When asked to consider their relationship to other dealers in the industry, most antique furniture merchants will respond with one word: competition. Now of course this is a perfectly reasonable answer, and perfectly correct, but competitive rivalry doesn't exactly capture the nature of the business.
Yes, there is a bottom line—everyone wants to sell the best product at the best prices. In other industries, the resulting competition has seen the concentration of capital in a few hands, most notably in multinational corporations (i.e. our toothpaste comes from four companies, our cars from a dozen or so). In our industry, we have managed to reproduce the same model of horizontal integration, if only on a smaller scale. Nevertheless, just mentioning the phrase, "antique furniture," calls to mind the myriad of mom-and-pop jobs, small dealers and down-to-earth trade markets like Atlanta's own antique show.
Why is the antique business so decentralized? Because our industry is one that resists colonization by larger market forces. As Rockefeller once said (and I'm paraphrasing here), the age of the individual is over, having been replaced by globalized corporate identities—and yet, here we are. Perhaps this is because it is in the nature of antiques to resist change—after all, evading or enduring the countless number of catastrophic events that can beset a piece of furniture, only to emerge hundreds of years later as a beautifully patinated work of art is quite a feat. And of course there is the difficulty in reaping profits from said furniture.
The trials of the antique business are old news: Globe-Wernicke, Herter Brothers, J & W Meeks, to name a few—the great furniture makers of the past, all gone. Reproductions? Chinese throw-aways, or else the infamous IKEA, the epitome of popularized trash. So where a profit can be turned, odds are you won't find the white collar corporate types, although I am positive that some more resourceful businesspersons might be found grinding out the dollars somewhere.
And so you might have noticed the Going-Out-Of-Business sales, We're-Moving discounts and otherwise Where-Did-They-Go? moments. I won't bother tracing the source of our woes to a single event. What I mean to do is to provide a possible solution to our problems.
Cooperation. (Who woulda thunk it?) The Internet. (Revolutionary!) I'm not kidding; if you're reading this, you are probably familiar with the infamous conservatism of the antique business—resisting change again—and this tendency certainly applies to how dealers and customers alike view the internet. But if you take stock of where the big money is, you will find more often than not small communities of dealers, designers and retail buyers alike. In the real world: trade shows, consignment shops, and antique rows or design districts that band together in marketing ventures, e.g. Atlanta's Westside Design District, to which we belong. On the internet: highly successful interlinking communities that dominate the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), or even co-op sites.
There is more to be gained than lost when closely related antique and furniture dealers band together in cooperative groups in order to increase each member's ability to compete and survive. Still, the same resistant, individualistic impulse that causes people to deal antiques in the first place can also foster an atmosphere of suspicion and isolation, and in these cases failures are more frequent. As for the viability of selling antique furniture in an increasingly globalized market, it is up to us to stave off the incorporation and institutionalization of our still quite unique industry.
2011 English Classics
1442 Chattahoochee Ave NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30318
404 351 2252
Tue-Fri 10-6pm, Sat 10-4pm EST
Sun-Mon Closed
