Last week we got in a couple dozen genuine vintage cat eye frames. One of those reminded me of an interesting anecdote with some women's eyeglass frames that happened a few years back.
But first a little background. At the Vintage Optical Shop we sell only genuine vintage eyeglass frames. We mostly get one of each of the frames we have but sometimes we get a few identical frames.
Once in a while we come across a pair of vintage eyeglasses that we haven't seen in many years. Last week we came across one such pair.
A few years back we bought out most of the inventory of an old optical shop in Central Missouri. They were mainly vintage women's eyeglasses but there were some men's vintage eyeglasses as well. We weren't sure those vintage frames would sell well so we didn't buy out the entire lot. It turns out that many of the frames sold well and we ran out of a lot of those retro eyeglass frames within a year.
We still had plenty of vintage frames from this lot unsold. Some of those styles did not sell well and haven't sold since, making them a bad choice, but many of the vintage women's eyeglass frames from this lot we sold very well which made up for the ones we still have sittings around.
Overall it was a good lot and the majority of the frames sold out. Many of the vintage frames which were mostly vintage cat eye glasses, many of which were gold filled glasses, came in multiples but they all sold out as they were very nice styles.
When we contacted the people from the old optical shop in MO to inquire weather they had any unsold vintage eyeglasses from this lot left they told us that there were seasonal floods in their area and the entire basement where the frames were being stored got flooded. All frames were destroyed.
As a side note it is interesting to think about he fact that these vintage eyeglass frames, which were mostly from the 1960's, sat undisturbed in good condition for 50 years before we acquired them. A few months after us acquiring them the basement where they were stored got flooded. While some frames got destroyed, we had acquired the bulk of the vintage eyewear and they were not damaged. It's almost like history was protecting these frames so that they could be preserved and last another generation.
What reminded us about this story was one of the frames we got last week. A pair of light brown cat eye frames. We originally had these in black, brown, gold and silver. They sold out pretty quickly. We did not hear from them again until last week. These are the frames:
