I was reading about Marie Kondo the other day. She founded the KonMari method which recommends that you tidy up your possessions, including, among other things, sentimental items. This got me thinking, about how to tidy up your vintage jewelry using KonMari.

Why I chose to use KonMari

I buy and sell a lot of vintage and estate jewelry. There is a lot of this going on in Camarillo which his home to a large population of older adults. Many of these folks want to sell jewelry they no longer use. Often, it’s their kids that sell me the estate jewelry they inherited from their parents.

This is not an easy task for some people. Jewelry like family heirlooms and antiques can hold a special place in a person’s heart. As such, some people who visit Mills Jewelers & Loan are hesitant to part with their vintage jewelry even though they haven’t touched it for 20 years.

Enter Marie Kondo

Marie says to “Keep only those things that speak to the heart, and discard items that no longer spark joy.” This speaks directly to my clients concerns about parting with their beloved jewelry.

So, how would one use Marie Kondo to tidy up their collection of vintage and estate jewelry? Marie has a step by step process for how to succeed:

1. Gather all your vintage and estate jewelry in one place.
2. Go through it all and identify which pieces you can easily part with and those pieces you may want to keep.
3. Pull out the pieces that you have sentimental value with. In addition, you may want to pull out the practical pieces that you wear intermittently.
4. Those pieces that you never wear and/or you have no sentimental attachment to, or don’t “spark joy” in you, per Marie, put in a separate pile.
5. The pieces you intend to keep get put away in an organized fashion.
6. The pieces you no longer want, you may bring to us at Mills Jewelers & Loan for evaluation or perhaps you can donate them to a local school.

Valentine’s Day 2019 Deadline

I decided to practice a little KonMari myself. For the past couple months, I’ve been running a promotion on a lot of jewelry that I’ve had for some time. Whatever didn’t sell by Valentine’s day I told myself, I would sort through and either scrap or donate.

Valentine’s day came and went. And so, on February 15, 2019, I started sorting. As you can see, I put the jewelry in multiple piles:

1. The big tray is 50 ounces of scrap sterling silver that we’re going to melt down and sell
2. The small pile is scrap gold that we’re also going to melt down and sell
3. The envelope is full of choker necklaces that I am donating to my niece Zoe’s theater company

It was great to go through all this and clean up the shop. And it’s going to be great knowing that we took all of this scrap and turned it into something.

So, thank you Marie Kondo, for showing me how to tidy up your vintage jewelry using KonMari. If you have a bunch of old vintage and estate jewelry that you don’t know what to do with – look up KonMari. Go through it, find which pieces bring you joy, and bring the rest to me. I guarantee we will pay top dollar for your jewelry.