Sheri Weiss is a woman of many hats: musician, songwriter, fashion designer, painter, screenplay author, jewelry collector, and now, jewelry vendor. During her thirty-five year career as a fashion designer making sportswear, she never stood still. She claims, “You can’t just do one thing in life, you have to be flexible.” As a kid, that took form in selling lemonade with a best friend or cracking open rocks in her basement in hopes of uncovering diamonds.
Being a New Yorker through and through - born in Queens and now residing in NoMad - Sheri took her creative tendencies to the High School of Art and Design and then to Parsons School of Design. She moved officially into Manhattan the day before starting her second design job, but was always creating on the side. She was signed to a music label for a period of time as a country songwriter, and for a short period, she made semi-precious jewelry. In addition, she is fluent in Spanish, knows a bit of French, Italian, and German, and can say “thank you” in every language - what she believes to be the most important phrase to know.
Working with her first partner who had been selling jewelry for forty years, she watched and learned. Her location inside the Showplace Antique Center on West 25th Street enables her to meet new vendors everyday. Many have taught her how to differentiate real and fake silver by scent and how to recognize pieces of furniture. Her previous time as a collector instilled a passion for researching pieces. She explained that in a “pre-google era,” she and a core group of collectors throughout the world would communicate through a mass email group to show pieces they owned and ask questions. They also did fun competitions to show off their jewelry, including making art out of jewelry. For this particular challenge, Sheri took all of her "jelly belly" jewelry - any small costume jewelry with a clear lucite stone - and composed a beach scene. Sheri's eyes light up discussing the historical debates of the costume jewelry community: the “Mystery of Harr,” the well-known but never-written-about Trufari, and the unsigned Julianna.
In Sheri's eleven years of selling, she learned to recognize unmarked pieces simply from clasps and structure; she enjoys that you can find out a lot more from the back of jewelry than the front. And though she simply bought what she liked when she was a collector, she now knows the importance of names in an internet-era. Today, Sheri focuses her collection on American vintage custom jewelry, sometimes purchasing whole collections from estates or other times from people bringing pieces in. She has a personal interest in Deco, Victorian, and snake jewelry. The only jewelry she wears everyday are her two snake bracelets, one Victorian, one from the 1940s. Everything else she switches from her enormous collection. Sheri shared some of her entertaining stories with Manhattan Sideways. We, particularly, enjoyed the time a customer asked her about a blue-green enamel bracelet, but when she opened it she found it was not costume jewelry. Rather, it was an 18k Tiffany bracelet. She always asks estates or people looking to sell to take out their real gold, but on a few occasions they forget.
