Jewelry Pricing

Yesterday I took a little break from estate sale paperwork to start to tackle my backlog of jewelry which needs attention. The silver needs to be polished and priced, the costume jewelry needs to be priced and there are some pieces which need minor repairs. There are also pieces from jewelry sets that need to be reunited. Vintage Shop Hop is less than two months away and I want to be ready for the fall and holiday seasons with as much jewelry prepared and out on the selling floor as possible. Mother came over to help after having her hair done as the salon is only 3 blocks away. Joseph John Salon is a wonderful place! It's an Aveda salon on Northwest Highway in Mount Prospect and we have been going there for years. Our first store was located right next door. Kerri is fabulous, she is the only stylist I've ever gone to where I've been thrilled with the way my hair was styled afterwards. She is a color expert and knows how to handle my curly hair. In fact, she loves to play around with it!

Back to my topic. I should have taken a before photo, the photo above is after Mother and I started going through things. Before, the table was really stacked high with boxes! This dining room set is on one side of my recently remodeled basement. I have a huge job ahead of me, I have all this jewelry to go through, plus the china cabinet and buffet are filled with jewelry as well. And I keep buying and pricing the newly purchased items first as I can't pass up all the amazing pieces!

I've been thinking about ways to make this monumental task more efficient. On Friday Mother and I ran over to Marshalls in Mount Prospect Plaza which is just a minute away from me. When we walked into the store, I mentioned that I received an e-mail from The Container Store the day before advertising 3-tier rolling carts. I said that I'd love to get one so I could store all of my jewelry pricing supplies such as stickers, price tags, gram scale, a mandrel to size rings, magnifying glass and more all in one place. I used to use my vintage atomic TV trays which are shown in the photo above but with the cart I don't have to locate everything and put it on the tray. Plus it frees up space on the table for the actual jewelry. As we were walking around Marshalls we found similar carts! I was so impressed with how smoothly the cart rolled around in the store. Mother bought one too to store supplies for when she cards and prices clients' jewelry from our estate sales and she's loving it already. We bought the two small size carts at $29.99 and there were two larger carts still there for sale at $39.99. I also bought a clear plastic vanity tray to corral the smaller items in the top basket.


I look at my Facebook news feed daily, usually when having meals. I treat it like reading a magazine. I have found a lot of great products in the past couple of years through the Facebook ads in my news feed. I belong to some jewelry groups and the question of cleaning jewelry was brought up in a turquoise group I belong to. The suggestion of an ionic (not an ultrasonic) jewelry cleaner was brought up because it is safe for any kind of stone. Other cleaners can take the finish right off soft stones such as turquoise, opals or pearls. The poster noticed that a salesperson at Nordstrom was wearing such shiny jewelry so she asked her how she got it so shiny. The answer was the ionic cleaner so I looked it up on Amazon and bought the large one. I've tried it a few times and although it doesn't get all the tarnish off heavily tarnished items, I was able to successfully use it on items which weren't totally black with tarnish and combine it with silver rouge on the items which were originally black. I think overall the ionic cleaner was a good purchase and will save me time in polishing silver, which means I can get all of these great pieces out onto the selling floor more quickly!


Once the jewelry is polished and priced, I can sort it in these baskets as we have different categories of jewelry that we sell. There is sterling silver jewelry, costume jewelry originally priced $30 or more and costume jewelry originally priced $24 and less. Mother took a boatload of the lower-priced costume jewelry home to prepare so we will be able to send this jewelry to estate sales starting next week.

I was able to prepare some terrific sterling silver pieces yesterday in a variety of styles including Native American, Bohemian and Czech rhinestone. Some of these pieces will be reserved for Vintage Shop Hop and others will make their way into the jewelry caravan. There is a lot to do and my goal will be to get as much priced as possible before Vintage Shop Hop and to hopefully be caught up before I head to the Tucson Gem Show for more goodies at the end of January 2020.