Ask the Watch Guy: Maximizing Your Backroom Bonanza

We all know the importance of “turning” your inventory to increase profits.

It makes no difference if you think old, not-yet-sold inventory someday will become popular again; in the meantime, your money is sleeping.

If you have, for example, what was $5,000 in inventory at retail, and, let’s be kind and say it is 5 years old with keystone mark-up, you may look at this as only a loss of $2,500. But in real terms, your loss is much greater and becomes greater over time.

In addition to readily visible old retail inventory, almost every jewelry store I have visited has “sleeping” inventory most aren’t even aware of.

I was in a mom-and-pop store in the Midwest and asked them if they had any unclaimed repairs, watch or jewelry repair tools, or watch part assortments they would like to sell. The owner’s wife said she didn’t think so, but asked her husband if he still had his uncle’s watch repair “junk,” whereupon he said he wasn’t sure where it is. She then remembered: “All that stuff is under the gift wrap bench.” They asked me if I wanted to see it and, of course, I said yes.

After digging through gift wrap and ribbon remains, I found a 19th century watchmaker’s bench full of watch and jewelry repair tools. In the chair well of the bench were staking sets, a complete Boley lathe, a Tempo watch cleaning machine and lots of old American pocket watches.

I offered them $1,500 for all this equipment, and they accepted. They both said they had no idea that the stuff was worth anything.

In another buy, I found a Spiro Agnew watch from the 1960s that was owned by a jeweler who did not know who Spiro Agnew was. (He was Richard Nixon’s first vice president). These look like real junk, but they are worth a quite bit of money.

Here are some things that may be lurking in your back room and hidden under counters:
--Old inventory;
--Watch repair tools, such as cleaning machines, watch bands, staking sets, timing machines, lathes, watch part assortments and crystal assortments;
--Unclaimed repairs;
--Ring stretchers;
--Ring engravers;
--Tabletop engravers;
--Miscellaneous hand tools;
--Ultrasonics; and
--Old watches of all types.

Old inventory--jewelry items that did not move--sell very well on eBay in assortments. Let’s say that you have old stock earrings and bracelets. Make assortments of good, bad and ugly out of what you have.

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