EVERYTHING VINTAGE

How to Find & Authenticate Vintage Items
- Plus tips on Buying & Selling Vintage -

1. Where to FIND vintage items
   1a) Authentic or Reproduction
   1b) Definition of Vintage
   
2. Where to RESEARCH vintage items
   2a) Ebay
   * See what an item has sold for
   * Less is More Hint -when searching
   * Keyword Hint
   * Currently Selling
   2b) Google

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WHERE TO FIND VINTAGE ITEMS

Vintage items can be found just about anywhere! In your attic, your Grandmother's attic, garage sales, church bazaars, estate sales and yes, even in thrift stores.

* Is it AUTHENTIC vintage or a newer reproduction? *

Since the 'vintage look' (also called Old School, Boho, Hippie, Retro, Mod, etc.) is really in right now, most designers have created reproductions in the last few years and it can get really tricky trying to figure out whether something is old or new. The vintage look is everywhere from clothing to household appliances and furniture. To try and differentiate between the ‘real’ stuff and the ‘fake’, we’ll first need to define VINTAGE.

* Definition of VINTAGE *

For an item to be vintage, it's technically supposed to be at least 20 years old. However, that definition is only loosely applied to things on Ebay. Basically, if it's more than a decade old -that's ten years or more- it's called VINTAGE on Ebay. Now with that in mind, at the end of this guide we’ll take a look at the past VINTAGE decades: what was going on then and what the lifestyles were like. Even if you remember just a little bit about an era, it will help you in deciding whether you’ve just bought the bargain of the century or if you should start digging a hole in the back yard to bury it in!

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WHERE DO YOU RESEARCH VINTAGE ITEMS?

There are two main sources to research information about vintage items:
Ebay and Google. You can check out other online stores but they don't generally give you a true idea of an item's worth, if you plan on selling it on Ebay. Also, there's usually not a lot of historical information given in these listings.

EBAY:

The first of course is Ebay! All you need to do is type in the item name and look around. At first this can be quite time consuming, if you don't know anything at all about what you are researching, but in time you will learn little tricks that help you reach the information you need more quickly!

1) You click on the link UNDER the Search box (located on the upper right hand of your Ebay screen) titled 'Advanced Search'.

2) You type in what you are looking for in the ‘Keyword or Item Number' box.

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* 'LESS IS MORE' Hint *

Here is a HUGE hint when it comes to doing this: When researching an item, LESS IS MORE! What I mean by that is, if you are trying to find out about let's say a groovy looking, psychedelic colored, mini dress with a Bleeker Street tag, DO NOT type in "psychedelic groovy Bleeker Street mini dress"! Chances of finding that are very slim because it is TOO specific! However, a great place to start with vintage items is a label name, if it is clothing, or a maker name, if it is something like furniture, pottery, glass or kitchen gadgets. Obviously, books would be looked up by the title and copyright date. Now, once you have your 'less is more' information in the Keyword box (for the psychedelic dress stated above, 'Bleeker Street' would do for possible information about the era it was made in or where it was made), you can fine-tune your search even more!

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3) Choose an area for the Ebay search engine to look in, by clicking on the downward pointing triangle to the right of the ‘In This Category’ box, a drop down menu will show (for the dress above, I would have chosen 'Clothing, Shoes & Accessories'). If it is pottery, glass or a set of dishes, this can get tricky because it could be in 'Home & Garden' or 'Pottery & Glass' or even antiques! You get the picture... anyway, if you're not sure, leave the Category box set to 'All Categories' to have the search engine check ALL of Ebay.

