Business & Tech
Consignment Store Offers Vital Link To Nautical Community
Thousands of items from "anchors to zinc."
There are 80-pound plus buckets of just plain nuts and bolts. Plumbing fixtures include heads and pipes and valves.
To help propel or operate a boat is a motley arrangement of working engines, rudders and steering wheels as well as cables and electrical items of all kinds, shapes, sizes and ages. There are doors, ropes, cables and anchors and small and large parts for power boats, sailboats and dinghies.
There are even old service manuals that are valuable references for parts that no longer manufactured but are vauable resouces fofr some parts purchased here.
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On a recent rainy day, local boaters filter in to scour the aisles, shelves and floors of , looking for that necessary or prized item for their boats in the upcoming season.
It may look messy, but items that cover “anchors to zinc” or “stem to stern” are indeed organized into categories, says Sam Angelini, a co-owner, along with his wife, Kathy. Overall, he estimates there are over 10,000 items in what he says “is the largest marine consignment store in New England.”
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No consignment store can exist without someone offering to sell their item through an arrangement with the owner. Angelini says “90 percent of the trade is individuals selling or buying an item.” Once a consignor agrees to have their item displayed and it is then sold, the seller gets to keep 60 percent or more.
“We want to get the best price for the seller, but we clean it up first, closely inspect it and make sure it is in working order before we place a value on it,” he says of the preliminary process.
Looking at the store, it is hard to believe Angelini is not a pawn shop, yard sale, estate auction or storage-place "junkie." But he is not. ”People often invite me to their house to see what they want me to sell for them.”
As customers drift in and out and through the aisles of this large, Angelini seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of so many brands and models, new and used. It was not always this way.
“There was no eBay or Craigslist or much on the Internet when I started, so when I didn’t know anything about a part, I had to look it up in books,” says Angelini of the business he and his wife started at Wickford Shipyard in 1994. “Now all I have to do is go to the Internet or Google it.”
The store also serves as an important link in a long nautical business chain.
“We enjoy what we do because we serve a purpose,” says Angelini of his place in the boating community. “We offer prices at less than retail and you can say we help to recycle and conserve lots of items. And the seller wants them to be used again so they can use and enjoy them, too.”
Besides his "utilitarian" site in Wickford, Sam owns has another consignment store, Marine Consignment of Mystic, CT with a different focus. “The Mystic store has more nautical art and high-end antiques there,” he says.
Yet, there are historical and even collectible items there, too.
He brings out an antique 1918 British Webley Scott signal flare gun made for World War I use by London & Birmingham. Asking price: $450.00. From a replica of the Sloop Providence, featured and used in two of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, is a cannon. He has a clock from the USS Landsdowne.
But the store does not carry everything. “If you can not find what you want, we will type in what you need or want into our database wish list and try to match it with a person or business that might have it,” he said. "We also have access to different wholesalers.”
Consignment shops are becoming common throughout the state, and growing, Angelini says. “We have more consignment shops per capita than any other state. Last month was one of my best years ever and we are looking to open another store.”
“The town likes us and we like the town because there are so many amazing resources around here,” he says.
Angelini smiles when asked if someone could scrape together all the items needed to actually build a decent working boat from scratch from items bought from the store. “You might do it, but it probably wouldn’t run that well,” he admits, though pausing as he ponders the possibility.
