The moment he saw the $7,000 dog made of black walnut, Lonny Piche knew he could sell it for a profit.
Piche shot a picture with his phone. He texted it to a customer in Wisconsin and sold the dog within 20 minutes - for $7,500.
It’s been a tough slog for most antique dealers in the past decade, as shifting tastes, eBay, thrift stores and the deep recession have cut into profits and emptied shops of customers. But upscale dealers are doing fine.
Find the right buyer, and you can trade a wooden dog for a 2004 Toyota Camry.
“The high end’s alwaysbeen good, and it’s still good,” said Lincoln Sander, executive director of the Antique Dealers Association of America and an antiques consultant in Newtown, Conn. “The middle market is hurting.”
Dealers who are thriving, like Piche, the owner of J&E Antiques in St. Paul, Minn., are gravitating toward furniture and other antiques that cost thousands of dollars, selling them to wealthy customers and other dealers.
For other antique shops - those full of collectibles, mid-market furniture and the occasional $1,000 piece - the outlook is cloudy.
The Minnesota Antique Dealers Association doesn’t track the number of shops inthe state, but “lots of them have closed,” said director Carol Eppel.
Eppel, whose Stillwater, Minn., shop specializes in American Arts and Crafts furniture, said business is improving, but the market still punishes all but the best antiques.
“The really, really, really good stuff is selling,” she said.
It’s no secret that businesses that serve the well-off tend to do better in a slow economy - high-end credit cards, brand-name jewelry, resorts and golf courses. Fine antiques fit the bill.
Deb Falk, who has owned Antiques on Main in Hastings, Minn., for 15 years, said thrift stores are taking business away from antique shops, andshe doesn’t deal in the $5,000 to $10,000 items that Piche can sell with a text message.
“The rich people, I don’t think they’d even come to Hastings,” she said. “I don’t think we have anything that would interest them.”
Reliable antique buyers from the 1990s are getting older and trying to clean house, while young professionals have become notorious in the business for their indifference to antiques. Meanwhile, eBay has cut the value of countless antiques that were thought rare before the Internet came along and proved they aren’t.
Young buyers might want an accent piece or two, but they’re certainly not buying many figurines, sets of finechina or decorative plates. “Glassware is gone,” Falk said, and most silver is priced at the melt value.
There’s some feeling in the industry that people in their 20s are starting to spend more time antiquing. But the smart money is on catering to the rich.
“The people who buy at the real high end are that top 1 percent crowd that you read about in the financial press,” said Sander, the consultant in Connecticut. “They’re buying the good stuff.”
This has been a transition for Piche, the second-generation antique dealer in St. Paul. He has learned to place more emphasis on upscale customers and the Internet, and to domost of his business over the phone.
Most of the time, Piche is on the road looking for furniture that he can sell to specific customers for several thousand dollars, like the Black Forest dog he picked up at an outdoor flea market in Massachusetts.
He snaps up R.J. Horner oak buffets and tables, sets of chairs that go for $600 apiece, benches and tables with intricate carving from the 19th century. He’s found new customers in Illinois, Texas and California.
“When the economy gets bad, you’ve got to attack it somehow,” Piche said. “You can’t just keep doing what you’re doing.”
Business, Pages 73 on 09/22/2013