay:

1. The lowballers- Like I said everyone is looking for a bargain, and we are ALWAYS negotiable, but some people are just so unrealistic its frustrating. No I will not sell you a $200 item for your offer of $5.50. This is a daily occurrence for us. You have to laugh.

2. The fees- Ebay can do what they want because they are the best. Some months we paid so many fees we would have been better off paying rent at a storefront. (We’ve since been able to cut down a little on fees with our own little system we created)

3. The eBay buyer protection program- Ebay has a great program if you’re a buyer, but as sellers it doesn’t work out in your favor. We’ve had multiple items (We literally wrapped with a full roll of bubble wrap) arrive broken. Some people are just scam artists which we’ve learned and others just the delivering company must have played soccer with our box. Whatever the reason though, eBay protects that buyer and your items and money is down the drain. 

Unfortunately as of late eBay has become inundated with tons of reproduction and cheap bulk alibaba items. I think they can care less because money is money, and if it sells than good for them. I can remember being a child when eBay first launched. My dad was and still is a collector of many items from Sports to Disney to Movie Memorabilia. I’d sit with him when an auction would be ending and he’d bid with others bidding all in the final seconds and somehow he always won whatever auction he wanted. He had some system with an old clock and calculating the seconds, and he’d bid with literally a second left and win the auction. This was before they had any of the computer equipment they have today. Now you can actually buy programs to win an ebay auction by a cent, which lets you win the auction but not overpay. Back then everything was genuine. The sellers, the bidders, the items. You could find deals and trust the items. On top of all that the selling fees were nothing like they are today. Now I see people making millions (yes millions) of dollars selling fake signs made in India. Or you could just buy 1000 tweety bird license plates thru the alibaba website for a thousand bucks and sell them for $5 a piece on eBay. More on that on a second.

The petroliana community (gas and oil sign collectors) have a deep hatred for these sellers. There’s even a black list of sellers eBay names floating around that is updated monthly. So basically this is how it works- these people mass reproduce gas, oil, auto, and soda porcelain signs. If you’ve ever seen American Pickers you know these signs can be very expensive. The more rare-the more money. They literally have a factory pumping out reproduction porcelain signs that are so good to the naked eye its almost impossible to tell if it’s authentic or fake, especially thru internet pictures. They even go as far as to make rust and rub dirt on them to make them look authentic. They use words like “RARE” “OLD” “ANTIQUE” or “AMAZING” but never ever say it’s authentic, or real, or original. These signs sell for thousands and thousands of dollars everyday, with tons of bidders on them. It just shows that even the experts aren’t sure what is real or not. I know we (only once) have bought a reproduction sign, and also many people we know have bought tons of them. They are starting to flood the market and by them being made so well to look authentic it’s a tough hobby to be in. I can talk about this for days, so maybe I’ll do a full blog on it upcoming if anyone is interested? Well see…

The alibaba items are another part of eBay that I really don’t like. Just my opinion. Some of the stuff is cool and cheap but it’s kinda like shopping in a dollar store. Yes, you can buy a car cell phone charger for a dollar but it probably won’t work after a month, and then you say to yourself “Well, whatever it was just a dollar”. Same thing with these bulk items that are flooding the eBay market. Searching on alibaba you can buy 1000 tweety bird license plates for $1000. Now you look at what they sell for on ebay and they go for like $5 per piece. You could definitely make some good money there but it just seems so cheap to me, and if they dont sell you have nearly a lifetime supply of tweety bird license plates that who knows what you can do with. You also have to be careful with flooding the market because after a while the buyers fade away. We learned that with 2 specific items we had bought it bulk. 

1. A Honda Magna Motorcycle Key Chain- Crazy right? It was a cheap little plastic key chain shaped as a motorcycle and it said Honda on it. We found a sealed bag with like 50 of these things, got em cheap, and listed one. The original key chain sold for around $25 and as time went on the price went lower and lower. We still have about 20 of these and we cant even give them away for our $7.99 asking price now. We still made out on them either way.

2. Pepsi Pinwheel Snapback Hats- these hats were never put out to the public to buy and they were only for Pepsi Cola Delivery drivers to wear in the 80’s. We found 4 sealed brand new hats. The first one we got close to $130! For a hat! We just recently sold our final one for a measely $50. Still pretty expensive but no where near what we originally got.

Those examples are just to show what flooding the eBay market will do. The collectors get their item, and then the next collector gets it, and then the next, but after all those collectors have that piece you get stuck with the bulk and can’t give them away. So its a very risky business buying in bulk and selling on eBay and you definitely have to walk a fine line and time it the right way. You have to mix it up and keep the inventory different which is what we always try to do. 

I guess to sum it all up, we’ve had a major love/hate relationship with eBay. I remember the day we made our first big sale. We were actually both working in our office and a guy made a solid offer on a street sign we recently picked, we countered and met him in the middle point of his offer and our asking price. He accepted, and we were so pumped that day. I mean we were straight high fiving and chest bumping pumped. The guy we originally bought the sign from literally was going to use the sign for scrap metal and we convinced him to sell it to us. He looked at us like we were nuts when we shelled out money for that sign, but it did pay off in the end. That first big eBay sale gave us that feeling that we could do this. Than we got our first positive feedback review, than our first return customer, and so on. Whether we are at a point that we love or hate eBay, it has played an important role as to where we are as a company today, but its definitely something we may not want to do forever, and being dubbed a Top Rated Seller shows the hard work and dedication we’ve put into online selling. With nearly 100 positive reviews and 0 negatives, I’d say people either like us or the product, and whichever it is, we’ll continue to chug along.

[tricityrevivals]

