Is this for you at all
Updated
Every other craft in this estate makes something. This one finds, curates and sells something that already exists, and that changes almost everything about it.
Not a maker craft
There is no formula, no batch, no shelf life in the usual sense and no product liability in the usual sense.
What replaces them is documentation and conservation: the value is in knowing what a thing is and where it came from, and in it still being that thing in thirty years.
Which means the skills that matter are record-keeping and patience rather than process control.
What it is good at
Low entry cost. A hammer, a notebook and a permission.
No production. Stock is found or bought, not manufactured, so there is no capacity ceiling to engineer around.
A real collector market with genuine price discovery, at every level from a dollar to five figures.
And material that does not expire, if it is stored properly.
What it is bad at
Sourcing is the whole business and it is unpredictable. A good year depends on a pocket somebody hits.
The legal layer at the front is genuinely complicated and differs by parcel.
Shipping is expensive and breakage is real, which caps the online business.
And the conservation problem is permanent: a collection left alone degrades, and some of it degrades whatever you do.
Who does well
People who like the documentation. If cataloguing feels like admin you will not enjoy this and the collection will not be worth much.
People with a focus, one locality, one species, one size class, because a focused collection beats a broad one at every level including resale.
People who go and look, because self-collected material with good data is the cheapest way into material worth owning.
And people with somewhere stable to put it, which sounds trivial and decides whether the collection survives.