Well here is a neat find, circa 1996.
Revere Ware on Facebook
I’m not sure how long it has been around, but I just discovered the Revere Ware Facebook group.
It’s got quite a lot of activity, some great information; and quite a few enthusiastic members.
Things are getting back to normal
Our sales continue to be substantially higher than the same period last year. Because Amazon.com has been limiting restocking shipments for all but essential items, we were starting to get worried about our inventory running out; we began the pandemic lockdown with about 3 months of inventory for normal volumes we expected this time of year, and some of our parts inventory were getting thing.
Amazon did start allowing some restocking of non-essential items, but in the last few weeks, we were very limited in what we could send; we only managed to get a few part numbers that were close to being exhausted restocked and could only send a small amount of each item.
That all changed last week when, without receiving any official notice, we discovered that there were no longer limits on the restocking of any of our parts. We’ve managed to ship a considerable amount of inventory to Amazon.com now that should bring us back to our 2-3 month stock level targets.
We’ve also continued to frequently restock our fulfillment center that serves orders made from our website. You should have no trouble getting our items from either source.
You get what you wait for – mixing bowl lids
This week, the Revere Ware eBay find of the week are these new old stock (NOS) mixing bowl lids.
These are pretty rare, and we get about 10 requests for these a year. But if you are diligent, even rare items like these do come up on occasion. Get them while you can!
HUGE Revere Ware lot on eBay
This is the largest lot of Revere Ware I can recall seeing for sale on eBay.
The price, at $499, seems steep, but that’s only $2.50 per piece, which is very cost effective. This would make a great lot for a refurbisher that wants stock to refurbish and resell.
Unfortunately, it is local pickup only, in Maryland.
When Revere Ware began to lose its way
I came across this interesting egg poacher on eBay today.
Now that, to me, looks like they took a muffin tin and called it an egg poacher. Compare that to the classic egg poacher they sold in the vintage era which is a very classic design.
The muffin tin one is part of the signature collection, which, according to our Photo Guide, was first produced in the 70’s, the period right after quality cookware produced during the vintage era ended.
To me, it is a good reminder of how Revere Ware changed course in a big way after which their products were never as good.
Sales so far in May – Wow
We previously noted that our April sales were considerably higher than the typical April, and more in line with a month around the holidays, our busiest time of year.
Well so far May is on track to be even bigger than April and overall one of our biggest months of the last year.
With all the talk of economic reopening in the news over the last week, our sales seem to indicate people are still at home and looking for things to do.
We’ve added Puerto Rico to our shipping destinations
After a customer request, we have added Puerto Rico as a shipping and billing option. We’ve hesitated to add countries other than the US and Canada to our shipping destinations because configuration and rate selection must be done separately for each country. Puerto Rico however gets the same US domestic shipping rates so we were able to add it to our US domestic shipping zone, which made things a lot easier.
However, because Puerto Rico falls in a grey area where it isn’t really a separate country than the US, and it isn’t a state, there is one quirk; when you select Puerto Rico as the “country”, it doesn’t show any selection for the state, and you have to manually add Puerto Rico as the state, in addition to it being the country.
Corelle shows even more disinterest in the Revere Ware brand
We’ve written about the abandonment of the Revere Ware brand by Corelle, its owners since 2017 when they bought World Kitchen. While the Revere Ware website pages would still show up in Google, they would land on a “not found” page on the Corelle website. Now it gets even worse; it appears they are letting the URL itself slide. Here is what we got when we visited their site today:
I would have thought they might still try to get some traffic out of the brand that they could redirect to their other products, but it seems they see no value in it at all.
Christmas in April
For 11 years now, we’ve seen the same cyclical pattern in sales; interest peaks around the holidays (as do sales) and is at it’s slowest in mid-summer.
But this year, due to the coronavirus, we are seeing a lot of interest in typically slower months; sales in April are about 30% higher than a typical April and almost reached that of our typical December. And much of the increase is due to sales from our website rather than on Amazon.com, likely due to the increased lead times that Amazon.com has been quoting for delivery.
We aren’t alone in this; Etsy reported a doubling of sales last month.
So it looks like people are making good use of their time at home.