Chinese “antiques’” invasion, buyer beware!
Yes, it appears so, China is invading the western world, and the antiques’ world is not going to be spared.
Below is a message that we received on our VOIP, Skype.
“Dear ,we supply the antique furniture in china.we are the factory.Nice to meet you .”
The message was obviously unsolicited, what you would call SPAM if it was in an email, and just shows how far into the Western World consumers’ market the Chinese manufacturing industry are willing to go.
I don’t think I have to bring to your attention the fact that these antiques, are obviously repros, of what quality I don’t know, but definitely not antique.
I am sorry I deleted the contact before being able to copy the introduction, which sounded like an ad to their production of antiques, just making it very clear of what you would get.
So, the point is, that not all antique dealers are going to ignore these offers, and many are probably going to take advantage of these first reproductions coming from China and are going to buy them and sell them off as antiques or good quality reproductions, in other words they are going to offer what they are going to sell as good value for money.
And that of course, is not the case.
Remember that mass produced items and reproductions in particular, are never going to have any real value, since it’s the rarity of any item, not only antiques, that is one of the main factors for value.
So, buyer beware!
Being here on the other side, this has been my experience as well. Not only do we get the same emails (clearly they have not even looked to see what we do) but it almost seems like they all use the same email template.. We talked about this same topic a while back one our own blog posting called