Blog Chapter 1.8: Flea Market Flip...and our run in with TV Shows Most of you probably don't know we were selected to be on Flea Market Flip. Well, kind of sorta were selected. Here's the story of our experience with the process and the producers of that show. In the early days I had come across an ad on craigslist for Flea Market Flip. We were a fan of the show and we had recently restored a bunch of furniture among other things as of late. I applied, sent pictures of our items, all of our info and they wound up getting back to us within the hour. They wanted us! Sent a huge packet for us to fill out with a ton of information we had to give them. The process was moving fast.  Luke was unsure about it from the beginning, but like any good business partner and friend was supportive of it. We take each others word a lot in our business. I may not see the vision sometimes and he does, or vice a versa. My thinking was go on, win the show, get five grand to play with as a winners prize, and most of all get some exposure for our new and upcoming company. Simple enough. At this point we were in 100%. We had a skype meeting with the producers all set up and the morning of the meeting they had to cancel for some reason, but rescheduled for a few days later. It was kind of a good thing they did because we were able to take a step back and look at this as a whole. In those few days, they contacted us again asking for more pictures of items we had restored. We didnt have many more pictures, but sent what we had. They immediately responding saying "Those are great, but we need more pictures so do what you have to do". In other words, they explained send items we have and than Google what our vision would be and send a completed product or someone elses work we could find a picture of. We weren't really feeling that. Taking someone else's work and claiming it was ours. They said it wasn't taking their work but taking their vision. To us, that's basically saying Ok you want to be an NFL Quarterback? Send over some tapes of the QB's you like and than explain to us how you're going to do what they do. We just really weren't feeling it. We told them that and one of the Producers wound up calling Luke on the Phone and he was brutally honest "Listen, I dont even want to do this show, but my business partner does, so I'm taking his word on it". The producers being subtle enough they were still pushing us for more photos of other peoples work and saying how we'd do great in this competition. We decided to shut it down. "We are out" Is all we said in the email, and they got the point of our frustration after a week of back and forth texting and e-mailing.  A more pleasant experience we had would have to be the time we met a producer for the Treehouse Masters Show on Animal Planet. I had never seen the show, but when the guy arrived and explained where these items were going I heard Luke say how much he loved the show. He explained to us how these vintage windows he was buying was for a Treehouse in Upstate New York and that the whole house is going to be built with vintage windows. Lucky for us we just had a huge score on about 30 vintage windows. They cleaned us out, bought every window we had, and than starting looking at our other items to see if they could use them. He couldn't have been any nicer or genuine, and was a great overall experience doing business with these guys. You can see our windows on Treehouse Masters Season 7 Episode 2: GlassHouse Treehouse. They have even contacted us after looking for certain items if they are in the East Coast shooting an episode, but so far all they have bought are the windows, because its usually short notice, and random bulk items they need. We still maintain a good relationship with them and hope to find some more items they could use in the future. I think its either a sign or something that TV shows are surrounding our business. Maybe were destined to be "found" and be the next American Pickers?  In this last example, we were just going about our everday business attending estate sales when we pulled up to a house in Wyckoff and were overwhelmed with the amount of big money items this guy had. His name was Mitch, and he previously had an antique shop in Midland Park, but was now filming his new show for The History Channel. American Pickers will be going off the air soon, and History is trying to find a show to replace that and its popularity. Mitch is called the History Chaser and he basically connects families and people with items that have been found elsewhere in the world. So if you're grandfather's military helmet is found by a guy in California and you live in NJ, he tracks you down and reconnects you with your families item. It's a great basis for a show and definitely something I would watch. Anyway, we met Mitch and his crew and probably spent a good 4 hours there looking thru his stuff and just conversating. We hit it off almost immediately and after about an hour, he decided to take us in his house to show us his not for sale personal collection (Mind you, there was hundreds of people lined up just looking at his stuff for sale and his crew and sons were equipped with walkie talkies to be able to contact Mitch at any point in this ruckus). Mitch has a great eye for items and finds a lot of stuff you just dont see anymore. Anything from movie posters to circus items, and sports memorabilia. We spent the most we have ever spent at an estate sale in the history of our business. It was worth it, and we made a great contact and someone who is genuinely a good person. He took a liking to us, because I think he saw a little bit of himself when he was starting up back in the day when he saw us. We wish Mitch the History Chaser nothing but the best in his upcoming show, and he'll always have our support. Be sure to keep an eye out very soon for the Pilot Episode! Besides that, there have been some minor run ins with people from TV shows- nothing really with an interesting story but we have talked to Robbie Wolfe thru Facebook before, and hes a great guy. We hope to one day take the trip to Iowa and stop by his shop! Most recently, we've starting filming some of our picks, road trips, and adventures. You can look forward to us putting them together as a mini-series with short episodes very soon. We get so many messages and emails that people want to come on picks with us, and although we havent had the opportunity to bring anyone yet, we want our audience to feel like they are right there with us by making these videos. We want everyone to see everything that goes into finding a pick, selling items, everything that we do will be an inside look of whats going on with us. We look forward to releasing these by years end, and hope you guys look forward to seeing them and continuing to support us! Overall TV, Producers, Show Runners can be a hit or miss. As you've seen we've had both positive and negative experiences. Being a new business you have stars in your eyes when you think your brand could have its own TV show, but there's just so much that goes into it than the final product you see on an episode. I personally think it would be A+ TV if you took us and all the personalities we surround ourselves with and gave us a show, but than again maybe we all have the same sense of humor in our group and everyone outside of it would look at us like we are weirdos. Either way, there's not a day that goes by that we aren't doing something interesting or having fun. So TV Show or not, well continuing to chug along and just maybe one day someone else will be writing a blog about their experiences with us when we make it big with our own TV show, but if not, we're just fine with that.

[tricityrevivals]

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Chapter 1.7: The Elephants Trunk Flea Market

So as we’ve said before we weren’t sure if we would ever do another flea market. Well, we decided to pickup and try out the Elephants Trunks Flea Market in New Milford, Connecticut. Heres a brutally honest review of our experience as vendors there.

To start, we paid for a “reserved vendor space” which basically means you are guaranteed one of the 100 spaces available. For those of you who don’t know, as a vendor if you don’t pay for a reserved space you basically wait in a line of hundreds of cars waiting to get in. If the field fills up and you haven’t passed the line yet, they turn you around and send you home. Thats something we didn’t want to risk. 

We brought 90% of our inventory with us and had to rent a 14 foot box truck. The whole truck rental process was a nightmare. I’m not going to sit here and call out the company but lets just say we were given a quote, and when we went to pickup the truck quote changed. Different people were working different days so I guess there was some miscommunication. Also, we went an hour and a half early to see if we could pickup the truck early the day before. They said we would be charged another days fee if we wanted to pickup now instead of in an hour and half. Something I really don’t understand is a business that doesn’t work with its customers. I mean, the truck was literally just sitting in the lot, no one else had it reserved, and that hour and a half would have given us a good head start on loading hundreds of items. Also we were paying for the gas and all the fees so for an extra hour or so they wanted to charge us about another hundred and something dollars. We wound up leaving and coming back an hour later to pickup.

After spending pretty much all day loading up the truck Saturday, we called it a night knowing we had to be up and on the road at 3AM. Reserved vendors have to be in their spot by 4:30AM.

Around 3AM Luke showed up outside my house in the Truck with two of our good friends in another pickup that were going to help that day. We started the ride to New Miford, Connecticut. 

It was an EXPERIENCE driving that 14 foot truck to New Milford, Connecticut. First off, something we really didn’t think about was that it was an 11 foot tall truck, and our GPS was taking us the way of passenger vehicles. It wasn’t until we saw a low clearance sign (8 Feet) going 65 MPH on a highway that we may have a problem finding a route to the Flea Market. We had to pull off the highway and take the side roads of NY State, which was one of the nicest small towns  we’ve come across. After taking a few detours we finally arrived around 4:30AM.

We pull up happy that we are there and the people running the Flea Market shut down our hopes immediately. They won’t let our two friends in to help unload, and they notify us that with this truck we are going to have about 6 feet only of a 20'x20’ space to display our items. The numbers weren’t adding up and we just agreed to get in and start up our day. When we pull up to our spot we asked the guy directing traffic is we could purchase another space next to us. We realized these spaces were definitely not 20 feet by 20 feet as they described online. They were cramming vendors in as tight as possible. We wound up purchasing another space, not something we wanted to do but it was a necessity. 

The vendors here we noticed throughout the day all know each other. They are regulars, and when they see fresh meat pull up everyone wants to see the items they have. We had a bunch of people waiting outside of our truck much like you would see on storage wars waiting for us to open the back of our truck. They all had flashlights because it was still dark at the time. Before we even unloaded the truck people were buying items from us. About 10-12 of our items literally came out of our truck and onto theirs. It was great start to the day. 

Myself and Luke continued to unload all the items and we had everything set up by about 6:00AM. What took us 5-6 hours to load the day before took us about an hour to unload. 

Early on in the Flea Market, you have all your dealers, vendors, and store owners walking around. This is where you’re going to make the majority of you’re money. By 10am I think we made about 80% of the total money we took home that day. From 10am-2pm we made the other 20%. It was a long four hours of window shoppers, but we were happy to have potential buyers and get compliments on our stuff. 

The Flea Market itself is packed. At an Estimated 10-15 Thousand people a day walking around this was definitely what we liked to see. The prior Flea Market at Allaire State Park we were lucky to see even a quarter of those people. Most of the people were friendly, others not, but in the end everyone is looking for a deal. Thats what I think sticks out most in this whole experience. People are tight with their money, and I understand that in this day and age, but certain items we can bend on others we can’t. Thats what a lot of people don’t understand for us as vendors.

Make no mistake about it, we were priced to sell, everything was, we probably had the cheapest prices we’ve ever had on our items. I guess just some people aren’t willing to spend and really depends on the crowd that day. I know we talked to a few friendly vendors around us and they said the crowd was smaller and cheaper than usual. Maybe we just had bad luck with a day. 

I’m not saying we did bad. We had a really really good day. We still took home the majority of our stuff but we made a lot of money. It also cost us a good amount though as well. Renting a truck. Paying for a double spot. Gas. All the miscellaneous costs. Would we do it again? Maybe, but it was a long and tiring day. It was a 20 hour day when it was all said and done, including travel. Thats something we have to take into account. If we did do it again we’d probably have to tweak a few things, but its all a learning experience. We had a lot of fun, and we had the support of our two friends all day, as well as my wife and Lukes girlfriend take the ride up to support us (and definitely shop as well). Overall it was a great experience for it being our first time-we may do it again, or we may try out Brimfield the next time around, but we’re definitely not ready after this experience to call it quits on flea market possibilities just yet.

