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Wilmington, Massachusetts

The Greater Boston Antiques Festival: Smooth Selling

by Jeanne Schinto

"I'm getting the impression that the show is established," Marvin Getman said, taking a step back to look at what he has wrought after seven years of promoting his semiannual antiques events at the Shriners Auditorium about 15 miles north of Boston. He was speaking on the morning following his latest Greater Boston Antiques Festival, on the weekend of January 21 and 22.

The previous January show results had suffered due to a Sunday blizzard, which had effectively turned it into a one-day affair. This time the weather gods were more than kind on both days, saving the snow for the following week. "So it's easy enough to report that the gate was up by eighty-two percent," said Getman. "It's more honest to compare Saturday to Saturday. In that case, there was a twelve percent increase."

Getman, a promoter universally praised by his dealers for his attention to every detail, continues to do market experiments to get new people coming in the door. "I rented a couple of mailing lists this time," he told us. "One was five hundred interior designers. The other was a thousand high-income collectors of antiques and art. And maybe you noticed the guy who was filming? I'm putting together a television commercial for next year."

We told him we had also noticed some high-profile shoppers, including Lorna Condon, archivist of Historic New England, and Colleene Fesko, head of Skinner's paintings department. Getman was pleased. "A lot of dealers decided to sit this one out," he said. "They'd had a bad November." (His last show in this same space was on November 19 and 20, 2005.) "Or else they'd had a bad year. I think some of those people will be disappointed they weren't here, because of the turnaround. We were up twenty-four percent over the November numbers."

Getman knows, of course, that a good gate does not automatically a good show make. Money must change hands. We saw some evidence of that happening on Saturday during our visit. Getman, with the full weekend's perspective, could name specific dealers and their dollar figures. He is privy to some transactions because he provides a credit card service for those who don't have their own. He also asks dealers to list their top trades on a questionnaire, which was returned by 40% of the 160 dealers. Looking at both types of data, he said two dealers each had made "mid-four-figure sales" and seven others each had sold items in the $1000 to $3000 range.

Many dealers also sold more than a few items for prices under $1000, we learned. Bill and Nancy Darcy of the History Gallery, Ashford, Connecticut, for example, sold an 1856 Western exploration print, a framed Teddy Roosevelt autograph, and a 1776 book that included the text of the Declaration of Independence, along with other items, for prices ranging from $50 to $850.

Still unsold by the Darcys at show's end was their framed copy of Classification of Clouds for Weather Observers, 12 scenes, each one 5" x 4", issued by the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office and published by the lithographer L. Prang & Co. in 1897. Their price for the clouds was $1500.

As we roamed the big venue, some of it divided into walled-and-papered booths, some more of it arranged with tables and do-it-yourself shelving, we collected other prices and took our photos. The floor plan included the auditorium, the lobby, and a carpeted area called the Fez Room. We saw bins and bins of prints and maps, cases of bric-a-brac and jewelry, lots of ceramics, folk art, paintings, dolls, glass, curiosities, etc. If you had wanted to look at everything, it would have taken a week. Like any show of this size, it threatened to be overwhelming. But it was often a lot more fun than a strictly high-end exhibition, where everything has already been discovered and documented for you.

To give ourselves a thematic focus, we formulated this question to ask some of the dealers: What are you doing differently now that you didn't do five or ten years ago, when the market was different? Unless they were like the shopkeeper in the old cartoon from The New Yorker, whose storefront sign stated, "Going out of Business, Slowly," they were doing something proactive, to use a jargon word, to stay in the game.

Matt King of Middleboro, Massachusetts, summarized his simple strategy in the midst of selling to the early buyers who had surrounded him. "I price stuff reasonably," he said. "There are a lot of people who say they keep stuff reasonably priced, but they don't. I just sold a bookcase in two seconds because it was priced well. I keep moving," King added. "I keep active. Also, to every single show I try to bring new stuff, along with the 'old friends.'"

What does he do with "old friends" now, when he decides that their time is up? "That's tough these days," he said. "It used to be that I would dump them into an auction because even if you lost on some, you could win on others and even it out. Now it's dangerous to do that, especially with older stuff, because there just aren't the buyers, unless it's very special. The margin of what people will buy is getting narrower and narrower. So what do you do? Once you recognize how it is, you buy only the good things, if you can, or else you buy really, really cheap."

Susan Mesick of Quirky Antiques, West Brookfield, Massachusetts, one of the smartest younger dealers we know, echoed King. "You've got to wholesale it these days," she said. "Everything's still selling as long as it's priced to sell," she said. "Once upon a time, when we had a Democrat in office, I could price things for more and sell them for more. Now, if it's something really unusual or something great, the old rule still applies. But the middle-of-the-road stuff has to be sold cheaply and bought cheaply."