4) Click to check off the 'Completed Listings Only' box; this is how you see HOW MUCH something has sold for. This is a very very very important thing to do!! When the listings pop up, you can see what category they were listed under (vintage clothing shows up in the vintage and regular sections) and how much they sold for! If you have something that you think is worth $100 dollars and you see it selling for just $25-$50, it would be foolish to start the bidding or make a reserve for $99! You'll end up paying higher fees AND your item won't sell! Remember, this information is only for you to get a roundabout figure to help determine what your item is worth. The ‘Completed Listings’ box only lets you see items that have sold within the last 30 days, which is good! You don't want to sell something out of season, if at all possible, so you want to see what has sold recently. If a bathing suit sold at the beginning of August for $300, chances are you won't sell it for that much at the beginning of October. So always keep the seasons in mind too!

5) Go to the very bottom of the page, left hand side, where it says 'Sort by' and click on the little downward triangle to choose 'Price: highest first'. We do this because we want to emulate the listings that sold for the MOST money, not the least!!! (I have even gone so far as to set my Ebay preferences to show the highest priced items first whenever I do a search –which of course I manually change whenever I am looking to buy something!) When the listings are shown, you'll see the items that sold for the most money FIRST! (You'll also see the items that didn't sell and this is important too.... so you DON'T emulate those listings!) The items that actually sold are shown with green prices, items that didn’t sell are shown with red prices. Just look at the GREEN ones! It does you no good to check out how the red priced items were listed, because they didn’t sell! Those listings are not something we want as our example!!

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* KEYWORD Hint *

Once you have the list of sold/unsold items in front of you, look for keywords in the titles. -Using the psychedelic dress listed above as an example again, I learned that it would be foolish to use the limited character space in the title by placing 'Bleeker Street' there! However, if I had a really well known name brand, like Pucci, then definitely I would use that. If it's a lesser-known name brand, then you have to make the call. For mini dresses, I found that it's more important to use keywords like 'mini dress scooter go-go 60s & psychedelic' than a name brand, if your item wasn't made by a famous designer or design house. Also, if you're not sure, try looking up a few things. For instance, 'Bleeker Street' showed listings going for $3.99 to $19.99. However, 'Mini Dress' showed listings in the $100s! And $100s is obviously what we are striving for! Also, the ‘Title’ section of an item also gives you the ‘IN’ words that people are using to describe things. An example: Cropped pants were called ‘Clam Diggers’ in the 1960s; today they are called ‘Capri’ pants! Another example” Hippie, Cool, Groovy, were all acceptable terms to call the clothing from the 1960s to the 1970s; now that time period’s clothing is referred to as BOHO (bohemian)! If you want to sell your item, you need to cater to your buyer and that includes the language that they understand! In the end, look for what sold for the most money, what category it was listed in, and at what price the auction started (Start your auction too high and you’ll scare off a lot of potential bidders!). The Keyword Hint is not only important when researching an item but in
listing it also!

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* CURRENTLY SELLING *

You can also look to see if something is selling currently on Ebay by entering in your 'Less is More' information into the Basic Search window. This won't show you a final sale price but it will show you what types of things are currently selling. HINT: Look for things that have bids.

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GOOGLE:

The other great place to look things up is on GOOGLE! You can Google anything and everything. AND Google will also show Ebay listings! Using the 'Less is More' hint above, you can find just about anything AND you can click the link that says 'Images' to see photos of what you are looking for. I found out through Google that 'Bleeker Street' is a famous street in New York City! I could have listed my dress as a 'Vintage New York City Mini Go-Go Dress' rather than Bleeker Street. After all, people all over the world know where and what New York City is! Lastly concerning Google; if you look at someone’s online store, the prices tend to be higher than your item would sell for on Ebay, so DO NOT go by other online stores to set your Ebay selling price! The good thing is though, people from these online stores tend to buy merchandise from Ebay to stock them and that can lead to some nice selling prices for you!

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Check out my other GUIDES
SELLING VINTAGE & BUYING VINTAGE
(as of 10/10/06: I should have these Guides up shortly)

See my BLOG with vintage eras We LOVE VINTAGE -by Delbodacious
This will help you in determining whether something is authentically vintage, as well as helping you find out when it was made.