[tricityrevivals]

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Chapter 1.6: All Hail to the King

Mike Wolfe. Many of you know him from The History Channels “American Pickers” show. You know him and his best friend from childhood Frank Fritz for digging through barns, negotiating deals, and finding the most interesting characters along the way. As you have seen on the TV show, these guys were the originators of the game. They brought it into the publIc eye, for everyone to see, and grew an audience unlike any other. I honestly don’t think we would be in this business if it wasn’t for this show and the popularity of it. We’ve already said this is where our original lightbulb idea came from- “Wouldn’t it be cool to do what these guys do?”. A lot may think they know the story just by watching the show, but you couldn’t be anymore wrong about that judgement.

To start, did you know Mike Wolfe is the sole owner of Antique Archaeology? Yes, the Antique Archaeology business that’s featured on the show. Maybe you’ve seen the big sprinter van with the store logo on the side, or the Leclaire, Iowa store or even the Nashville store. Danielle is employed there and is always calling the boys with new leads. That’s right, Frank Fritz has nothing to do with it. If you look closely at some episodes you’ll notice they buy separately, and almost always keep their money and items separate. The reason is because Mike sells through Antique Archaeology, and Frank sells through his own personal website. Hearing this, and knowing how massive Antique Archaeology is, we couldn’t believe it was just Mike. I guess we always just assumed it was both of their doing. We couldn’t be anymore wrong on that assumption.

Prior to the show, Mike owned a warehouse where he kept all his stuff, and he didn’t even have a cash register because he did all of his selling online (*Cough*Cough* sound familiar?). He has been self employed for about thirty years. Looking into him a little more after hearing this, we soon learned American Pickers was his brainchild as well. He thought of the show, pitched it to various different networks for about four and a half years, and got denials from pretty much every network. This didn’t stop him though. After a failed pitch, he would follow up with the network and ask why they didn’t want to pick up his TV show idea. Why? Who was in the room? What did they say? What did they like? What didn’t they like? Persistence. The guy was actually filming himself picking in barns to get footage to show to the networks in the beginning. A funny story he tells is when he finally got picked up by the History Channel and his show aired, the next day he shows up at his warehouse and there is 100 people lined up waiting for him to open. He also checked his email and had about 6,000 emails overnight. Pretty overwhelming for a regular guy from Iowa, but nonetheless satisfying. His persistence got him to that point. His inability to just accept the denial from big TV Networks.

Mike and Frank first met in Sudlow Intermediate school in Davenport, Iowa. Both young and into collecting different things they developed a friendship they continued throughout high school. Frank, although always a collector was a fire inspector for over 25 years. After making a big resale turning $15 into $475, he decided he could probably make a living doing something he enjoyed, so he quit job and opened Frank Fritz Finds, an online business where he would resell the items he picked. Him and Mike would constantly keep in touch and cross paths throughout their picks, and one day Mike pitched Frank on the idea of having cameras start following them around. Frank agreed to it and after gaining some footage the four and half year wait begun. When they finally got picked up by the History Channel, Mike asked Danielle Colby, a friend for over a decade to come and work for him at Antique Archaeology. The producers weren’t too happy because she was never part of the original pitch but after talking with her and Mike telling them, she works for me so I need her on the show, they soon agreed. The American Pickers were born.

Mike’s dream, had finally come true. The show broke the History Channel premiere record at the time, and it was an instant hit.

Anyone who would read this success story would chalk it up as a feel good win win scenario. Mike accomplished what he had worked so hard for. In reality this was just the beginning for him. Now all eyes were on him. He was known and loved by many, but the persistence is what we love most about Mike. I’m sure anyone would be satisfied being a TV Star, owning a huge successful business with two locations, and having all the money you could possibly need. Well, apparently not Mike. This is where you can see the entrepreneur in Mike. Books, Clothing Brands, Lighting Company, Kid Pickers TV Show, the list goes on for all the things he’s accomplished aside from the show and Antique Archaeology. Not to mention the show is in its 17th season with no end in sight. No one is tired of him, mostly because I think he connects with his audience so well. He’s a regular guy, no Hollywood fakeness. No big headed celebrity disorder. Also, he just seems so genuine and passionate about his craft.

We admire Mike for variety of reasons. He’s the godfather of picking, I don’t know if we could ever be on his level but we sure as hell are shooting for it. His business is amazing, and his items show how much hard work he puts in everyday. It’s to the point where non collectors are even buying his stuff, which is impressive. People just want a t-shirt with his logo on it. He’s doing it right, and for him to set an example for us to go by is something we cannot thank him enough for. He gave everyone in America the blueprints to picking. Some see it as entertainment, a TV show, but we saw it as an opportunity to learn from the best. It’s funny sometimes while on a pick well overhear each other using Mike phrases and we always chuckle at one another. “The bottoms all roached out”, or “I think your a little heavy on that price”. It’s not intentional, but after watching episodes over and over again, sometimes the phrases just come out. Where he is at is where we strive to be one day. With enough persistence, we will get there.

We hope to one day be able to meet Mike and just have a conversation with him. No business talk or crazy fan questions, but just a genuine conversation. Being in the industry we’ve come across a lot of people who met Mike and Frank along the way. One guy I specifically remember talking to was trying to tell us how Mikes a phony, and the show is fake.

“I went to a book signing and brought a coin worth $250, I said, hey Mike what do you think the value on this coin is? He replied I don’t know man, like $50. So that’s when I knew he was a fraud”

We replied to the gentleman

“Did you ever think maybe Mike didn’t want anything to do with you when he’s at a book signing with 2,000 people asking him tons of questions?”

“No, that’s not it he’s a fake”

Well this guy was special. We could tell he had something against Mike for some reason, and he seemed a little crazy. Anyway, with the bad always comes the good. Other people who have met him has said hes such a nice guy. Genuinely talks to you as a person and not a fan. When meeting other pickers or collectors this topic almost always surfaces. Have you ever met Mike Wolfe? For now, the answer is no, but one day, we hope to be lucky enough to cross paths with the Pickin’ King. When that day does come, the first words out of our mouth are going to be “Thank You”.

I guess to sum it all up, if you strive to one day be the best Basketball Player you watch Michael Jordan, and learn from him. You practice non stop develop your craft and get better and better each day. This is kind of what we have done, and still do to this day with Mike Wolfe. Sure, there may be plenty of collectors bigger and better than Mike out there, but one thing for sure is those people didn’t maximize their potential. Mike did. Recently I had a conversion with an old high school buddy who had reached out after hearing what we were doing and seeing our items and he said

“You guys are like the new Mike Wolfe’s”

Even though he doesn’t know it, that is one of the best compliments we could receive.

Mike Wolf, if you ever come across this small town blog we want you to know we support you and will always be rooting for you and your new ventures whatever it may be. Besides our love for collecting, and picking, you are the main reason we attempted to start this business, and grow it to what it has become in such a short period of time. You gave us hope starting off when we were trying to find our path. Now everyday we get to do what we love. Thank you Mike Wolfe!

#mikewolfe #americanpickers #historychannel #pickers #nj #tricityrevivals #antiques #oddities #entrepreneur #king #legend

[tricityrevivals]

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Chapter 1.5: Mr. Teterboro

It was just a normal day at the office for us organizing, posting/looking into Items, and finalizing our schedule for the upcoming week. We were put onto a lead by Kate, Chris’s wife, for a lady named Cathy who is moving to Florida soon. She and her boyfriend Chris, of 25 years, inherited his Aunt and Uncles house in Saddle Brook, NJ. After calling Cathy and speaking with her a while we decided lets pick up and go today. She was pretty overwhelmed with the amount of stuff in the attic mainly. We put everything else on hold and headed over there and good thing we did.

