Brimfield Shopping – the truth about finding specific dealers or specialty merchandise.

You may already know the truth about finding people and things at Brimfield if you’re a seasoned shopper.  If you’re a novice, it’s better to find out ahead of time that there is very little information available to guide you to your treasures.

Here are some of our Brimfield Shopping Tips:

Plan to do a lot of walking and searching.  Although there are some dealers who are exhibiting a particular category of merchandise, for example; toys, pottery, costume or fine jewelry, primitives, Native American, etc., the majority bring a mix of inventory that they want to sell. Period.

There are a few rows here and there of dealers who know one another and intentionally rent space nearby but overall the dealers are scattered throughout the show fields with very little rhyme or reason.

If you go to the show office of any field and ask where  the pottery dealers are, usually the answer is that you will need to walk the show to see what is in each booth to find the pottery.  That’s the reality of shopping at Brimfield.

Now, as a more practical approach, once you’ve made contact with a dealer with whom you’d like to shop again in the future, your best bet is to get his contact information and his Field name and booth number. You should ask if he does Brimfield each time or just in May. You might keep notes in your cell phone or have a little notebook to jot down the information.

Lots of dealers move during the week from one field to another. You may see them on Tuesday ( the opening day at Brimfield) at a one day show and then again on Thursday at a two day show. They move in order to be more successful at their sales. Usually the opening day at any show field sees the most action. By being set up at several openings the odds of having more serious buyers shopping their booth increases as does their overhead.

To review; please be aware that there isn’t a field that only has dealers who just sell toys or dolls. You won’t find a field with just glass or pottery. You will find dealers who specialize but many still bring other things, too.  One exception to this is postcards and ephemera (historical paper). There is a red building on the west end of Brimfield that houses a group of dealers who handle paper. They need to be set up indoors due to the nature of their merchandise which is too fragile to be shown outdoors.

Happy hunting!!