The Young Collector: Relevance Revisited

by Hollie Davis and Andrew Richmond

So, where were we? We had been talking about relevance—the art of being useful/staying useful or as Merriam-Webster puts it, "having significant and demonstrable bearing on the matter at hand"—and the reasons antiques had once been relevant. The problem, as we mentioned last month, is that the antiques marketplace isn't as relevant as it used to be. There are certainly reasons for that, some that might be our fault, and some that aren't, but at the end of the day, determining fault and assigning blame doesn't resolve the situation. More important, it certainly doesn't make us, as an industry, relevant again.

From our perspective, that is where we're stuck. Our marketplace has been shrinking, and doing all the things we've always done as well as we can do them isn't making the difference we expect. That's because we're still struggling to accept that people don't want what we have to offer for the same reasons they did 20 years ago. That isn't as hopeless as it sounds. If you think about it, that's what the antiques business has been doing for decades: selling people objects that are no longer desirable for the same reasons they originally were.

Do most of the people with pie safes keep pies in them? Do stoneware collectors haul out their 15-gallon crocks for pickling? Are people mounting their Harris stag weathervanes on top of their barns? Of course not, but customers still bought these objects, and that's because we convinced people that the objects had value distinct and separate from—even greater than—their original purpose. We just have to do that again with the next generation of collectors.

Our problem is that we keep trying to sell something based on the same old reasons. As times change, people's motivations change. When you think about it, using the same old sales pitch is like trying to sell someone a horse today for farm work or for transportation. What you're offering doesn't fit their needs at all. Not only are they not interested, they can hardly even envision a world in which that would be the right choice. Even though people no longer use horses in the same way they once did, horses didn't become extinct; people selling them just had to find other reasons to buy horses, other ways to tell buyers that what they were offering had value.

By the way, notice that we said buyers, not collectors. That may be a byproduct of the new direction things are taking. We talk a great deal about collectors, but really, being a collector is a personal attribute, not a business or economic one, and we need to separate the concept of collecting from the concept of buying. In business, we have customers. We may have good customers and great customers, but this emphasis on collectors implies that we're interested only in people who want to fill an entire house by emptying out our shop or salesroom.

Collecting may be fading in terms of relevance (and we certainly need to be thinking about how to revive an interest in collecting, but that's another issue), so we need to be wary of linking our fate to it; buying, however, is something more necessary, something that virtually everyone has to do at some point. By including buyers, and not just collectors, we expand our opportunities.

In terms of increasing our relevance, the best card we're holding at the moment is affordability. This may well be the silver lining in the current market correction. Prices are down, and while that isn't making the sellers of antiques happy, it is certainly good for buyers, particularly new buyers.

Lately, Andrew has been reading about the financial lives of Generation X (our generation) and Generation Y (a.k.a. the Millennial Generation), and books such as Tamara Draut's Strapped and Anya Kamenetz's Generation Debt paint a pretty bleak picture. The economics of young adulthood are very different today than they were for our parents. Education costs have skyrocketed over the past few decades at the same time that financial aid has shifted from mostly grants to mostly loans. (Two-thirds of college graduates have student loan debt, and the average debt load of graduating seniors exceeds $20,000—let's just say that most of the folks we know are keeping the average up!)

Moreover, today's job market is rough, and while it's become very difficult to get a decent job without a college degree, those with college degrees and the associated student loan debt are being forced to take low-wage jobs with no health benefits and no retirement plans. For many of these twenty- and thirtysomethings, once the bills are paid, there is little left to save, and unexpected expenses, such as an illness or car repairs, often get put on credit cards (thereby increasing the monthly obligations).

It's really no wonder that we don't see many young folks at shows and auctions, especially since among Gen X and Y, the perception of antiques is that they are expensive. And sure, many antiques are very expensive, but as we hear all the time from dealers and auctioneers, one can buy good quality antiques for the same price (often less) than one can buy new furniture from any big-box store or interior design center. The antiques industry needs to start preaching affordability. We need to take on the competition, places such as Ikea and Target, head on. We need to get over our avoidance of words like "cheap" and "bargain." Low prices sell.

