I was a Professional Beachcomber, Part 2: A Lot of Work!
Continuing on from yesterday's post!
Now it's important for me to preface this next segment our story with the reality that there is a lot more to being a professional beachcomber than merely walking on the beach and picking up interesting things.
While it might seem almost magical that you could make a living from such a thing, let’s keep squarely in mind that it involves a lot of work!
Certainly there is the ”walking on the beach and picking up interesting things” part but after that you end up with quite a few other things that need to be done.
Let's have a look at those:
- You bring the sea glass home and then you start by washing it to get the salt, sand and seaweed off of it from the ocean.
2... Next you have to sort the sea glass into the different colors that you're going to sell. Jewelers like to buy specific colors they like to work with, so you can't just have everything mixed together.
3... Once you've sorted it by color you have to take the pieces of each color and grade them into (a) premium jewelry quality, (b) good jewelry quality, (c) mosaic quality and (d) beach waste. Whereas this is as much art as science, you pretty quickly develop a sense for what's what.
4... Once graded comes the process of separating the glass into groups that make sense in terms of selling it to jewelers and other artists. Typically, that means quantities and sizes/shapes. This part of the process typically means taking the finds from 3-4 beach trips and creating maybe 60-100 "lots" with it. It's pretty time consuming!
Part of the sorting and grading process
5... Once ”lotted”, comes the process of taking really good photographs of every single group or individual piece. That mens several photos per group, including at least one with an object for comparative scale. I used a US dime coin.
6... When the photography is done, the photos are downloaded to my computer so I can process the photos to make sure that they are ”web friendly” and that they are in focus and look good, and you may even have to "color correct" them if the natural light used for photography didn't present the sea glass to look like it does in real life. Usually, a few re-shoots are required.
7... Part of the photo processing is also renaming all the photos to be sequenced in the order corresponding to how I wanted to offer up the glass in eBay auctions. More about that later.
8... And then: eBay auctions! Once I had my "auction lots" ready to go then I would list them on eBay for sale. As mentioned above, in any given auction series I would usually have between 60 and 100 lots to sell. About 3-4 times a year I would have a "super auction" where I offered up some of the best of the best from the preceding three to four months, and such auction series would generally have between 150 and 200 lots in them. Let me tell you, it takes quite a long time to list that many items properly and give them a good description!
9... Timing matters! Since most of my customers were in North America, the listings would open up for bidding on Sunday afternoons, and bidding would close the following Sunday afternoon, seven days later. Once I had an established clientele, there would be some hefty competition, especially for some of the rare and popular colors! Of course, since this was done on an "open auction" format, results could vary considerably, but most weeks generated sales between $1,200 and $2,000.
This bright teal green color was both RARE and popular. Bidding for a handful of glass like this might reach $70-$80.
10... But things don't stop there. Once the auction ends, then you have to bill all your buyers for their winnings, being careful to group "multiple winners" together so they can save on postage.
11... Once the invoices went out, then you await payment. Most people were prompt payers, but sometimes I ended up sending reminder notices for a couple of weeks before the final remittances trickled in.
12... Shipping Frenzy! Once the payment comes in then you of course have to safely package and put the glass into parcels to mail them out to the buyers. To say that I was a mass consumer of "bubble mailers" would be an understatement!
Meanwhile, let's keep in mind that I didn't just get to do this once and then sit still! I needed to constantly find new things to sell, and soon! As a general rule, I ended up working mostly with a two week cycle.
That is to say I would start a new set of auctions every other Sunday afternoon designed to run for one week. That meant 26 ”series” a year.
So, on the immediate following Monday after auctions were launched, it would be a beachcombing day. Hopefully the tides would be favorable for a good long day... but that wasn't always the case.
Tuesday fllowing the end of auctions would be shipping day because by then most people had paid for their items and I could get them all packaged up and taken to the post office and sent out.
Keep in mind that this was all happening in the days before you could buy postage and shipping labels directly from eBay so I had to take them to the post office and buy shipping inside the building!
And this seems like another natural break point in the story... next time, I'll get more into the joys and sorrows of pursuing this strange line of work!
Thanks for stopping by, and I hope to see you again for the next installment!
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Created at 2025.07.08 00:43 PDT
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I like reading these glimpses into your life and different jobs over the years. :)) And that glass is lovely!
Thank you! It was a fun thing to do, for a while...
Interesting way to earn a little, enjoy the outdoors, all extremely time consuming. Still sounds fun once you know what you are doing and have a market for pieces.
It was a lovely way to keep from having to go to a "real" job and sit in an office, every day!
Seldom found nice pieces of glass along our side of the coast, I think the Cape beaches would have better options, although never heard of market for them here. All jobs behind a desk or otherwise become repetitive and boring.
That was a cool job, even if it did require following a schedule.
Here beachcombers focus on cargo lost by ships on the North Sea. Recently that included packs of cocaine too. Did you pick up anything interesting that wasn't sea glass?
There were quite a few things to find, including natural jade washed down from Canada, pieces of pottery and china, electrical parts from ships, random driftwood in the (approximate) shapes of fish and animals, pieces of cutlery, even a few old coins. No contraband, though!
That is definitely a great deal of work. Just getting the photos right could take hours. I don't know if setting up ebay auctions is any easier now than it was back then, but I know it used to take me a long time when I did it. The worst part for me was trying to calculate the postage.
Wow you sure made some money from it! Nice specimens for sure - so rounded!!!