Sell to Us · Costume Jewelry · Pasadena
Pasadena jewelry boxes were built by people who dressed for things.
Pasadena households entertained. Club evenings, Tournament season, charity dinners, and the long formal habits of a city with old houses and long memories, all of which required jewelry that read across a room. The good rhinestone pieces bought for those evenings went into the drawer afterward, generation after generation, in houses in Madison Heights and Bungalow Heaven, up the hill in San Marino, out in Altadena and Sierra Madre. Those drawers are among the deepest costume supply in Southern California, and they are usually opened for the first time in decades by an adult child who assumes it is all glass.
Free visit · cash offers · no obligation
We are California Vintage Buyers, at 23011 Moulton Pkwy, Suite G-11, Laguna Hills, CA 92653, and Pasadena calls are a weekly habit for us. We come to your home, free, and read the box in front of you: a loupe on every clasp and pin stem, suspected Bakelite tested properly, matched sets kept together, condition explained as we go. Signed and special pieces are priced individually with the reasoning attached, the modest remainder is bought as an honest lot, and payment is cash the same visit. Call or text photos to (949) 449-1255.
What San Gabriel Valley drawers hold
Signed designer costume
Trifari, Miriam Haskell, Eisenberg, Schiaparelli, Boucher, Weiss and Coro, the names collectors chase and the reason we check every closure.
Rhinestone sets and parures
Necklace, bracelet, earrings and often a brooch, bought as one for evenings out. Complete sets carry a premium, so we keep them together.
1930s and 40s pieces
Big theatrical brooches, dress clips, and wartime pieces from the years when costume houses changed what they made and how they marked it.
Bakelite
Carved bangles, figural and cherry pins, and buckles, tested at the table with hot water rather than with a hot pin.
The whole box, boxes and all
Original maker’s boxes, hang tags, and the tangle underneath. Unsorted and uncleaned is exactly how we want to see it.
Pasadena weekly, and the towns around it on the same day
Our Pasadena calls run through the San Gabriel side of Los Angeles County: Madison Heights, Bungalow Heaven and the Oak Knoll streets, San Marino and South Pasadena, Altadena and Sierra Madre next door, with Arcadia and Monterey Park easily added. The visits are quiet by design. Unmarked vehicle, weekday appointments, no signage, nothing posted publicly, which matters in neighborhoods where everyone notices a van. If the jewelry is part of a whole household being settled, we look at the rest of the contents on the same visit and make one clear offer for whatever you decide to sell.
Our Word
One phone call is the whole process. A real person answers, we come to you, and you decide with a cash offer in hand.
How it works
Call or text photos.
A real conversation about what you have, no pressure to sell.
We come to you.
We look at everything, at your pace. We know what we're seeing.
Cash offer, same visit.
A fair price on the spot, or a full estate sale run for you.
Common questions
Do you cover San Marino, Altadena and Sierra Madre, or only Pasadena proper?
All of them, on the same weekly run, along with South Pasadena, Arcadia and Monterey Park. The San Gabriel Valley schedules as one trip for us, so the address rarely changes how quickly we can get there. Text photos of the box to (949) 449-1255 and we will tell you the same day when we are next through and whether what you have justifies a stop, which it usually does.
Should we just take it to the Rose Bowl flea ourselves?
You can, and for the right seller it works, but count the whole cost before you commit. A booth is a fee plus a 4 a.m. Sunday, jewelry sells slowly by the piece to buyers who are hunting bargains by definition, and the dealers who walk the aisles at dawn are there precisely because unsorted boxes get underpriced by the people selling them. The pieces that reward that weekend are the ones you have already identified correctly. What we do instead is read the box first, free, and price the signed pieces individually so nothing walks off a table for two dollars.
The necklace, bracelet and earrings all match. Should we sell them together or separately?
Together, and please do not split them before anyone has seen them. A complete matched set, what collectors call a parure, is worth more than the same pieces sold one at a time, because reuniting a set later is nearly impossible and buyers pay for the fact that someone kept it intact. The same goes for a brooch and its matching dress clips. If a set is missing one piece, bring it anyway and say what is missing, since an incomplete set still sells well when it is described honestly.
One of the brooches is stamped STERLING but it is clearly costume. What does that mean?
It is a dating clue, and a good one. During the war years, roughly 1942 to 1947, base metal was restricted for war production, so American costume houses switched to sterling for the bodies of their pieces and often finished them in a warm gilt wash. A costume brooch carrying that mark usually belongs to those years, which is one of the eras collectors care most about. Two other cliffs date the rest of the box the same way: a copyright symbol in the mark means the design is mid-1950s or later, and a patent number or Pat. Pend. points to the 1930s through the mid-1950s. Do not polish the mark to read it more easily, since polish strips finish and takes worn marks off with it.
Is Eisenberg Ice worth the same as the older Eisenberg pieces?
No, and the mark is the whole difference. Pieces marked Eisenberg Original are the 1930s and 40s work: large, heavy, set with exceptional Austrian crystal, and they tend to bring in the range of $100 to $300, with the biggest and best examples above that. Eisenberg Ice is the later production line and sells for considerably less. Both are worth keeping out of the donation bag, but knowing which one you are holding changes the number by a lot, so check the back of every big rhinestone brooch before deciding anything.
There are trays in three different rooms and nobody has time to gather it all. Does that matter?
Not at all, and gathering it is not your job. Point us at the rooms and we will work through what is there, which is faster than you sorting it first and safer than a box getting missed in a closet. If the house is being emptied on a schedule, tell us the date and we will fit the visit ahead of it, because jewelry is the category that most often disappears into an estate sale table before anyone has read it. The whole collection is welcome however many trays, boxes and drawers it turns out to be.
Know what it’s worth before you sell.
Our field guides explain how the market actually prices these things. No fishing, no hype: real ranges and the details that move them.
One call. We’ll take it
from there.
(949) 449-1255Mon-Sat 6 am-8 pm · Sun 8 am-5 pm
A real person answers seven days a week, weekends included. Photos sent today are usually answered the same day.
Prefer photos? Text them straight to the same number · or send them here
Also from California Vintage Buyers
- Somewhere in the costume box, a Trifari is waiting.→
- The best costume jewelry in America was made for Los Angeles.→
- Sell vintage in Pasadena without renting a flea market booth.→
- Inherited jewelry, read before anything leaves the house.→
- The Valley kept its jewelry boxes for sixty years.→
- San Marino kept everything. We buy it quietly.→