We went there with all parties knowing the deal. She needed some extra cash as well as help getting rid of the clutter. We needed more inventory, and we promised to go through everything because we didn’t want to take her family heirlooms. From the moment we walked in Cathy and her dog Bella couldn’t have been any more hospitable to us. We got to know each other and than she started telling us about her uncle who has owned this house previously.

“His nickname was Mr. Teterboro, have you ever heard of him?”

Both of us looking puzzled at each other

“No…. we haven’t”

“He was one of the first employees ever to work at Teterboro Airport, he was there for over 55 Years”

We couldn’t think of anything else to say but

“Wow…really?”

As if she was going to lie about that.

She went on to tell us how he he was friends with tons of celebrities and presidents. He met all of these people mostly through Teterboro Airport.

Let’s get into Teterboro Airport for a second for most of you who don’t know.

Teterboro Airport is a general aviation relief airport located in the boroughs of Teterboro, Moonachie, and Hasbrouck Heights in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is owned and managed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and operated by AFCO AvPORTS Management. The airport is in the New Jersey Meadowlands, 12 miles from Midtown Manhattan, which makes it very popular for private and corporate aircraft. The airport has a weight limit of 100,000 pounds on aircraft, which is meant to make it nonviable as a commercial airport. The airport takes up almost all of Teterboro and consists of 827 acres and has more than 1,137 employees. Teterboro is home to many private aviation charter companies that fly nationally and globally. The Aviation Hall of Fame of New Jersey is also on the airport grounds.

So now that you know my wikipedia copy and paste skills I’ll tell you from a real perspective on what Teterboro Airport means to us. As two kids growing up in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ, Teterboro Airport is literally in our backyard. It is a staple of our town, even our high school mascot is the Hasbrouck Heights Aviators. The airport is located right across the highway from our football field, and almost any time of the day or night you can look into the sky and see planes coming or going from Teterboro Airport. Constantly you’re hearing about celebrities coming and going through the airport if they have shows in the area. We even took field trips in grade school to learn about day to day operations.

So for us hearing just the name “Mr. Teterboro” we knew we were in for a treat that day. After chatting a little more we noticed Cathy had layed out some items on the table that she thought may be worth something. As we approached and started browsing we saw some generic antique scales, a couple of toys, german beer steins, and then we saw it, Frank Sinatras Funeral Mass Program. Only 400 of these were made and they were only given to the people actually invited to his funeral. As we picked it up and started browsing through it Cathy said

“You know he was friends with Frank”

“Really? ….He was?”

Again, as if she would lie about something like that.

Both of us being huge Sinatra fans we were in awe. Who was this man “Mr. Teterboro” who even Frank Sinatra liked enough to become friends with?

H.J. (HANK) ESPOSITO, better known as “Mr. Teterboro,” was a U.S. Army Air Corps veteran and served in Europe during World War II. After that, he embarked upon a half-century-long career at Atlantic Aviation’s New Jersey FBOs in 1949. He was also a graduate of our Alma Mater Hasbrouck Heights High School in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ which made this pick all the more special. He later moved to Saddle Brook, NJ with his wife Helen who he was happily married to until the day he died.

“Unfortunately Uncle Hank became very ill when Frank died, and he couldn’t attend his funeral in California, So he wrote a letter to Franks assistant whom he had known to explain why he wasnt there”

Frank Sinatras assistant of 21 years Dorothy Uhlemann had written a letter back to Hank after the funeral and thought it would be best that she send a Funeral Mass Program to Hank even though he couldnt make it. Frank and his assistant Dorothy were so close he even left her a cash gift in his will of a reported $50,000.

(Read the personalized letter in photos above)

As amazing as that story was what we saw next really put into perspective of who Hank was. Cathy pre-warned us these items weren’t for sale, but that they were amazing. What could be more amazing than a legitimate documented relationship with Frank Sinatra? She pulled out a test tube with a label on it, and an old zippo lighter. Seems pretty normal until we actually saw what these items were. In the plastic test tube container it was actual D-Day Sand Hank took home with him from the war. Amazing. In our hands, holding the history of America from someone who was there. It was labeled “D-Day June 6th 1944 Utah Beach”. Possibly one of the most infamous battles in American History. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about it was the graphic battle in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan. The zippo lighter was amazing as well. While at war Hank inscribed on one side “1943-44 "Espo”“ on the other side he inscribed the places he had been "France Belgium Germany England”. Sometimes you see in the movies things like this but this was real life. Holding these items it got real vey quick. Just think about not just Hank but all the soliders there that day. What they must have went through and seen that day. All the different countries they were shipped to, and Hank inscribing and keeping track of them. It was different times, and the start of the foundation that made this country what it is today. We’re lucky because in this business you’re constantly reminded of America’s past time, and you have to respect the people who layed the ground work for us to get us here.

(See Photos of the lighter/sand up above)

Now by this time we were chomping at the bit to get up to the attic and see what else could possibly be up there. We had just come across 3 items we never thought we’d see. What else could we find? After sharing a few more funny personal stories about Hank, Cathy walked us up to the attic. It was loaded to the brim. We’ve never seen an attic this packed. Filled boxes everywhere you looked, furniture, crawlspaces with no more room to put anything, and a loft with things hanging and piled everywhere. Now we saw why she had said she was getting overwhelmed trying to go through all of the stuff. We told Cathy that this was going to take a while and she could go downstairs if she wanted. We said we’ll make a pile and at the end she can come up, check on the stuff so it doesn’t have sentimental value, and than we can work on a price. There was just so much stuff we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to skip a box or an area. We had to see what we could find.

We for once came unprepared for this pick. We had the most important part- the cash, but we forgot our gloves and masks we like to wear for safety when were going through old dusty dirty attics. This especially started effecting us a few hours in. Coughing, sneezing, squinting eyes. I can guarantee we wont make that mistake again. By the 2 hour mark we had already built up a pretty decent pile of things we were interested in, and we were only a little more than halfway through. We had to suck it up. You don’t get opportunities like this everyday.

When you’re picking, you’re going through the items of someone’s life. Their story, told through their things. Even the stuff that wasn’t valuable was worth looking at for us. For example, we came across Hanks old flight log from Teterboro Airport, Military Paperwork, Books, Clothing, Music Records, Tools, Repair Kits, Artwork, and Posters just to name some. After looking through all of these inexpensive items is the part where you really get a feel for who he was and what he enjoyed. That’s the most underrated part of picking to us because nobody talks about it. We’re not there to find valuable stuff and run. We’d like to get to know your story so we can pass that on to someone who may buy one of his items from us. The story is everything, and sometimes unfortunately when your gone no one is there to tell your story, but your things will always be there to tell it.

Hank was a cool dude. He had exactly what we look for to sell. Going through his things you could tell by the huge belt buckles, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats he must have been some character. We also found a lot of “Dear Hanks”. Letters. Not just any letters, but personalized hand written letters from people such as George HW Bush, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Frank Sinatra, and John Wayne. I’m sure there were tons of more letters but it would have taken us all day to go through the box of them. Cathy told us Hanks favorite person to hang out with besides Sinatra was John Wayne. Every time he’d come into town Hank would always have a bottle of whiskey and big cigars waiting for him. They’d hang out, drink, eat, conversate, and smoke, and eventually call it a night. What stories he must of had hanging out with all these celebrities and presidents.

Hank being at Teterboro Airport for 55 years says something about Hanks character as well. Being in a profession and doing it for 55 years is an accomplishment to say the least. If it tells you anything it’ll tell you that he truly loved his job. He loved what he did, and when you love what you do it isn’t really a job to you. Even when he retired from Teterboro Airport he couldn’t stay away for long. The job offers came in from various different companies and everyone wanted him to be a consultant. When you throw the word “consultant” on a job title you’re basically paying someone for their experience and knowledge of that industry. Whenever you can just give your opinion on how to make a company better and get paid for it, you know you have to be an expert, which is what he was. He settled on Atlantic Aviation, wound up keeping that job for another 7-8 years until he officially retired, only because he got sick.

