Eisenberg Jewelry Value: Reading the Mark on a Big Rhinestone Brooch

Eisenberg is the name people find on the biggest, heaviest rhinestone brooch in the box. The back carries one of half a dozen marks the company used across eighty years, and which mark it is matters more than how the piece looks, because Eisenberg made its best work in one window of about fifteen years and kept making jewelry under the same name long after. This guide reads the mark, puts modest and dated numbers on each era, and names the auction results that set the ceiling.

Is Eisenberg jewelry worth anything?

Yes, and the amount tracks the decade. The pieces collectors pay for were made from the mid-1930s through the late 1940s: large brooches, dress clips and fur clips built around big Austrian crystals, marked Eisenberg Original, a lone E, or the block-letter EISENBERG of the war years. Set deliberately at the middle of the market rather than the top, as of September 2026, those bring $100 to $300 for a typical brooch or clip, with fur clips in excellent condition around $100 to $200, and the largest colored-stone pieces and named figurals above that band. Antique Trader put the floor plainly in February 2021: ordinary Eisenberg Original pot metal pieces with clear stones now sell for less than $150. Later production marked Eisenberg Ice in script, from 1970 onward, is good modern costume jewelry that mostly brings tens of dollars, not hundreds. The costume jewelry value guide puts these figures beside Trifari, Haskell and Coro.

How did a dress company end up making jewelry?

Eisenberg and Sons was a Chicago clothing house, founded by Jonas Eisenberg in 1914 and run with his sons Harold and Sam. Through the 1920s and early 1930s its dresses sold with rhinestone ornaments attached: buttons, buckles, dress clips, and eventually brooches meant to move from one frock to another. The company’s own account of what happened next was told by Karl Eisenberg, the founder’s grandson and then president of Eisenberg Ice, to Collectors Weekly in November 2010: women tried on the dresses in the North Room of Carson Pirie Scott, the Chicago department store, left the dress and stole the pin, and the store’s chairman suggested selling the jewelry on its own. Jewelry historians treat that as family legend, and Antique Trader called it largely a myth in 2021, so take it as the company’s story rather than history. What is documented is the result: a stand-alone jewelry line by the mid-1930s, a separate company, Eisenberg Jewelry Inc., by 1940, and the end of the clothing business in 1958.

The jewelry was never made in the family’s own workshop. The first pieces came from a Chicago maker, the Agnini and Singer firm later known as Ralph Singer, and from about 1940 nearly everything was made in New York by Fallon and Kappel, whose in-house designer Ruth Kamke drew most of the Eisenberg Originals made after 1939 and much of the Eisenberg Ice line until Fallon and Kappel closed in 1972. Kamke’s drawings are the designs collectors chase.

How do I read the Eisenberg mark and date my piece?

Turn the piece over under a bright light with the phone camera zoomed in; the mark is small and often worn thin. Two cautions before you read the table: published lists disagree by a year or two on almost every line, and the company left stretches of production unmarked, so no mark at all is not proof of a fake. The makers marks guide covers the same dating cliffs for Trifari, Coro and Haskell.

The most useful line is the last one. Script Eisenberg Ice is what most boxes actually hold, because the name has been in continuous use for more than fifty years, and a seller who reads the word Eisenberg and looks up the 1940s prices will be disappointed. Script Ice means 1970 or later. Everything else on the table is worth a closer look.

What does Eisenberg Sterling mean?

It dates the piece to the war. From 1943 until about 1948 the white base metal that costume makers normally cast in was restricted for the war effort, so Eisenberg, like Trifari and Coro, made its bodies in sterling instead, usually finished with a warm gilt wash that has often worn through to the white beneath.

Those pieces carry the marks Eisenberg Original Sterling and Eisenberg Sterling. They are the same Ruth Kamke designs as the pot metal Originals of a few years earlier, set with the same stones, and the market treats them as a category of their own. Karl Eisenberg told Collectors Weekly in 2010 that the wartime pieces are the most valuable to collectors, and the top lots at the 2020 Ripley sale described below were gilt wartime figurals. The value in one of these lives in the design and the stones, not the weight.

What is an Eisenberg fur clip, and what is it worth?

A fur clip is a brooch with a different back: instead of a pin and catch it has a hinged double-prong clip, sprung so the two sharp prongs bite into a fur collar or a lapel. Eisenberg made them large, built to be seen across a room on a coat. Dress clips are the smaller cousins, a flat spring clip for the neckline of a dress, sold in pairs and often separated since.

