Antique Shop is Making it in Woodbridge

Maybe this isn't the greatest time to resettle an antique store in Woodbridge, but Robert Smith is doing okay.

Smith moved Westfield Antiques, the store he founded with his father in Westfield almost 25 years ago, into a storefront in a building owned by his uncle in 2010.

So how's business?

"It's kind of slow, but we get a lot of traffic going by," said Smith as cars whizzed past the Rahway Ave. store.

The upside is the rent is about a third of what Smith was paying in Westfield, and he's not waiting for any of those speeders driving past his store to come in and snap up his inventory.

That's why Smith has been selling his merchandise online on Ebay for over a decade.

"I have 500 items in my Ebay store. I sell all over the world, asia, europe," he said. 

Smith goes under the name "Westfield Antiques" on the ecommerce selling site.

"In the past few years, I'm selling more and more on ebay. Sometimes people shop online instead of going to physical stores."

When he was a teenager, Smith got tickled by the antique bug. His parents would take him to area flea markets, and when his father, George, retired in the early 1980s, he decided he wanted to open an antique store. Smith joined his father in the business a few years later.

Over the years, he's seen things in the business change - the biggest of which is the online antiques phenomena. "In the past few years, I'm selling more and more on ebay. Sometimes people shop online instead of going to physical stores. There aren't even as many antique shows as there was," he said.

People who stop by the store sometimes bring him antiques they want to sell on consignment, or that they want him to purchase outright.

That's not to say he doesn't still sell antiques straight out of his store. His merchandise spans a wide range from pottery to artwork to 50s and 60s collectibles. The price range is reasonable, "between $10 to several hundred," Smith said.

For now he rotates items from his personal collections from his home in Clark to the shop, and vice versa. "It keeps it new and fresh, and I also get to sell things when I'm tired of them," he said.

Westfield Antiques is at 717 Rahway Ave., Woodbridge. The phone is 732-218-5646.