Another note worth mentioning is that Hank was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in 1986. Still at about 35 years of service and another 20 to go, the Hall of Fame thought he deserved to be inducted. This is the same Aviation Hall of Fame that has names like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart in it. Imagine what he must have meant and.the things he must have done for the Aviation industry to be inducted into the actual Hall of Fame. Only the best of the best make it here, and him and his family will forever be able to say he’s with the elite in this profession.

At the four and a half hour mark we finally called it quits after going through as much as we could and pretty much got to see everything available. Some of our favorite items include a busted plane propeller, parachute, cigar memorabilia, some old aviation calendars, and general vintage knick knacks about 3 full boxes worth.

As far as the items we picked, they weren’t worth much monetary wise, but the experience, stories, and items we were able to look through were priceless. To this day it’s still our favorite pick.

We tried to put a dent in as much as we could because the goal for Cathy was to get rid of the clutter to make the move to Florida in the future easier. The reality was that there was just way too much stuff. Realizing that, we offered another service to Cathy- a clean out. Generally when we’ve picked through everything and decided what’s valuable and what’s not there’s almost always leftovers. Unused or broken furniture, which takes up the most space, and boxes filled with general household items that even Hank and Helen probably haven’t used in over 20 years. We made a small dent but it wasn’t enough. We exchanged numbers and said we’ll figure something out to help out getting rid of the rest of the stuff. We had to stick to our word and help them get rid of the junk.

After running some numbers and figuring out details to make the clean out work, we decided we were going to do the clean out pro bono. We realized whatever price we gave would have put them over budget, and with a big move coming up we felt they could put that money to better use somewhere else. We’ve never done that before but all things considered, if anything, we figured we owed it to Hank. We’re sure he wouldn’t have wanted to overwhelm Cathy and Chris with all his stuff, and just the opportunity to see his stuff and hear his stories was enough for us to come to that decision. Cathy couldn’t have been any more thankful offering us lunch and drinks every day (alcoholic drinks). She was also up there with us on the three day clean out helping sort and organize. She also said we could take whatever we thought was cool or thought we could resell that we may have missed. In the end it was mostly garbage, but we found a few hidden items like typewriters, some cool coins, and an old schwinn bicycle.

In the end, the pick was amazing. The clean out was brutal, and Hanks stories were legendary. We were glad we got the opportunity to go through Hanks stuff, and even own some of it. A lot of the items sold fairly quickly so it shows we had a good knack for finding what people liked. It was truly an honor to see some of the things Hank collected that had been hidden from the public for decades. Although we’ve never had the chance to meet Hank, we do feel we have a special bond with him. His story is one of many, but its pretty damn cool to hear it, and it’s a great reminder of why we love doing what we do. Picking. You get to meet the most incredible people and hear the most incredible stories. Without these people and these stories nothing would ever be passed down, and were just trying to do our part and continue to pass down the knowledge and the story of our items past. Thank you for creating such a legacy for us to discover Mr. Teterboro! Until we meet again…

#pickers #nj #vintage #antiques #oddities #tricityrevivals #Teterboro #atlanticaviation #Hasbrouckheightsnj #hometown

[tricityrevivals]

Blog Chapter 1.4: But it's an antique! Antique. Its a Category not a price point. So often these days the word antique is thrown around for any type of older item. If I could have a nickel for every person who calls their stuff antiques when its not I'd be a wealthy wealthy man. An Antique is a collectable item, at least 100 years old. It is collected or desirable because of its age, beauty, rarity, condition, utility, personal emotional connection, and/or other unique features. It is an object that represents a previous era or time period in human society. Key Words there- At least 100 years old. No your 1970s toaster oven is not an antique. Your Toaster Oven falls in the category of Vintage- WhIch is at least 20 years old. So technically 1997 would be considered vintage. Man do I feel old. And by the way, it's still not worth much. Anyway, getting back to the big picture. We've now established that just because you have something old doesn't mean it's an antique. You should also know just because it is old doesn't mean it's worth something. Too often we come across the client who says they have tons of Antiques and all this stuff that's going to make us rich. Really, they just know we pay cash and they need some for whatever reason. If you mix old items in with sentimental value its never a good combo for our side as the pickers. It's tough to tell someone who inherited their parents collection or items listen, this isn't worth anything. Because to them its already worth the world. The memories of their maybe now passed loved ones. Maybe their loved ones telling them, when I pass, you can have this, it's worth a lot- only to find out that its really not. Some people get angry at us, some people get upset, others just think were trying to scam them. It's really none of the above to us. In this business you can't get emotionally attached because you will never last. We love every single item we pick because we found it, cleaned it, brought it back to life, and now someone else gets to enjoy it. That's just how this works. You have to understand someone else who's paying good money for these items is probably going to enjoy it way more than I ever would. Pickers are collectors. That's how you get started, but to be successful in this industry you have to be able to let go for the greater good. So often the sentimental value drives up the asking price. Sometimes because they think it's worth more, other times because they want to justify getting paid a good price to get rid of a family heirloom. People can live with parting with things for a good price it seems. The most common line we personally hear is "Im asking 200 for it, that's what its selling for on ebay". Unfortunately this is where we have to drop the hammer on them and deliver that news. Well you see some crazy guy in Idaho does have it listed for sale for 200 but he's been asking that price for over a year and it hasn't sold. You have to look at the sold items on ebay. Most of these items sell for around 100 on ebay. Also ebay takes 10% of your sale, so we'd be interested for like 50, and maybe we can come away with 30-40 profit. That's when the reactions above get underway. We even show them on our phones sometimes and they still don't believe us. I get it, you have a number in your head and were offering you a quarter of what you thought you'd get. It sucks, but that's how it goes. So often we get that callback, "Ok, I can do 50 if you want to pick it up". Most likely after trying to sell it for a crazy price for a few months with no bites. It also has to do with your audience. Your repeat customers and your relationships you have built with buyers. This is not just lets list it on ebay like anyone can. For example if we were listing something and a private person was at the same time it would come a lot easier to us. We have hundreds of items for sale, so when ten items are selling and you have to ship those ten items the next day, you forget about that one item sometimes until it sells. If you're a private seller listing just one item you're checking it everyday to no avail. It gets frustrating. On top of that, we have repeat buyers who when we come across a certain category like toys or photography items we send them a text, and its almost always sold before we even buy it from the customer. Its work, it's not that simple, but if it was that easy everyone would do it right? You also sometimes come across the items that used to be hot that have now gone out of style. Antique furniture is a big one. People used to pay loads of money for antique furniture sets, but now it's becoming a little harder to find buyers. We are by no means furniture experts but for our customer base its not a good investment sometimes for the amount of money spent and the amount of time you will have to sit on it and find a buyer. Some stores and sellers do great in these areas, but were not one of them. We've never lost money on any of them but its just not our cup of tea I guess you could say. One of the funniest conversations we probably had with a potential customer while on a pick was when she had an antique commode. A wooden toilet. Her prized possession and the item she thought she was going to cash in big on. She was shocked to say the least when we said we weren't interested. "But it's an antique!" She kept telling us After about a five minute conversation on this toilet, I finally had to say "Listen, do you know anyone who wants to buy a used toilet?" "........No" "Exactly, neither do we, in the end of the day- Yes its an antique, semi-rare, great condition, but it sure as hell isn't beautiful or wanted by everyone." Although it was an antique, who the hell would want it. We sure had no customer base for it, and on top of that we've seen these sell for pretty cheap. It was just an item we didnt see was worth the risk. I don't think someone would actually use it for what its meant to be used for anymore, and what kind of conversation piece is that? "O, what's that beautiful wooden thing in the corner?" "Isn't it great! It's an antique toilet! Back in the day people would take shits in it!" Huh? In our, business we mostly deal with vintage items, although we do come across a good amount of Antiques from time to time. Unfortunately that's what this business category is called. The antique business. Not everything in your antique store is going to be an actual antique. Go into any antique store and start asking what year is this from, I can guarantee only about 50% of the items are actual antiques. Anyway most of these real antiques the normal everyday person cant afford. Mint Victorian Era furniture set- 7-8 grand at a minimum, but it is fun to call yourself an antiquer and go antiquing with your significant other to see what you can find on the weekends. Just know though, it may be awesome, but its probably not an antique. #diy #antiques #oddities #bergencounty #nj #nyc #pickers

[tricityrevivals]

(Pictured: Our Hoboken Bottle; A few of our favorite items we found on our first pick) Blog Chapter 1.3: Our First Pick Getting to our first pick was a long time coming. We knew what we had wanted to do for months. Find a pick, Get a lead, but it's not as simple as you would think. It takes willingness from both parties. The seller has to want to sell. They also have to realize you can't pay them retail prices for the items there selling. The buyer (us) has to want their items, see a profit in them, and be able to negotiate the price with a good enough margin to make money. This is where all the research we had done for months came in handy for us. Luke had ran into a guy locally who has lived a few blocks from him in Oradell, NJ. He was retired and moving his family to North Carolina. After speaking a little to him he realized this was the opportunity to set something up with him. The word "picking" was never brought up. He explained we buy and resell vintage items after hearing Len had a bunch of stuff in this category. He had a barn full of stuff, and we were ready. It was a sunny Wednesday, and I showed up to Luke's house and picked him up. He explained to me about Len and all the things he said he had in the short 5 minute drive to his house. We pulled up, parked in front of his house, and started walking down the driveway. At the end of the driveway was Len and his son Christian, waiting for us. Luke and Len had met prior so he introduced me, as well as Len introducing his son to both of us. We broke the ice by talking about some furniture he had pulled out of his barn already. Most of the pieces were sold already pending pickup, but as we were talking me and Luke kept looking into the barn from a distance to see if we could get a glance of what was in there. Much reminiscent of a Christmas morning trying to peak under the tree with my sister before my parents woke up, I truly couldn't wait to dive in. We learned a little about Len- He was a firefighter and police officer locally for over 30 years. We have so much respect for our first responders so we were lucky when he shared some funny stories of the job and the past on how policing used to be. He then said alright let me give you a background in this barn your about to go in to. "This barn is original from the 1800s. It.used to be located about a block away from here, and around the 1900s they moved it on logs to where it stands today. It took them 3 weeks to pick it up and move it foot by foot to this spot" Pretty amazing story to think about and hear from the owner himself. We were also close to George Washingtons retreat route, so the possibility back in the day he saw this, walked by it, was awesome. Now too often something old just gets demolished and rebuilt, but back then that seemed like it was just wasted resources. Why waste, when you can just pick it up and move it. We were given the go ahead to enter the barn. We explained this may take a while. Hearing that, Len decided to stayed outside and took a seat, and sent his son Christian with us. The barn was similar to a four garage if you're trying to envision it. It was big. Also in the back was a stairwell leading to the top where an enormous loft was. We started from right to left. The gameplan was stay together and dig through everything. Four eyes were better than two, and we figured we wouldn't miss much if we stayed together and went section by section. Well that gameplan went out the window about fifteen minutes in. We would see something across the barn that we recognized and had to go grab it immediately. Pretty soon, I was downstairs alone, Luke was in the loft alone, and Christian was on the other side of the barn pulling out stuff he thought we may like. Every item we found we'd shout out to Len a price that we thought was fair, and very rarely did he haggle with us. Both sides knew what the stuff was worth, and on top of that Len realized how much we were buying and saving him from having to clean out or throw out later on. Len and Christian were definitely salesman. Everything they could get their hands on they were throwing us great prices and it was basically to the point that we literally couldn't pass it up for the price they were giving us. At one point we thought to ourselves that by the end of the day we were going to buy 90% of the items in this barn. It wasn't junk, all quality items we knew we could sell quick. Len had quite the collectIon, a lot of different categorical items. He had a lot of farmhouse decor which has become very popular as of late. If you watch any HGTV you should know what items I'm talking about. To name a few items we found- A huge vintage buzzsaw blade, amish made bucksaws, barn windows/shutters/doors, washboards, atlas canning jars, and galvanized tubs. Of course some of you may say what the hell are you going to do with a 30 inch buzzsaw blade? Wall art, or now businesses like to print their logo on these and make it a cool vintage looking sign of sorts. That's where our research comes in handy. Besides that he also had a vintage collection of police and fire memorabilia like Fire Helmets, Police Batons, Vintage Fire extinguishers, as well as police patches. We are very big on police patches. Although not really expensive, Each pick or location we go to we try to find a police patch of that area or ask if they have any for sale. We've accumulated an entire binder booklet so far, and we hope one day to have enough for an entire wall to display. I'm not going to list everything we had found that day, but what I will say is sometimes you come across items in picking that just mean so much to you for one reason or another. A particular item me and Luke found that day that we thought was amazing was an Old Glass Bottle inscribed - J. GALLER 123-125 Grand St. Hoboken, NJ. Not dated but from research approximately 1925-1950. This bottle isn't worth much money wise, but for us this bottle represents a lot more than what we can get paid for it. It's priceless, and its not for sale. This bottle represents our first pick with Len. It represents the joy, happiness, and determination of getting to this point in our long journey to our first pick. All the hours put in, the ups and downs, the dead end leads and ideas that didn't work in the beginning. It's the coolest item, and one of the first we both looked at and smiled at each other about at Len's house when we found it. Remembering this is something we love to do, and when you love your job you'll never work a day in your life. This bottle represents the beginning of an era with us, and one of the first steps we took to grow as a business. After a four hour day of picking, we exchanged cash for the items, and Len even threw in a few small things he said he was going to throw out anyway for free. We actually had bought so much stuff that day, we had to make two trips with all the items. Len was happy. We were happy. We now had our first huge inventory. It was a successful first pick, and the ball was just starting to get rolling. We were excited for what the future held, and optimistic that we could make it in this industry. Thank you Len if your reading this from retirement life in North Carolina. We hope to run into you maybe down the road if we are ever picking in the area!

[tricityrevivals]

(Pictured: Our booth in our first and second flea & a photo of me Luke snapped on the ride home from our frustrating second flea market)

Blog

Chapter 1.2: It’s called a Flea Market..not a Free Market

Flea Markets. Walking around a usually big lot looking for bargains. The good ones sell mostly antiques, salvage items, or collectibles. Others now have turned into a mall of sorts. You have food, games, desserts, retail clothing, electronics, bedding, fragrances, supplements, music, and almost always that one stand with a person just selling their services through brochures. On the upside, Flea Markets have now turned into a family outting and I’m all for the youth of America learning the worth of a dollar and deal. Most of you would consider antiquing or attending flea markets a weekend hobby. We even enjoy attending flea markets as well, but now I’m going to give our take on the other side of the table. The vendors.

Vending at a flea market can be challenging, fun, or frustrating depending how much cash you come home with that day. It also depends on your expectations going into the day, and ultimately what type of buyers you have attending that day. Of course before you even step foot on the property you are paying whatever company is running the flea market a fee to be there. You should take this into account when choosing one. Fees Range from approximately $25 to as high as $200 per 10x10 space depending the location. Also you have to factor in gas and mileage you’re using to get there, as well as if you need to rent a truck or trailer for transport of your items. Most professionals usually have trucks or trailers already.

Now back to the buyers. Most of the pros will be there (if allowed) while your just pulling up and starting to unload. They want to be the first one to see everything available to them. This happened to us at our first flea. New to this area we turned around and asked the guy

“Can we help you?”

As he was standing over our shoulders looking in our trucks to see what we had.

“Just seeing what you have” he replied

He saw two stained glass windows we had for sale and asked

“How much?”

“150 for the pair”

“Ok I’ll take em”

Boom. First sale and we literally just pulled up two minutes ago. We looked at each other with the same idea in our heads- wow this is easy. We hadn’t even set up tables yet and were making sales.

The Tri-State area has some of the top rated Flea Markets in the Country. If you are a serious buyer you should attend these. To name a some - The Elephants Trunk in New Milford Connecticut, The Brimfield Antique Show in Brimfield Massachusetts, Golden Nugget Antique Market in Lambertville NJ, as well as about 3-4 in NYC and Brooklyn. If you are interested and seriously want to buy something Antique or Collectible you will find it here. You won’t find socks or cheap knockoffs here.

