A $25 estate-sale cat turns out to be a Fornasetti

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The ceramic pieces Jordan Piluso purchased at an estate sale this year. Jordan Piluso businessinsider.com

A New Jersey mother paid $25 for a ceramic cat at an estate sale in late January. Back home, a reverse-image search and a stamp under the tail led her to Piero Fornasetti’s Milan workshop, and the brand later confirmed by email that the hand-painted piece dates to the late 1950s or early 1960s, according to Business Insider.

The episode is a tidy illustration of how secondhand markets still work when attention is uneven. Estate sales are designed to clear a house quickly, not to run a global price-discovery process for every object on a piano. The seller’s advantage is access—being in the room first—while the buyer’s advantage is information, and increasingly the buyer can rent that information from a phone in seconds. A stamp once meant something only to specialists; now it is an indexable data point. That does not eliminate mispricing so much as it shifts it: the gap opens when the person running the sale does not know what to photograph, how to describe it, or which items deserve a specialist’s glance.

As more stories like this circulate, the amateur edge shrinks. The same tools that helped this buyer verify the cat—image search, brand email, appraisers’ reference points—also make it easier for estate-sale operators to pre-screen items, route them to auction houses, or outsource authentication. The result is a familiar pipeline: low-information clearouts feed a higher-fee layer that can certify provenance, handle returns, and market to a global audience. The margin that used to reward the person willing to rummage through boxes increasingly goes to whoever controls the verification and distribution.

Ken Farmer, an antique and fine-art appraiser quoted by Business Insider, estimated the piece at roughly $1,000 to $1,500 at auction and about $3,000 at retail. The buyer says she is keeping it, placing it out of reach of a toddler—an object whose value was discovered by a search query, then converted into a story she intends to tell for years.