Practical advice for dealers on sourcing, running a shop, and building a trade.
Tips on finding inventory at estate sales, flea markets, and online auctions.
The dealers who consistently walk away with the best inventory aren't lucky — they've built a system for getting to the good stuff first.
The best flea market finds never make it to a table — they're sold out of the back of a truck to the dealer who showed up first, for years.
Online auctions have opened up sourcing beyond geography, but the dealers losing money on them are almost always losing it in the same two places.
Skipping the estate sale company and dealing directly with grieving families can yield the best inventory of your career, if you handle it correctly.
The dealers who consistently get first calls on the good lots aren't the highest bidders, they're the ones the specialists actually trust to deal fairly.
Reality TV made storage unit auctions a spectacle, and turned them into a far tougher, more crowded market for the professionals who buy there seriously.
A container of French provincial furniture can transform a shop's inventory, but only if the dealer understands customs, currency, and authentication risk first.
Practical advice on insurance, booth layout, shipping fragile items, and digital marketing.
Standard business policies are written for retailers with replaceable stock — antique inventory needs a different kind of coverage entirely.
The difference between a booth that turns over and one that gathers dust rarely comes down to inventory quality — it comes down to how it's arranged.
Most transit damage doesn't happen because a carrier was careless — it happens because the box was never built to survive their normal handling.
Keystone markup is a starting point, not a strategy, and the dealers with the healthiest margins price against comparables, not against their own cost.
Most dealer websites lose sales before a single email arrives; here is what separates a site that converts browsers into buyers from one that just sits there.
Polished product ads underperform for antiques, while rough, unscripted sourcing and reveal videos consistently outsell them; here is the pattern behind it.
Antiques dealing punishes sloppy bookkeeping faster than most retail businesses; here's how to track cost basis, margins, and cash flow without a finance degree.
Interviews with successful shop owners and booth dealers sharing their business journeys.
A composite profile of the path so many dealers recognize — a weekend habit that quietly outgrew a day job, and the hard choices that followed.
Going broad feels safer, but the dealers with the most loyal customers are almost always the ones who narrowed, deliberately, into a specific niche.
Inheriting a shop is easy. Inheriting a reputation, a customer base, and decades of buying instincts — and knowing what to keep versus change — is the hard part.
No booth rent, no showroom, no walk-in traffic — just a spare bedroom, a camera, and a shipping station that quietly grew into a six-figure antiques business.
Twenty years calling bids from behind the podium taught this dealer more about value and timing than any inventory course ever could — until he stepped down to open his own shop.
A single booth in a shared antique mall let one dealer test a specialty, build a customer base, and grow into three booths, all without ever signing a solo lease.
Fifteen years repairing other dealers' furniture taught this craftsman exactly which pieces were worth buying — so he started keeping the best ones for himself.