Back to our first flea. We decided to bring Courtney, Lukes Girlfriend of 9 years with us. We felt she would give off a good vibe and would make buyers feel comfortable talking and negotiating. She added a woman’s touch and had a good visual eye on where to place items to make it appealing for potential customers. We wanted them to see everything and need to come in and check our stuff out. Sometimes we can give off this mean vibe just by standing there and not even saying a word. We don’t get it, but for some reason we look intimidating to some. Admittedly, we aren’t the most outgoing people either. Courtney walked away from us turned around and looked at us and our space. She wwalked back over.

“Smile. You guys are mean muggin everyone who walks by’”

Oh great. Now that we know for sure we’re intimidating people away from our space we both put on the awkward 2nd grade fake smile when the photographer comes for school pictures. We weren’t intending on doing that I honestly think we just had soooo much stuff and there were influxes of people we were getting a little overwhelmed. That and we didn’t want to get anything stolen, we put a lot of time in selecting every single piece to bring that day. That obstacle was early on and we hurdled it pretty quickly.

After the first few hours it became slow. The big groups were disappearing and we had a lot of time to kill. At this point we made some money but nothing like we thought we’d make. We each took turns going for a walk and scouring the other booths to see what we were up against, and talk to the other vendors about how they’re doing. I am probably bias in saying this but I thought that our booth had the best stuff in this small flea market. I didn’t understand why we weren’t selling more. Everyone who came in our booth had the same reaction to how cool it was and what unique items we had. While walking around I ran into an elderly gentleman who had a sign right in front of his booth “It’s called a Flea Market not a Free Market”. I told him how I liked his sign and I was a vendor a few rows over. We started conversating about the crowd that day.

“These people think I’m just supposed to give this stuff away”

He showed me around his booth and showed me a few cool items with stories. I wasn’t interested in buying them but that didn’t stop him from trying to sell them to me. His prices were fair for a flea market but for me as a reseller there was no margin for money to be made. As I was walking away he said

“Listen, I’ve been doing this for over 40 years, it’s good for a few hundred bucks in your pocket every weekend but there’s no way to make a living doing this”

I heard him loud and clear. Although the day was still young and I still had hope, I wasn’t going to forget the words of a man who had this type of experience in these things.

When I got back to our booth, we had a conversation and decided lets start slashing prices. For most of the items we cut the price in half. Even with the prices slashed we could still make a great profit. That’s the art of picking. About 3-4 items we found in a dollar bin at a prior flea market we sold for $15-20 each. Those items true value is $15-20. We went out and dug through everything to find them, so we put in the legwork, knew what we could sell them for based off of research, and completed that job. If you think its just lucky or a risk to make a profit you’re wrong. If you learn more and more each day you can’t fail.

As the day continued the large groups started making more appearances. A lot of the stuff we were selling was free (given by my parents) or just stuff we’ve had laying around our houses for a while. In particular we has 2 pieces everyone would come up and rave over. 2 dressers, one was mine one was Luke’s we restored from the craigslist free curbside pickup. Everyone loved them, but there was one problem. Who the hell wants to buy a dresser and lug it home from a flea market? By the end of the day we got tons of compliments, but no cash in our pockets for them, thus we had to load em up and lug em back home.

The last hour finished and the final rush was over. We had a wad of cash and counted it. We made around $400. Not bad for our fist time. The guy 2 booths over said he made around $200 and next to him made around $150. I thought that was pretty impressive. We took this day as a start, something we could get better and better at. An overall success, but we werent happy. We had to do better.

Flash forward 3 weeks there was another flea in the same place. We said, ok lets go again, no bigger itema. We had just finished our first real pick so we had tons of inventory. Small and medium items worth a good amount. We packed up and headed back down. This time we were on a roll, we were getting better at this. Repeat customers were showing up and buying more things, asking for our business cards, and talking with us. We were developing relationships and Selling almost every time people came in our booth. There were no window shoppers this time around. Around 11am and only 3 hours in we saw some other vendors start packing up there booths.

“What’s going on?

“I dont know”

We went over to our friend vendor from the last flea

“Hey man why are you packing up everything ok?”

“Yeah, the rains coming, mine as well call it a day. No one comes out in the rain”

Shit. We decided were riding it out. Lets see how it plays out. Nonetheless, after about an hour and us being the only booth still stocked and ready to go, we realized, he was right. No one was coming. Time to call it a day. We made $450 surpassing what we did in a full day 3 weeks ago. We were bummed. It was such a good start, and such an abrupt end. Rain was not in the forcast that day. We packed up, soaked and miserable at a missed opportunity.

The hour ride home was silent for the first 20 minutes. Not a word said to each other. Upset, pissed off, and confused about why this happened. It wasn’t a waste of a day, but in a sense it was. Without any words spoken I know what we were both thinking. This isnt it. The old mans wise words were right. It’s a weekend gig. It’s a hobby. It’s an entire lot of lowballers. Its bargains. This is not us. This is not what we wanted for our future. Haggling, and explaining to someone the importance and story of an item to have them say “cool”, than walk away. Now trying doing that 20x in the same day. We had retail worthy items. We had stuff if we had a storefront that we could sell for triple what we were asking at that flea market. This wasn’t it, but as we’ve always said, this didn’t stop us going forward. There’s always another way. We had to figure out another way.

In the end, it was fun and it was an experience. We learned a lot and were able to meet and talk with some cool people. We hope the people who bought our stuff that day will enjoy it and pass on the story because that’s what its all about to us. Unfortunately though, as a vendor in a flea market, most people could care less about that story and let the price tag consume them. It’s not about that to us, and that’s why we haven’t set up shop at one since. Maybe in the future we will go back, and try another location, who knows, but for now we are sticking with our private buyers who enjoy our items much more.

#tricityrevivals #fleamarket #allairestatepark #nj #pickers #vendors

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Blog

Chapter 1.1: Our Logo

One of the first questions we always get when giving out a business card or brochure is “Cool logo, what does it mean?” It’s probably one of the most common question any new business gets, but sometimes in this day and age people just go with what looks cool and there’s no meaning behind it. Too often these days, especially with something like tattoos, people are just getting what looks cool at the time. This is not the case for us though.

For starters, we were looking for something with a vintage look. Something that isn’t seen very often these days. When you’re picking and see some of these old logos on advertising items such as signs, it’s unlike any made today. At the same time, we wanted modern. We’re two of the younger people in this industry, I can guarantee that. Constantly people when meeting us face to face are surprised by our age, and interest in the vintage items. I’m not saying were the only ones doing this, but personally we’ve never run into any others our age doing what we are doing in our travels.

The Bird- Many of you who know me personally will know my nickname. Bird. I’ve been called this for about 20 years. I’m not going to go into my history and how the name came about, but this name is something people know me by. I’m almost positive some people who call me Bird probably don’t even know my real full name, which is hilarious. On the other hand, if you know me by my real name, you probably will look at people like they’re nuts if they call me Bird and I respond to it. I’ve seen these encounters before with various different friends and family and its very entertaining. Some can’t see me as anything other than Chris, others can’t see me as anything else but Bird. The Bird puts my stamp on our logo is a subtle way. To the naked eye, its a bird, not THE bird. Also a bird is free, it can travel whatever direction at whatever time it wants, which is pretty fitting to our business. If we get a call or an email we are up and out in whatever direction that place is, much like a bird would be.

The Road- Unlike the Bird thats a little more visible you will should notice a winding road on the bottom of our logo. If you know Luke, you know his last name is Ruroede. Nickname Rodes. Pretty self explanatory as to how he got that nickname. The road is something that we spend the majority of our time on. In this industry like I stated previously when you get that call, you’re up and out like a bird, but unfortunately we can’t fly, so we hit the open road. Driving around in NJ is unlike any other state. You have jug handles, tolls every 6 blocks, and pretty much everyone is going 30 miles over the speed limit at any given moment. It’s a challenge, but this is what we are used to. The Jersey roads represent the obstacles we come across every day. Also there’s a phrase very popular with the American Pickers - “Freestyling”. This basically means if you don’t have any leads sometimes you hit the road and look around for possible leads. Whether your looking for an overcrowded yard or garage, or an antique/thrift store, anything can turn into a lead. WE DO NOT SUGGEST YOU TRY THIS. Some people are welcoming, others are not. Even if you’re just talking and making contacts this can turn into a lead or a good relationship with both businesses. This is why were always on the road, and why is incorporated into our logo.

