Over the past few weeks, I have been asked what trends I am seeing in the collectible market.
This was a question I needed to think about carefully, because we sell a large variety of vintage items at Rene Vintage Treasures (http://www.rvt01.com/ & http://www.rvt02.com/) (over 6,000 items and adding more each day!).
In analyzing the last three months of sales, I see that old toys are back in style! Big sellers right now are gumball vending toys, dolls and related toy accessories (still in the header packages) and carnival dice (a big favorite). One of the joys of selling these items are the wonderful folks we get to meet along the way. It is a pleasure and a privilege to connect with our customers, and find out what their passion(s) in collecting are (I appreciate all the responses I got back from my informal email survey). Collectors in general are supportive people, always up for discussions and ready to give an opinion or an answer without any fuss!
So (drumroll please) the answer is ................. most people are collecting these wonderful old toys because it makes them feel really good. It's a reminder of a simpler time, one that you cannot recapture today with the technological toys that are on the market. People remember being little and begging mom for a penny so they could go to the gumball machine in the local candy store. Out would tumble the little prized toy, which they would play with all day! Some folks remember going to the dimestore to get one of the little toys hanging on the spikes on the walls. Our folks didn't complain because the toys were always cheap (but oh how we loved them).
A few of my customers said they were passing the old toys down to their children or grandchildren. (As always, we always warn our customers to be careful as all of these toys should be used for display purposes, and not for playing with.) Vintage toys right now are the collecting rage. A piece of childhood history that is extremely affordable for you to build a collection with. 
1 comments:
In Montreal we used to call the little prizes that came out of gum machines, charms. They usually had little loops on them so you could sew them on your cap.
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