Well, it was inevitable.

Hello. We’re your hosts, Bryan and Linda. Welcome to the A La Modern store and blog. Over the years, we’ve been collectors and fans of various types of vintage and modern items. We did tons of research on our collectibles, met some great online collector buddies and even started up some pretty popular websites (Pyrex Love and Potteries of California, among others).

I’ve read many times that the distinction between the collector and dealer can be somewhat nebulous, to say the least. Many sellers start out as collectors, and most remain collectors afterwards. For us, we had resisted the switch over to the “other side” for so long. There wasn’t really a reason for that, we just never really felt the need to sell.

So why start up our own shop? I think it really came down to clutter.

Any serious collector will tell you that a collection, if left unchecked, will inevitably take over your residence. Having already filled up more than 30 boxes in garage, we decided that enough was enough. Some of it had to go.

Originally, the idea was to “Ebay” all of our extra stuff. However, since we already have pretty solid background(s) in design and web programming, we thought we should leverage those skills and create our own little shop. So that’s what we’ve done for now.

We’ll be listing various vintage and antique housewares here on A La Modern. The primary focus will be on mid-century and Scandanavian items, particularly ceramics, glass and home decor, since that’s our current interest. We’ll have a corresponding Etsy shop and will also sell on Ebay, but the main focus will be on our own site here.

One of the purposes of this companion blog will be to continue to engage and research our areas of interest. We hope to reconnect with old collector friends / dealers and make some new ones. While the focus will be mainly on the vintage items we’re selling, we also welcome discussion and questions on other designers and companies from the mid-century era.

We’ve decided to be completely open and frank with our new business – hopefully some of the future posts here will detail our experiences with the business aspects of selling vintage items and antiques online. Having tried to do research online about this previously, I can tell you there’s not a lot of solid stuff to sink your teeth into out there. We’re not claiming to be experts about it, but we’ll certainly try to present our experiences with setting everything up. We’ll also post about some of the technical aspects of how to set up your own website to sell vintage items.

Ok, we’ve got to get back to setting up various things with the shop. But please come by and visit the blog every so often. We hope to post up our latest finds as well as keep the dialogue going with collectors and other vintage sellers. Maybe we’ll even get a few interviews going if we have time later on.