Don’t Miss Erica Weiner’s Enormous Online-Only Jewelry Sale
Erica Weiner–Brooklyn-based designer of gorgeous, antique- and costume-leaning jewelry (and very funny person, we found out on the phone this morning)–wants to bring the original meaning of the word “sample” back to the words “sample sale.”
“Sample sales today just mean markdown, and everyone is marking things down in bigger letters,” says Weiner. “We really do have sample productions from every time we design a piece of jewelry; we make ten pieces that don’t make the cut.”
Starting next Wednesday, October 21 at 10am through Friday, October 23 at midnight, Weiner will run an online sale filled with those literal samples, plus a lot of very odd, and very appealing antique pieces that she and her business partner, Lindsay Salmon, have found across the country over the past six months, then stowed away for the online sale, which they run biannually.
“It’s the weirdest antique stuff where someone replaced this thing that was supposed to be a diamond with a piece of asphalt,” says Weiner. There is also a whole stash of pieces, like 80s dead-stock studs, that were not expensive enough to photograph properly and offer online, but that are nonetheless one-of-a kind and awesome–i.e. things that you will want to own. It’s a sizable sale, too–this morning Wiener said there were up to 300 listings.
Weiner has two stores, one that opened five years ago in Nolita, and a second that opened over two years ago on Atlantic Avenue in Boerum Hill. The stores are meticulously designed and have the feeling of being steeped in another time. You should visit for sure, but don’t expect to find the same deals in store that you’ll get online next week.
“When you have [a locally-designed, high-end brand–Weiner didn’t want to name names], everyone knows to wait for sales, nobody buys anything at full price,” says Weiner. “I really didn’t want to train people to let them know they don’t ever have to pay full price for stuff.” As a result, her first online sample sale a year ago was way more successful than she was prepared for. “You get an alert when an order comes in, and it was ringing like, ‘ping-pa-ping-ping,’ and we were like, ‘Holy shit, do we have to hire people, what the fuck are we gonna do?'”
Which is just a little anecdote to let you know: these Erica Weiner samples will likely be snapped up like Kraftwerk tickets at MoMA–you know, impossibly quickly–and you should be sure to be online next Wednesday to get first dibs.
“This is a way to have an exciting hyped sale, and get special stuff–but the normal collection never goes on sale,” she tells us. In fact, like so many other things in life—and this borough—Weiners reminds us, “It’s all about the hype.”
For more information about the sale and to follow the action, you can go to the store’s Instagram and Twitter and to Erica Weiner’s Facebook. And don’t forget to look for the sale next Wednesday on ericaweiner.com