And don't forget, a big part of the affordability of antiques is that they retain value. If a young couple fills their house with antiques today and wants to redecorate in five or ten years, they can sell the antiques, but they can only donate the department-store furnishings.

The fact that you can buy antiques without patronizing a huge retail chain and sell them rather than stick them in a landfill offers two more points of relevance—responsible social and environmental practices. Being socially responsible is increasingly important to young people. With reasonable alternatives, they'll often reject shopping at places such as Wal-Mart, feeling that these companies, offering poverty-level wages and importing low-quality merchandise, do little to support either our local or national economies.

When our parents were choosing to buy furniture and decorative objects, they might have been buying things produced and sold on a large scale, but the American economy was still manufacturing those goods. Factories were still opening, not closing, and with only a high school degree, people could not only support their families, they could also hope to make their way up into management positions. Underemployed workers weren't draining government programs to keep their heads above water, and people still shopped downtown where family businesses weren't shuttered because of an inability to compete with freight containers of cheap fabric and low-grade electronics.

Social responsibility wasn't a selling point then, but now knowing that something benefits American companies that pay their workers reasonable wages makes people feel better about their purchases. Younger people are beginning to respond to movements encouraging them to buy locally, to support small businesses in their communities, and to think about the ramifications of their purchases, and that's all good news for the antiques business, if we can make them aware of us.

If today's young people are more concerned than their parents were with social responsibility, then that goes double for environmental responsibility. Forty years ago, most people hadn't heard of the ozone layer, let alone of the holes that were appearing in it. The concept of peak oil was barely more than a decade old, and the word fluorocarbon probably turned up only in spelling bees. We were still fascinated with all the new tools in our science toolbox, as yet unaware of all their dangerous implications. If you'd tried to sell a dining table on the merits of saving trees, people would have laughed. We were just getting started on the rain forests in the 1960's!

Today though, there are young people who are concerned about the distance their supermarket vegetables are trucked, so they're obviously concerned about the chain of damage done by the creation of new furniture-deforestation, wood-preserving chemicals, transportation emissions, off-gassing chemical dyes, and urban sprawl. These people are still turning to new furniture produced by environmentally responsible methods because they just aren't aware of what we have to offer. To many of them, their choices of existing furniture are either antiques that are way too expensive or well-used pieces from the Salvation Army. The antiques business has what they want; we just haven't let them know it yet.

Along with social and environmental responsibility, quality is an issue for today's buyers in a way it wasn't in the past. At least once a month around our house, some small modern contraption breaks, and it drives us nuts. It's never (well, almost never) a huge expense, but things such as phone chargers, electric razors, and lamps just stop working.

Even more maddening, we don't have the option to fix them. We still have Hollie's grandmother's Sunbeam mixer that was purchased sometime in the 1950's and a toaster she got as a wedding gift in 1948. Replace a cord, spot-weld a beater, and you're in business, but today, the motor just burns up, and you have to go spend another $20 on a new one. Even if you could fix the problem, plastic casings usually have to be shattered in order to get at the motor!

Antiques aren't like that. They've already survived for years, sometimes under rough conditions, and if, heaven forbid, we break them, most of the time they can be fixed. As a society, we're beginning to come back around to an appreciation of quality. We've had several decades now of huge piles of possessions obtained as cheaply as possible, and we're finally beginning to see that you do in fact get what you pay for.

We in the antiques business get what we're paying for too, in a sense, and we've not been "paying" for young people for quite a while now, not doing what we can to include them as buyers. They weren't relevant to us, and while they may be ignoring us now, we ignored them first, so we have some making up to do. We can't promise that droves of young people will suddenly start appearing at antiques shows, but we think if we begin to change the sales pitch, we will start to see improvement. We can't afford not to. As we said last month, in business, if you're relevant, you succeed, and if you aren't, you don't.

We welcome ideas, tips, criticisms, and questions regarding "The Young Collector." Andrew and Hollie may be reached by e-mail <youngcollectors@maineantiquedigest.com>, via our blog (www.youngantiquecollectors.com), or by writing The Young Collector, c/o Maine Antique Digest, PO Box 1429, Waldoboro, ME 04572.

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