The Kitsch Box – Should We Review It?

Vintage is actually 15-99 years.
100 and beyond is antique.

It’s Etsy rules for vintage (20+ years), which seem to have crossed over into other websites, I think.

20+ years old is considered vintage for clothing/jewelry and antique is 100 or more years.

Hi Dea!

I’m Sara, co-owner of Kitschtopia, and can explain this a bit more in depth.

We source vintage jewelry, categorize, price, and sell it appropriately. We are in a “turn” business, so we always try to offer our products at a lower cost than you would find elsewhere. Some items command a higher collectors value at this time than others, so we list and price those items separately. However, we guarantee that any piece you receive from our subscription box is worth at least twice as much as the cost of the monthly subscription. Yes, it likely won’t be a piece that’s worth $300, but who knows where this box could go in the future! We would like to offer higher-end options in the future. But, our market tests have shown that the majority of customers want something fun and interesting and inexpensive. So, we’re here to provide that! 🙂

Owning a vintage business is unlike owning any other type of business – you need multiple streams of revenue to survive. Selling individual pieces is one stream and selling a subscription box is another. I hope this provides some insight into our business!

I used to collect and deal in used costume jewelry – e.g. what they are calling vintage.

They are probably amassing vast numbers of very cheap used jewelry whenever they source the more expensive stuff pictured on their Etsy site. The cost to them of this would be almost nothing – literally and most jewelry is so light that it can be shipped in a padded envelope cheaply.

It makes no sense to try to sell any of the low end stuff on Etsy or any other internet source because there is so much of it around and most of it isn’t desirable enough to stand out. The stuff in the Etsy shop either has some kind of distinctive design element or “name” but is still very marked up based on what they are probably paying for it but I don’t begrudge people profit made on time spent going to estate sales or flea markets to source items.

If people are willing to take some of their unsellable merchandise off their hands for a modest profit as a subscription box, it’s all profit for them. It’s very easy to bag and ship out the stuff and you don’t have to photograph it or describe it or do any of the other time consuming stuff necessary to market individual pieces on the internet.

I have bins of this stuff and could probably run a subscription jewelry box for the next decade if I were sufficiently motivated LOL.