The Philadelphia Antiques Show was booming, or, at least, as close to booming as you can get while a recession and an election are doing their best to kill us all. Wonderful things on the floor, a real buzz in the aisles and some welcome red dots in the booths. To me it seemed a more exciting show than New York's Winter Show in January. Dealers and customers were happier than I've seen them for a few months.

Yet we've done four shows this year, all of them soft, every one of them worse than last year's, in one case by a lot. That's never happened to us before - four soft shows in a row; I went back through our records to check. While I was poking around in our database, I also checked our numbers for this year. OK, our shows have been way down, but our website sales have been up, in fact the first four months of the year were our best website months ever.

A recession? Yes, there's no question that we're in one. An election? Yup, in case you hadn't noticed, we're in one of those too. Most of the dealers I talk to are finding that the double whammy of a recession and an election is making sales hard to come by. Yet a friend specializing in Southern material told me he's having an excellent year: January, February and March were very strong, but April (tax month?) was a bit softer. I've heard similar stories from some of the specialist dealers in both the mid-Atlantic and New England regions. The clientele of specialist dealers is collectors.

As I was going through our records, I realized that we're in the same boat, although a much smaller one. With one exception (a chest of drawers to a New York decorator) our web sales have all been to serious collectors. If they see something that really excites them, they'll buy it. At Philadelphia, too, it was serious, and excited, collectors who were buying.

Collect or covet

Antiques buyers have always fallen into two categories, which we might call collectors and furnishers - I'm using "furnish" in the broad sense of the word that applies to all the decorative arts, not just furniture - furnishing and decorating the rooms we live in to give them that ambience that only antiques can give. It's always been that way, but recently the differences between the two have become starker. Despite everything, specialist dealers are still selling, and they're selling to collectors. The buyers who have gone to ground are the furnishers.

Christie's, who are, I think, the best marketers in the business, recognize better than anyone that the two sides of the business are now almost completely separate. Inside a recent catalogue was a glossy, double-sided card. On one side it read, "Collect: Add to your Collection at the Specialized Sales. Over 70 sales each year." On the other, "Covet: Furnish your Home at the Interiors Sales. Over 40 sales each year."

Collect or Covet, Add to your Collection or Furnish your Home - there you have it. I like the biblical tone of "covet" - thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's antiques! Coveting, suburbia's most enjoyable and prevalent sin; may the sinners increase and multiply, and spread their seed upon the ground, and start spending their sheckles at shows again!

The Philadelphia Show drew collectors, the shows we did drew mere coveters (I'm painting with a broad brush here, of course there were exceptions.) Philly boomed, our shows were busts. The lesson's simple: in a recession, people cut back on what they covet, but not on what they collect. The coveting was there, lots of lustful coveting, but no indulgence. The gates at all our shows were good, the conversations were good, people wanted what we had, but they went away self-frustrated. Which bodes well for next year. We Americans aren't good at bottling up our urges, we're a covetous people, and what we covet, we must have, sooner or later.

Meanwhile, the collectors are coming to our website, not our shows. Their interests are focused, not broad. Because we're in a small niche, if they came to a show, they'd come straight to us and sometimes the one, or at the most two, other dealers who handle similar material. They wouldn't take advantage of everything the show has to offer, hoping to stumble across something they couldn't go home without. It makes more sense for them to visit websites than shows, unless the show is collector-directed.

Overheard

"I'm just looking and enjoying this year, but next year I'll be back for some serious buying." This from a woman who is, I believe, on the point of graduating from furnishing to collecting. She comes to our booth every year, and has three or four pieces of ours furnishing her home. I think she's beginning to realize that her interest in our material is passing beyond mere furnishing. If so, the show will have been worthwhile for us, even if we lost money on it this year.

"I feel so poor, I just can't buy anything." This from a woman who could easily have bought the whole booth. But it's a telling comment, recessions hit people in their feelings just as much as their pocketbooks. In a spotty recession like this one, whose effects are very unevenly distributed, more people are hit emotionally than financially. In recession-scarred shows, if we can keep people feeling good about antiques, keep them aware that buying an antique is a feel-good thing to do, if, in other words, we can keep them coveting, we can stockpile the sales for next year that we didn't make this year. We dealers may well feel recession depression, but we mustn't infect our customers with it (see Talking Point, p. xx). We need to keep them feeling good about antiques, and they'll come back next year. If we infect them with gloom and doom, they may still come back next year, but it won't be to us!

Sticking our necks out

Fighting the recession involves directing our forces to the furnishing sector. The collectors are still collecting, no need to target them. The longer term strategy is to keep furnishers covetous and to associate antiques with feeling good, not with "feeling poor." Tactically, we may need to dig in and hold our ground, keeping the longer term strategy in mind. Stay alive, keep our customers feeling positive, and wait till next year.

As a dealer, I find that hard to do, by nature both Lisa and I are proactive, at times, dare I say it, impatient. So we've been pondering the problem of re-invigorating the furnishing side of our business, trying to get more people to covet what we offer. We deal mainly in furniture, which is the sector of the antiques business, and the retail business in general, that has been most directly impacted by the housing slump. Some of the chain stores that are suffering most are the furniture chains - Bombay, Levitz, and Domain have all filed for bankruptcy protection - so we're battling a strong tide, but we're going to try something.

We're wondering about running a series of ads in our regional shelter/lifestyle magazine. It's published every other month, and has a controlled distribution - it is sent to every household with a house worth $500,000 or more and a combined household income of $120k+. You'd think that this group would include some people who can buy, even in a recession. For this market, we can't just show antiques as beautiful objects, we want to show them fitting happily into contemporary lifestyles. We haven't yet decided on the best tag line theme to use - green, homey, stylish, distinctive, lasting.... But we're working on it. The ads will challenge us, because, like most dealers, we're do-it-yourselfers of necessity, we do all our own design, photography and layout, and we don't have access to studio sets and beautiful models. It'll be difficult, but we'll do our best, and see what happens.

I've also noticed a number of national advertisers recently who actually refer to the recession, emphasizing that now is the time to get good value for your money, which, of course, is what their products offer. Can we take a page out of their book? In many cases, antiques are exceptionally good value today, especially for furnishers, but people don't know it. This is due, in part at least, to the media who trumpet the collector-driven headline prices, but hardly mention the real bargains to be had in furnishing side of the market. Surely we can correct this in our advertising - include the price, to show how reasonable it is! Maybe for the lower end of the demographic we should emphasize price and value, and for the higher end style and beauty. And, of course, antiques are green at every level of the market. For some, value + green = feel-good: for others, style + green = feel-good. And hopefully, feel-good = buying!

Tuck your head in your shell and wait for the recession to pass, or stick your neck out and try something new. But don't whine about it and make it worse.