The Two Feathers- Two feathers, two people who started this business. Both of us had this crazy idea to start this. Sure, a lot of people had the eyerolls and the chuckles when we told them our idea, but we were persistent with it. Too often in the past there has been missed opportunities because you take other people’s opinions into account. We didn’t want this again, and we didn’t care really. We knew what we had to do. A feather also symbolizes trust, honor, strength, wisdom, power and freedom. All of the above are the words we base our business off of in some way or another. Whether it’s building up a customers trust to researching and building the wisdom of our inventory, we run our every day operations with those words in mind.

The logo as a whole, we wanted simple, vintage but modern, and something that stands out. Something that someone would see and say “Who are they?”. Something that lures you in. That’s what any good business should have if they want to be successful. In doing that we also wanted something that would look good on clothing, something that people would not just buy to support us, but want to wear. That is a walking billboard. It’s more eyes on your business. It’s not just a name on a t-shirt that anyone looks at and forgets 5 minutes later. When you’re looking at the logo you’re looking at it as a whole. Maybe the font will catch your eye first, maybe the road or Bird, or even the small font that says “Antiques and Oddities” because your wondering what it says. Either way whatever it is, and whatever catches your eye, after you look at it, you’re going to step back and than look at the logo as a whole. This is what you’re going to remember us by, and ultimately this is our introduction to you.

#logo #tricityrevivals #blog #antiques #oddities #collectibles #nj #bergencounty #njtechteam

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Blog Chapter One: The Journey Begins... The Meadowlands Flea Market. If you have ever attended it you will soon realize that you can buy a pair of socks, cologne, knockoff clothing, sunglasses, knives, pickles, bread, seafood, and some collectibles and antiques mixed in all in one place. This is where the journey began. A conversation walking around the Meadowlands Flea Market. "Have you ever seen American Pickers?" "Yeah, I love that show those guys are great" "How awesome would it be if we could do that?" "It would be pretty awesome, but how do we do it?" Neither of us had the answer. How do you find those people without the help of TV Producers or a big name TV show? How do you go about not only finding items, but finding items that people want to spend their hard earned cash on? We didn't have the answer, but that didn't mean we weren't going to find it. Research Research Research. We were driven to find the answer. Staying up all hours of the night trying to figure out a plan to start this journey. In today's day and age there is no excuse not to be able to figure something out. With the internet and the various sites available to everyone its just a matter of how bad you want it, and how much time you're willing to put into it. After gathering bits of information here and there, and jotting down ideas we thought would work, we developed a game plan. We started with garage/estate sales. Easily finding listings on websites we were attending 7-8 per day on the weekends. We made lists, mapped out where all the locations were, and went from house to house looking for items. We weren't finding the best stuff, but we were excited to be at the start of our journey, and intrigued by what we could possibly find at the next house. After a few months we soon found out we weren't finding the right items we have been looking for. Everyone once in a while we'd come across something good, but it was more risk than it was reward. It was fun, as a hobby, but there was very little money to be made on the back end. Especially when everyone conducting the garage/estate sales think everything they have is worth a fortune. Meanwhile on the weekdays when there weren't any sales we started picking up the famous "Free Curbside Pickup" items. If you have ever been on Craiglist in the Free section you should know how people are constantly throwing away things such as dressers, hutches, and end tables just to name a few. People saw junk and we saw dollar signs. We would pick up the piece of furniture- sand it, fix it, paint it, put new hardware on it, and then resell it. It was all profit because it was free, and all it took was a little of our time. We were pretty damn good at it too, but we didn't want to get into the furniture flipping business and again you can only do this for so long making a minimal amount of money. In the long run, this basically gave us our bankroll for buying stuff on the weekends. By this point we had built up a really big inventory and it was starting to take up a lot room in each of our garages and basements. So much that we were starting to run out of space. The love of our lives Kate, and Courtney were very patient with us in this period of time and we cannot thank them enough for their support. I mean, who really wants their house overtaken by all this stuff? We understood loud and clear, and now it was time to sell. We decided to go the route of becoming vendors at a Flea Market. Reasearching and finding the best venue to sell your items is a whole different story that we will talk about in the future, but for us we decided Allair State Park Fall Flea Market was the best venue for us at this time. We set up our tables and all of our items and had a pretty successful day for our first time. Even the other vendors were coming to buy our stuff. All day we heard "You have such cool stuff" and "Wow, where did you guys come across all of this?". We knew we were onto something and it solidified that we had a good eye for piecing together our inventory. It gave us hope, and inspiration to continue working hard at this, but we still weren't satisfied. It's important to understand, every dime we made in this time went back into the business. As with any new startup business sometimes you just have to work for free. You have to see the bigger picture. We both decided in order to build this into what we envisioned this is the route we had to take, and we had to suck it up. Coincidentally, shortly after the flea market Luke found a guy who lived a few blocks away from him and was moving him and his family to another state. The best part- He had a barn stacked with vintage items, and it was all for sale. Our first actual pick was about to happen. This is what we waited for. We put in tons of work and effort and we finally got lucky and found someone. The mans name was Len- A retired police officer. (Our first pick with Len will be featured in its entirety in an upcoming blog.) He and his son Christian were waiting for us that day at the end of his driveway near the barn. As we walked what seemed like a mile driveway it hit us that this is it. Today is the day we have been waiting for. The day that we had envisioned and talked about from day one back at the Meadowlands Flea Market. We greeted each other, chatted and got to know each other, and than got down to business. We bought over 100 items that day. We got lucky with Len because: 1. He was ready to sell and 2. He knew we had to make money as well by reselling. Overall we had probably spent around four hours there and we went through every inch and item in that barn. Looking back, we left some items behind that could have been worth something but that's all part of the journey. Because of that, next time we see those items we will not make the same mistake twice. Its all a learning experience from the beginning to the end of the whole picking process. It's not easy for two late twenty something year olds to know information on something that was made in the 1970s. Sure, many of you were around at this time and know those items, but we don't. That's all part of the fun though. To learn an items history, and find out where it came from, what is was used for, and when it was used. To go even further- what company made this item, where were they located, are they still in business? Its something we truly enjoy and like say on our website- the best part about this is we get to reconnect people with the items from their past, and most of these items mean something to them and their history. That's the best part about picking. Seeing the joy in people when the light bulb goes off in their head and our item reminds them of a good memory from their past time. This is our story and the start of our journey. Everyone's is different. This story is how we got our start in this industry. We continue to grow, learn, and find more and more stuff every day. It's a successful day to us if at the end everyone's happy, we are covered in dust and dirt, you have cash in your pocket, and we are leaving with a truckload of stuff. Nothing is better than that. #tricityrevivals #antiques #oddities #collectibles #vintage #BergenCounty #nj #Pickers #americanpickers

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What originally started out as a hobby for us, quickly turned into an obsession and a passion. Growing up together as best friends, we weren’t into many of these items like we are today. Around 2011, we started attending flea markets, garage sales, estate sales, and auctions. From that point on, day in and day out, we were going somewhere to find the most unique items possible. We are “those guys” attending your estate sale and asking if we can see the crawl space in your attic or the loft in your garage. Once we mastered the small town sales, we turned to picking. Very similar to what you would see on TV, we found collectors off the beaten path of America. We gained a few leads, developed relationships, and kept up the momentum. We look for those items that have been hidden from the public for decades. Not just because there is a market for it, but because we enjoy the hunt of finding someone who has been looking for that piece to collect since their childhood.

#antiques collectors americanpickers buy sell antique vintage gamingwheel ebay rubeylane pickers