Having young children, I have a fondness for the Revere Ware play sets. Occasionally, they come up on eBay, like this one.
Update: Here is another play set on eBay.
Removing stainless steel burn marks
Houzz is a great (if not overwhelming) resource for all things house. I recently came across this article on how to keep stainless steel clean.
The part that caught my attention was about removing burn marks from stainless steel.
6. Banish burn marks. If you have some burn marks that just won’t come off your stainless steel stove, try this simple DIY recipe:
- 1 cup baking soda
- ¼ cup lemon juice
- 3 tablespoons Borax
- Club soda (for rinsing)
Combine the first three ingredients to make a cleaning paste. Apply this paste to the entire stained area with a soft cloth. Scrub in the same direction as the grain of the stainless steel. Rinse with club soda and wipe dry with a microfiber cloth.
This might be a good way to occasionally clean the bottom of Revere Ware pans to get off burn marks of the more stubborn variety.
Revere Ware brochure from 1965
We recently came across this Revere Ware brochure from 1965.
It comes folded like this.
We’ve seen things like this included in new Revere Ware that we’ve come across on eBay, still in the box, from the same era, so it seems likely this brochure came with a purchased piece of cookware.
What is interesting, is that it appears to be some kind of order form, showing some sets, and quite a few individual pieces. Do you think someone could get away with calling a set the “Homemaker” set in this day and age?
Here they are a bit larger.
Wow, look at the Art Deco styling of that beverage server. I’ll be on the lookout for one of those.
What is interesting is that, there are places to check off what one wants to order, but there are no prices, and no instructions on how to place and order. I wonder exactly how one used this form?
To consider where this brochure falls in Revere Ware history, this is just 4 years before they changed the design, reducing the thickness of the copper and stainless steel, and made the cookware that much less effective.
Lastly, there is an bit about their cleaners.
The copper cleaner is pretty standard stuff. However, the stainless steel cleaner has me curious, with the statement “Easily removes stubborn discolorations and heat stains …”
If you’ve ever overheated stainless steel, you are probably familiar with the rainbow swirls you can get on the stainless steel, also sometimes called heat tint. We recommend Bar Keepers Friend for dealing with that, but it isn’t perfect. I wonder if their stainless steel cleaner was better.
Revere Ware refrigerator magnets?
When we started selling Revere Ware replacement parts 8 years ago, we bet on the fact that, with an installed base going back to the 40’s, there would be a lot of people passionate about their vintage cookware like we were. In the 9 years since, our business has grown at a moderate but health clip, and in all the ways you might measure the level of interest in all things Revere Ware, interest in the vintage cookware brand has grown considerably.
For example, the number of listings for Revere Ware cookware at any given time has roughly quadrupled in that time period. Similarly, the number of impressions we see for our Adwords ads every month has more than doubled (meaning, people are searching a lot more on Revere Ware related terms).
However, I think the best indication that the vintage Revere Ware brand is seeing a revival is the fact that someone is making new refrigerator magnets out of vintage Revere Ware ads, and they appear to be selling.
Competing against ourselves on Google Adwords
If you regularly read our blog posts, you know that, in addition to writing about topics that are helpful for owners and fans of Revere Ware cookware, we also like to write about our experience running an online business.
Today’s topic is Google Adwords, something which is pretty essential for running almost any online business. If you don’t get traffic, you can’t make sales.
Let’s start with this graph that shows the average cost per click we’ve paid since we started the business, about 8 years worth of clicks.
One thing to realize is that, when it comes to most of the keywords we advertise for, like “revere ware parts” or “revere ware handle” we are the only business providing these parts. You might think that there is little to no competition for the Adwords phrases we pay for, and you would be right. By any standard, the amount we pay per click is tiny. Some businesses will pay tens or hundreds of dollars for a single click, while we spend mere pennies.
But still, a curious thing has happened over the last 8 years … our cost per click has continue to trend up. (There are a couple of anomalies to ignore. The large spike near the start of the graph was us weeding out keywords that were far too costly for our business, and the downward trend towards the end of the graph before it started going up again was us again weeding out the most costly of the phrases we paid for.)
How is this possible given that we are the only business that does what we do? Well, we recently discovered the likely reason. Check out this email we recently got from Google.
Well that’s interesting, we are mostly competing with Amazon.com for keyword phrases. The strange thing about this is that, well, we are the ones selling our parts on Amazon.com. So, it appears that Amazon.com, in order to move more of the business for our parts to their website rather than to ours, is purchasing the same phrases as us.
What does this mean to our business? At one level, not much. Our net margins of selling through our own website and using a fulfillment center to ship the orders, versus selling on Amazon.com and using Fulfillment by Amazon to fulfill the orders is about the same. Well, mostly. Take a look at the graph of our margins over the last 13 months.