A signed Eisenberg Original fur clip in excellent condition commonly brings $100 to $200, as of September 2026, a figure from the Lion and Unicorn costume jewelry value guide, which reads eBay and Ruby Lane, both asking-side markets. Auction estimates agree: Ripley Auctions in Indianapolis estimated an Eisenberg Original rhinestone fur clip at $100 to $200 in November 2023 and a larger one with unfoiled crystals and faux pearl berries at $200 to $300 in June 2024. The figurals are a different market. A gilt Eisenberg Original Sinbad fur clip, a turbaned head with enamel detail and colored teardrop dangles, circa 1940, brought $1,250 at Ripley on September 12, 2020. That is a named design from a published book collection, a record for the form, not what a floral clip from a jewelry box will bring.

When was Eisenberg Ice made? The name is older than the mark

This is where most internet answers go wrong. The phrase Eisenberg Ice is a 1930s invention: Sam Eisenberg coined it around 1935, borrowing the gangster-era slang in which ice meant diamonds, and the family says it registered the name that year. The company was advertising Eisenberg Ice in magazines by 1941. The name predates the jewelry most people associate with it by a generation.

The mark is another matter. Through the 1930s and the war the pieces were signed Eisenberg Original or with a lone E, not Ice. Block-letter EISENBERG ICE appears on postwar pieces, from the late 1940s into the 1950s. Then comes the gap: for a stretch of the 1950s and 1960s most Eisenberg jewelry was not marked at all. From 1970 the company signed its jewelry Eisenberg Ice in script and has used that mark ever since, through the 1977 merger into Berns-Friedman, a Chicago costume wholesaler, and a 1990s revival that reissued classic designs and produced the limited Christmas tree pins collectors now look for. In short: script Ice is 1970 or later, block Ice is postwar, Original is the 1930s and 1940s, and the same family name describes one company across three different markets.

Why are the stones on Eisenberg jewelry so bright?

Because they were Swarovski. From the earliest ornaments Eisenberg used Austrian crystal from Swarovski, cut with a higher lead content than cheaper glass, in sizes the rest of the trade did not use: single stones an inch across, emerald cuts, teardrops, pale aquamarine and topaz colors, held by prongs or bezels rather than glue. Oversized crystal, weight and prong setting are what a hand recognizes before the eye reads the mark. The stones are foil-backed, so the one thing that reliably ruins an Eisenberg piece is liquid: water or cleaner creeping behind the foil grays the stone permanently.

What has Eisenberg actually sold for at auction?

Realized prices with the house and the date are the only figures worth carrying into a sale. The best single dataset is the sale of Sharon G. Schwartz’s collection at Ripley Auctions in Indianapolis on September 12, 2020: 284 lots, nearly all illustrated in her book on Eisenberg Originals, grossing a little under $100,000 as reported by Antiques and The Arts Weekly and the Journal of Antiques and Collectibles. These are the results that made the news; the average lot in that sale was a few hundred dollars.

Notice the shape. Every result above $1,000 is a figural or a one-of-a-kind form from a single-owner book collection sold to a room of specialists. The ordinary clear-crystal brooch or floral fur clip, which is what almost every family actually has, sits in the $100 to $300 band the house estimates confirm. Dealer asking prices on retail sites run well above every figure here; an ask is what a seller hopes for, never a value. The company’s own president told Collectors Weekly in November 2010 that vintage pieces then commonly sold for $150 to $250 each, a band the ordinary piece still sits inside sixteen years later.

What should I not do to Eisenberg before selling it?

• Do not clean it with liquid. Every stone is foil-backed; water behind the foil grays it for good, and a grayed center stone on a big Eisenberg piece costs most of the value.
• Do not polish the metal. The gilt wash on the wartime pieces is part of the value, and polish strips it.
• Do not replace a missing stone with a modern one. A missing stone is an honest deduction; a wrong replacement is a bigger one, because collectors can see the difference in the cut.
• Do not straighten or re-tension the prongs of a fur clip. Bent prongs are a small fault; snapped ones are permanent.
• Do not separate dress clips that came as a pair, or split a brooch from its matching earrings. A set brings more together.
• Do not price the box by the one name you recognize. A script Ice piece and an Original can sit in the same tray and differ tenfold.

How we buy Eisenberg

We buy costume jewelry outright, Eisenberg very much included. Signed pieces are priced individually, in front of you, with the era explained as we go; the modest remainder gets one honest lot offer; and everything is paid for in cash the same visit. Across Southern California that is a free house call or an appointment at our Laguna Hills warehouse; the studio history of Los Angeles and Pasadena means the big theatrical pieces surface there most. Outside California we buy by video call: the price is agreed on the call, we pay by PayPal before you ship, and the shipping is on us. If the same box holds Trifari or Miriam Haskell, those guides read their marks the same way, and the where-to-sell guide names every route honestly, including where a patient seller does better than we can.