Look For This Marking On Thrift Store Furniture For A More Valuable Haul

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It would be easy to miss valuable pieces in a thrift store — and that would be a shame. You could easily stand in a cavernous room full of Drexel furniture and have no idea it was all made by the same company. The company started with a single, made-to-order dining chair and ultimately manufactured hundreds of individual designs since its start in 1903. Those designs covered a lot of territory, from traditional French, Italian, American, and British pieces to French Chinoiserie (an old-school pattern that has been having a comeback in recent years). There are also the sorts of midcentury details you'd find in a well-appointed home and beyond. Fortunately, you can look out for Drexel maker's marks to avoid missing a more valuable haul — potentially worth thousands of dollars.

We tend to think of the brand as Drexel Heritage, the company's name between 1968 and 2015, when it was acquired and renamed. But a lot of the maker's collectible pieces were made before that, when the company was called Drexel Furniture. So, unless you're familiar with a century of the brand's designs, the important thing to look for in a piece's maker's mark is the name "Drexel."

The company name hijinks were made slightly more confusing by the fact that the company returned, in 2015, to its earlier name, Drexel Furniture. The 47-year Drexel Heritage period represents a lot of the company's more modern offerings. But the pieces made after 2015 — while still high-quality — might be less desirable, depending on what you're looking for.

As with valuable pottery pieces, looking for the maker's mark is probably the easiest way to investigate thrift store furniture. It's easiest to look for the company name wherever the maker's mark appears. For Drexel, that tends to be in fairly predictable places, including the backs of case goods, the undersides of tables and chairs, and the insides of a drawer, usually the top drawer. But the mark can be as simple as "By Drexel" (often with a notice of trademark registration) or "Heritage," or as complex as eight or nine lines of stenciled text and codes. The company's ID numbers were reportedly standardized in the early 1970s to two three-digit numbers separated by a dash. These codes include such information as the piece's series of collection, the type of wood it's made from, and the date of production, and can be deciphered by contacting Drexel's customer service department.

You can often suss out the date of production without anyone's help. While there are reports of dates being encoded backwards for whatever reason, there are many examples from the last 50 years of dates in a simple month-year format. Consider the real-world example of "145-405 4-72," in which the first three digits indicate the suite number (the style or collection), the second three are a finish number, and the "4-72" means exactly what you'd expect: the piece was manufactured in April of 1972.

Just as the collections are varied, so are the prices of the pieces you might find in a thrift store today. The price is generally a function of four bits of information: the desirability of the furniture, obviously, and also its condition, age, and rarity. There are many popular Drexel collections, often conceived by well-known designers, but the most valuable lines appear to be the Triune, Travis Court, and Declaration collections. The particular sort of furniture seems to have an even greater impact on price than the collection, with larger and more complex pieces costing considerably more.

We looked at offerings and actual sales from antique dealers, retailer Chairish, and eBay to get a sense of the worth of Drexel furniture in those contexts. There is considerable variation in these prices, however. Chairish offers beds selling for as much as $5,800, but those on eBay often sell for around $1,000 to $2,000. Chairs available on Chairish can cost around $6,000 and as much as $19,000, though there are some on eBay that are listed for a few hundred dollars. But what about thrift stores? You can sometimes find these for under $100, so be sure to keep an eye on those maker's marks.