As you can see, our website margins (in blue) are right in line with the Amazon margins (in red), except for the last two months. Our fulfillment service has a certain fixed cost for using the service (base cost that doesn’t change every month) and then a variable cost per order (handling, packaging materials, postage). If our website sales get too low in any month (in the summer months we do about half the volume per month than in the winter months) then there aren’t enough order such that the shipping charges sufficiently offset the fixed costs. This affect is smaller if you consider the full year, but, if the proportion of our sales that are sold through Amazon.com continues to go up, eventually it simply won’t be profitable for us to sell through our own website anymore; we will at some point start losing money on every order. Selling through our own website is beneficial, as it allows us to keep much more in touch with our customers, and get direct feedback from them, than selling through Amazon.com, so that would be a shame.
Revere Ware retail arbitrage on eBay
Arbitrage is the exploitation of economic inbalances. An example would be borrowing money from a low-interest rate country and investing it in a high interest rate one.
The appears to be some kind of economic arbitrage happening with our parts for sale on Amazon.com and those parts being listed on eBay. Here is an ad for two of our lid knobs on eBay.
The ad is identical to our listing on Amazon.com, including the title, pictures, and down to the description. We sell the pair of knobs on Amazon.com for $10.49; on eBay they are listed for $14.49. Similarly to the fake web store we found a couple of months ago listing our products from Amazon.com, it seems likely that the back-end systems of this seller simply place orders on Amazon.com with free Prime shipping whenever an eBay order is placed, and make a few dollars on the difference between the prices. This particular seller has 3 other products of ours from Amazon.com listed, all of which are our top sellers (so they are being smart about it).
We can draw a couple of possible conclusions from this phenomenon.
- Our prices are too low. Given the proliferation of our products (and we are the only maker of Revere Ware replacement parts) on eBay at higher prices than we sell on our website or Amazon.com, perhaps the market can bear higher prices.
- We should start selling on eBay; there is clearly a market for our parts there.
Doing a little searching on the subject reveals that Amazon-eBay arbitrage is actually a pretty common thing. There is nothing wrong with it, per se; people are selling a listing something on eBay and then fulfilling the terms of the sale via Amazon.com. The only problem we have with it is that the un-savvy shopper is paying more than they need to, and that any issues with the sale may track back to us via our Amazon.com sales channel.
We would actually love to use Fulfillment by Amazon as a way to fulfill eBay sales, and the difficulty of fulfilling them separately than how we handle our own website sales (via a fulfillment company), and Amazon.com sales (via fulfillment by Amazon) is what keeps us from listing our products on eBay. As of yet, there doesn’t appear to be a way to do this that is supported by Amazon.com.
The moral of this story is, if you want the best price on our parts, avoid eBay and go straight to Amazon.com or our website.
Revere Ware tea kettle replacement lid spring installation tip
A few customers have had difficulty installing the spring when replacing the tea kettle cap and trigger. To help, we created this handy graphic that shows the orientation o the spring and how to tension it. You can also find the full installation instructions and our cleaning tips on the Tea Kettle page.
Revere Ware find of the week – large batch of colored handles
I am not sure why (I prefer black), but people seem to be willing to pay a lot for colored vintage Revere Ware Bakelite parts. Here is a large batch of colored handles for your viewing pleasure.
Scrubbing the inside of stainless steel pans
In our cleaning guide, we recommend against using steel wool to scrub stainless steel pans. The problem is that bits of the steel wool filaments can get embedded in the cookware stainless steel and promote rust.
However, we discovered a new scrubbing pad recently made of stainless steel, the Scotch-Brite stainless steel scrubbing pads.
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Scotch-Brite green scrubbers are our favorite tools for cleaning the inside of stainless steel pans, as they can easily remove food and hard water buildup, and leave the inside with a nice dull polish, (which it will end up with from metal utensils anyways). The stainless steel scrubbers look useful for dealing with the harder burnt on crud.
As a reminder, never use an abrasive scrubber (either of the two above) on the outside of a stainless steel pan, as it will dull the finish. To clean the outside, use a nylon scrubber to clean and Bar Keepers Friend to polish (as well as a good copper cleaner to polish the copper bottom). If you have burnt on food on the outside of the pan, use one of the techniques in our cleaning guide to get it off without harsh scrubbers.
Finding old-style 2-screw pan handles
Our 2-screw handles fit Revere Ware cookware made since the early 1940’s. However, from 1939 to the early 1940’s Revere Ware briefly used a type of handle that was somewhat different, but looked very similar. These handles had 2 screw holes near the pan side of the handle, and another screw that went through the hold where the hanging hook goes. They look like this:
Unfortunately, because of the limited number of pieces that have this type of handle, we don’t sell a replacement. However, from time to time (like the ones above) they do appear on eBay.
The key is to save a search on eBay like “Revere Ware handle) such that it will email you new matches.
For the less patient, we have a guide to adapting our handles to this style of cookware.
For the more ambitions, you could grind down the metal spline to get a perfect fit.