We caught up with Mesick only after the show was over because we never could find her in her space. Leaving the selling to a helper, she shopped the show relentlessly, bargaining with the best of them. "I spent a lot of money on the floor," she acknowledged. What had she bought? "Everything." Rephrasing, hoping for a better insight, we asked what she was staying away from. "I'm buying anything but bisque. Bisque is deader than road kill."

What was her opinion of Victorian jewelry? Another dealer at this show had told us it was "dead in the water." Did Mesick agree? "Victorian jewelry is not dead, unless it's overpriced," she said.

When we asked Beverly Bernson of Altschuler/Bernson, Waban, Massachusetts, what she was doing differently now, she said, "The question is perfectly timed. My husband has just been saying to me, 'Maybe your business model isn't working.' There have been downs before," said Bernson, who at age 70 has been in the business since the 1960's. "Sometimes it was the gas prices—in the 1970's, remember? That was the beginning of group shops. This time, though, I don't think it really is the economy."

Her regular customers still have money, but have grown less acquisitive as they have aged, she said. "The people who were thirty or forty years old when I began have finished their collections and are downsizing. Ninety percent of the time, when I used to buy something, I used to know who I was buying it for. Biscuit tins, mercury glass, tartanware, Quimper pottery." She reminisced about her buying trips to England. "Now I'll sell one piece to someone new and never see them again. Or they come in and buy multiple things, but that's it-everything at once. It's not going to be a continuing relationship."

Then there are the new people, young ones with babies, who are "horrified by the prices," she said. Bernson herself raised three children. "Still, my collecting was a passion, a priority. And we met loads of wonderful people who had also made it a priority." She doesn't meet many people like that anymore. Rather, there is this scenario: "When I go to an expensive restaurant, I'm the oldest person there, and I'm surrounded by young people spending money on food and wine."

Bernson's observations about the cultural shift aren't novel. What is new and refreshing is that, even at her age (if she doesn't mind our saying so), she is willing to entertain the idea of adopting new business strategies. "How do you get new people to find the passion? I used to teach a course at a community college, 'The Business and Romance of Antiques,' with a heavy emphasis on the romance, but that was in the seventies and eighties."

Bernson, like King and Mesick, is someone willing to admit that some items have become too expensive for what they are, and there's just no bump left. There's no place left to go with those prices except downward. "Doorstops. I have always loved them. But twelve hundred dollars? They were mass produced, as opposed to things that were handmade, hand painted, handwrought. There comes a point when you have to ask yourself, 'What is the value?'"

Actually, Stephen and Mary Daniell of Alley Antiques & Collectibles, Pelham, New Hampshire, were selling an iron doorstop in the form of a rabbit wearing a top hat for $145. The Daniells, who have been doing these shows in Wilmington since the beginning, also offered a painted wooden top, $38; a box decorated in pyrography, $55; a Frederic Remington print, dated 1910, $550; and a barrister bookcase, $650. Smalls and small prices were helping them have a good show.

Lin Stebbins of Lin's Quilt Source, Bristol, Connecticut, shared with us her marketing innovation, another simple one that makes a lot of sense. "A few years ago, I started offering a layaway plan," she said. "We did it when we found out that a woman had saved for two years to buy one of our quilts, only to discover that we had sold it two weeks earlier."

Stebbins also takes credit cards, but sometimes even that can't accommodate a shopper. "If someone comes to the show and doesn't expect to buy a quilt in our upper price range, they can walk away very disappointed if you don't have something like the layaway plan to offer." There's no liability on her part. "They make a down payment, we keep the quilt, and then they start paying monthly. It helps on months when our show fees are down." Non-payments haven't been a problem, said Stebbins. "And when they finish paying, we either mail it or bring it to them at the next show."

At this show, Stebbins did well, selling five quilts. "Four were top-end quilts," she said, "the best one being an 1850's basket-floral appliqué with a berry-vine border that came out of a private collection in upstate New York." Its price, said Stebbins, was "about three thousand dollars."

The Shriners Auditorium is easy to reach from the highway, with plenty of parking once you get there. Dealers like the wide aisles, the huge roll-up garage doors that make for easy pack-in and pack-out, and the ambiance that Getman creates with his hard-work ethic and good humor. There is even live music, generated by an electric piano played by Lou Yelle of Jan & Lou Yelle Antique Jewelry. The lighting is a little harsh, and objects don't always look their best under it. The food is sold by the Shriners—sushi is not on the menu. But if you like chili, bread pudding, and baked macaroni and cheese, you'll be satisfied.

The next winter show in the Shriners Auditorium will be in January, as always. The fall one, however, will be on October 21 and 22, not November—another marketing experiment. As Getman explained in a letter to his dealers, he hopes that distancing it from the holidays will make for an improvement in traffic and sales for most.

For more information, call New England Antique Shows at (781) 862-4039 or visit the Web site (www.NEAntiqueShows.com).