Welcome to PRONIK SPECIMENS!
Choice mineral specimens for your collection!
PRONIK SPECIMENS was founded by me, Prodromos Nikolaidis, a professional geologist who at heart simply remains a mineral specimen aficionado.
The idea of offering mineral specimens for purchase to collectors started floating around sometime during the course of my undergraduate studies. Frequent university field trips to mines and solo prospecting hikes resulted in such an influx of specimens that my small apartment-space was severely struggling to cope with displaying everything. As more and more specimens kept coming in, lots of them had to go into shoeboxes for storage. But that didn’t feel right – those small treasures from the Earth were simply too beautiful to be stored in shoeboxes. Instead, they ought to be displayed and admired at all times. Well, what if they could be shared with other like-minded people who could accommodate for them to be marvelled in their own collections? Yes, that felt like a more fitting destiny!
In this sense, PRONIK SPECIMENS mineral dealership materialized for the first time as an entity on 7th Sep 2017 when an account was created on e-rocks.com and the first sale happened about a month later on 9th Oct 2017. PRONIK SPECIMENS existed online here and there (e.g. e-rocks.com, ebay.com, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram) but it didn’t have any official place of living. Until 1st Aug 2023 when this website was created and went online.
All specimens, available and sold, can be found at the website’s Shop section. When a specimen is sold, a ribbon indicating as such is added to the specimen’s main photo. Use the filter option if you want to see only available or only sold specimens. The reason for maintaing sold specimens on the website is for archival purposes. As any seasoned collector knows, a great part of a specimen’s value is inherently connected to the associated provenance information. And for PRONIK SPECIMENS, provenance is of paramount importance. Every specimen sold by PRONIK SPECIMENS is associated with a unique inventory number which can be used as a reference to trace your specimen. The easiest way to do this is to simply write the specimen number in the address bar of your browser in the Shop section (for example, if your specimen number is 1150, then the address bar should read: pronikspecimens.com/shop/1150). The specimen number can be found written on the accompanying label. Please note though that in some of the earliest printed labels, the specimen number was not included. You can always contact PRONIK SPECIMENS and we can work out together your specimen number – that’s even if you have acquired the specimen indirectly but you know that at some point the specimen was once in our repository. In any case, drop a line to discuss your specimen and you may find out one or two hidden easter eggs!
Please note that newly offered specimens make their debut at an online auction platform such as e-rocks.com or ebay.com. And why is that? Well, the answer is twofold: first, because we genuinely enjoy auctions, and second, because auctions give the community the opportunity to determine the specimen’s value in the ever-ending debate of specimen valuation. If the specimen doesn’t sell at the auction, it then gets listed here, at the website’s Shop section, where it is offered at a fixed price. As a small-scale mineral business we prefer direct communication when ordering specimens – thus no automatic check-outs and add-to-cart-buttons exist here! Simply drop us a line through the Contact form to discuss the best payment method. We prefer EUR but we even accept bitcoin! Please note that we always strive to bring shipping costs down as low as possible. Final shipping costs will be calculated based on the weight of the package and shipping address. Of course we offer combined shipping.
Finally, the purpose of the website’s Blog section is to share with the mineral collecting community anything that needs to be shared.
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