Interesting fact about Star Wars

So I have grown a small collectibles business over the last three years into a significant part of my income. I started with a 14 dollar purchase from a thrift store and now buy and sell collections for thousands of dollars all from the reinvestment I made on the profits of that 14 dollar purchase.

One metric I have tracked, for fun, is how the value of the weapons from the vintage Star Wars figures compares to gold. So here is the interesting fact... by weight the weapons for several vintage star wars figures are worth more than gold. In some cases many times the value of gold. A gram of gold is worth about $40 today. The navy blue Princes Leia Blaster weighs about .3 grams, and I recently sold 1 of them for $27.00. The black Death Star gunner pistol weighs .2 grams. I once sold one for 47 dollars.

 

Grats on the business.

I would be more interested in your full story of starting and growing your business personally. Sounds like a neat story.

 

Nah, this shit's scalable. Much better than that penny thing.

 

Here's another interesting star wars fact. I've never seen any of the movies. bits and pieces here and there but I don't even know the storyline.

 

It all began from my interest in toys from the 1970s and 1980s. When I was living in Atlanta there was a thrift store that was a honeyhole for that kind of stuff. I began buying so much that I was getting duplicates of several items, so I started selling items on ebay.

I had a very high profit margin on the stuff I was selling, and decided to stop accumulating and start selling. I made a 14 dollar purchase for a grab bag of transformers from the Goodwill in Tucker, GA, and sold the contents for about 300 dollars. From there it was on. I set up a business paypal account and started putting up ads to buy vintage toys. The more I sold, the more my reputation grew on the message boards, and I eventually became an eBay power seller and top rated seller.

Since that $14 purchase in 2007 I have not put a dime of my personal money into this thing. I have steadily increased my revenues every year, and am presently closing in on $35,000 in sales on the year. I'm hoping to hit $50,000 by 12/31. It isn't big money, but I really enjoy the nostalgia of it all, and it supplements my career nicely. If it keeps growing it may replace my career.

The biggest burdens are taxes which eat up about 40% of my gains. I have to pay self employement taxes, and taxes on collectibles are taxed on 28%. The other big expenses other than inventory are ebay and paypal fees which eat up about 15% of my sales through ebay. Luckily, I am able to do most of my sales through collector's message boards and can miss out on the ebay fees. The other burden is consistently finding inventory to keep the thing going.

I had a lead on a massive Transformer and Shogun Warrior collection from a recently deceased collector. The family had offered it to me at a price that was right where I needed it to be, but before I could respond they contacted Jordan Hembrough from the TV show Toy Hunter, and sold the collection to him. It is going to be on the show. That collection would have surely allowed me to make my $50,000 sales goal.

My most recent purchase was 5 bins of various transformers, gi joes, star wars, and miscellaneous robots. The woman wanted $45 or the lot, but I could see the stuff was much more valuable than that. I gave her 100 as a deposit, and began sorting and selling. To date, one week later, I have sold over $1,000 from that one lot. I may have another $1,000 left to go. This lot was very disorganized and required a lot of labor from me, to organize, clean, match, and restore the varios items. When I square up with her I'll probably offer her like 30% of my profits. That is lower than my typical offer of 50% of expected sales, but consistant with the amount of work I had to do, and still many times more than she was originally asking for.

I tend to spend about 8-10 hours a week on the business, but right now it is a little more.

 

I made a mint on the penny sorting. I still have about 35,000 pennies in my attic waiting for the next surge in copper prices, but with the growth in the toy sales I don't have time for it anymore.

 

That's a lot of pennies

 

It's all about zona.

Truthfully, you have been beating me more than I beat you lately though.