“Every day you show the world who you are!” Oprah Winfrey.   At Antiques Iowa, this means being the antique mall with the great reputation for fair prices, quality merchandise and excellent customer service.   Our mall receives comments weekly about our friendly service, our clean, well-light facility and our great merchandise.

 “Coming together is a beginning…Keeping together is progress…Working together is success,” Henry Ford.  Antiques Iowa has 90 plus wonderful dealers.  A great antique mall is a win-win situation for everyone involved.   Antiquers (dealers and customers) are a very social group.   Don’t you just love antique auctions where you can go to gab the night away and try not to miss what you came to buy?  I wait for the item to come up for sale and then perhaps half the other bidders turn out to be friends.   Darn!  Do I really want it?   My dealers can always tell if I need new merchandise or if it is for me personally because I move up front.  I don’t want to know who I’m bidding against; I don’t look back.  Usually though – I let the item go to someone else.  There is always another auction.  It is more important to me to keep my antique dealers and customers as friends.   You can tell a lot about an antique mall by its dealers and we feel more like family.  The Antiques Iowa staff know our dealers by first name.  We care about illnesses and family issues.  We try to treat our customers the same way – as old friends.   

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” Ralph Waldo Emerson.   At Antiques Iowa, we try to help if we can.  Our customers come to us with questions about values on their antiques and about how to dispense of antiques that their children don’t want.  They come looking for lost parts or a special piece to add to a collection.  Recently a customer called asking for three antique opaque blue lightning rod balls and one rod.  There had been a problem on a roofing job and the balls had gotten broken.  Needless to say the barn owner was upset.  Every day I look for the ordinary miracles.   I told the person to come and we would find him what he needed.  We had EXACTLY three blue opaque balls and one rod in the WHOLE mall.  We had exactly what he needed to fix the problem.  Is that a God thing or what?  Awesome!

 A question that I get regularly is:  What is an antique?  At Antiques Iowa, we sell collectibles, vintage items and antiques.  So what is the definition of these three categories?  My personal opinion does not really match industry’s definition of a true antique.  When I was growing up, an antique was anything that was 100 years old or older.   About 25 years ago, during the 80’s craze, prices in antique malls were sky high and dealers were trying to classify newer items as antiques so that they could charge more money.   At that time, the definition by industry standards shifted down to suggest that an antique was anything fifty years old or older.  This was before EBay and before items that we all thought were relatively rare were showing up in multiple pages for sale.    My opinion (and what I tell anyone who asks) is that something collectible is less than 25 years old.  To be vintage the item needs to be approximately 25 years to 79 years old.  An antique item needs to be more than 80 years old; great-grandma stuff - something that generation would have used and would readily identify.   Of course, the older the better!  EBay has definitely dropped the prices of all categories:  collectibles, vintage and antiques.  Some dealers would argue that eBay has ruined the antique business.   I reply that it has made all “antiques” more reasonably priced.   It has made it harder for dealers to make an easy profit in the business and eBay has also made collectibles, vintage pieces and true antiques more affordable for the general consumer.   EBay has made collecting a younger sport – lots of young people that never come into an antique mall – shop online.  It is a great thing to see young people collecting.   Pass the knowledge forward. 

“The ultimate goal should be doing your best and enjoying it,” Peggy Fleming.   At Antiques Iowa, we have a wide variety of items for sale.  Some things such as slightly used VHS and DVDs would not be what I would want to see in a true antique mall.  But we have found that customers aren’t as fussy as antique dealers.   Because Antiques Iowa is located on an interstate, we try to satisfy the needs of an entire family traveling across our state.  The children may want a different DVD to watch in the car while mom and dad shop for something else.   Perhaps Dad collects pocket watches, pocket knives, NASCAR or John Deere toys.  Mom could be looking for the Watt mixing bowl that her mother mixed up cookies in or she collects snow babies or Precious Moments.  Our goal is to have something for everyone.  Dealers at our mall are allowed to bring in any item that they buy on the secondary market.  Dealers can purchase merchandise for resale at an auction, garage sale, from a private collector etc.  They cannot buy it wholesale from a catalogue or from a wholesale market – such as the new tin advertising signs, reproduction Jadeite that you see booths filled with at the larger antique malls across the country.    Dealers are not allowed to bring in live plants or animals, and no pornography (in many cases, pin art is acceptable).  Weapons such as knives and guns are to be in a locked case.  And, if the dealer knows an item is a reproduction then he is suppose to mark it as such.  Rules are necessary to keep a great mall great.  

“Abundance is about being rich, with or without money.” Suze Orman.   I traveled to Brazil (Jan.2009) and came back from my vacation happy to be at home in the U.S.A.  At Antiques Iowa, we feel blessed to be in business together.  Our glass is half full and sometimes, over flowing.  Our antique mall is full.  We treat our antique dealers and our customers the way we would like to be treated.  We do not ANNOUNCE that we are closing for the night twenty minutes before closing, nor do we repeat that obnoxious siren every 10 minutes.  We do not push our customers out the door – we invite them to stay and shop a while!   The bottom line is that we care and we try hard to make our customer family want to come back, want to walk through our front door to be greeted and want to spend time looking at what our antique dealers have brought in this week. 

In summation, what we believe at Antiques Iowa is that to have a great reputation you must have fair prices on quality merchandise and give great customer service.  Here at Antiques Iowa we treat our dealers and our customers as family to create a win-win situation for all.  Our staff and our antique dealers pass along their experience and knowledge to help in any way they can.  We want you to come again!