Last year I visited an interior design trade event and saw this sweet looking elephant, right before I was about to leave. I went up to the sales man and asked for the price. It wasn’t much, but I did notice that the elephants trunk had been broken and glued back together. It’s not strange, it’s the most fragile part. I waited to make a decision and then decided: no, I should really only buy things that are intact… Bye little elephant…
So with almost instant regret, I tried the next day to find an “intact” version of the elephant online and when that didn’t work, I tried to locate the dealer, who was, by then, untraceable.
I spent quite some time on this, but in the end accepted that I had just made a mistake with not buying it in the first place.
So this year when I visited the same interior design trade event, I went up to the same dealer and without any hope asked him if he still had the elephant. You can imagine my surprise and happiness when he opened a plastic box and took it out!! There he was! My beautiful – glued trunk – elephant.
Be careful when you buy broken items, as they can easily reduce a whole lot in value. But also (and more importantly), when you love an item genuinely, think of it as a person. It might be glued together, but if you can see through that and be happy when you look at it anyway, it’s always a good investment.