My Ebay Business- L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven- Part 1 February 23, 2008
Posted by 54071 in : Uncategorized , trackbackHi Everyone.
As I’m sure by now, anyone reading Fanboy@50 realizes that I run a Ebay Home Based Business called L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven, and I thought it was high time I gave everyone a little bit of background about my business…
I started my business, L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven four years ago on Ebay….but anime figures and anime in general was not what the business’s original direction was aimed toward…nor was it called ” anime otaku heaven “…
In the summer of 2003, around my birthday to be exact, myself and my friend Ken decided that we could do things better than the local hobby shop where we were buying magic cards from ( and I was purchasing my comics from at the time ) and so we launched our Ebay business which was called…L&K’S Collectible Cards and Comics…get it…Lew and Ken…I thought it was a good business name. 
Originally we had decided to concentrate solely on used comics ( which of course were my finished readings ) and deal in Magic the Gathering, CCG ( Collectible Card Game )cards, which of course we were intimately familiar with due to our actually playing the game.
The initial first year of this business was a learning experience for the both of us, and since we were basically a two man operation, the chores of running the business at the time were split between the both of us, as far as listing items and following thru with the shipping of items purchased to our customers. Of course in the first year, we really made no profit, as we were both learning the in’s and out’s of Ebay’s structure…and by structure I mean all the fee’s that were associated with running an online Ebay business which included at the time…
- listing fees
- store fees
- final value fees
these were just the Ebay fees back than, Paypal’s fees for transactions processed were a separate entity at that time, and were deducted after someone paid for an item.
This is how Paypal still works today, the only difference between than and now is the fact that Paypal is now just another Ebay asset/ acquisition, so basically this is just another Ebay fee, that goes into Ebay’s coiffures if you will.
In year two, we decided to expand the business into Miniatures gaming which included Hero Clix and ( at the time I thought was just a passing fad ) Mage Knight figures from a company called Wiz Kids Games.
We also decided to include the Lord of the rings CCG game, produced by Decipher games ( I should say that this was more a decision based on the fact that the first movie was being released at about this time ) rather than how popular this game was at the time.
Another year of business passed by with out a lot of movement and at best lackluster sales.
I had decided in our third year, that I wanted to go beyond Ebay and our online presence…which due to our lack of available funding would necessitate our having to bootstrap this end of the business or in other words we would have to pay cash out of our pockets for anything we wanted to do outside of the net.
At this point we had another person working with us, a friend who I’ve known ever since he was a kid, named Chris.
Year three was also the year I took more control of the direction that L&K would go in, and what we would aim for…in the area of NY State that we happen to reside in, there were several ( at least two card shops that I was aware of ) that held CCG card tournaments every once in a while, along with the local Toys R US in the town I happen to live in.
The thing was only one of the two card shops were running sanctioned tournaments..I won’t go into detail about running sanctioned tournaments at this time, but maybe I’ll talk about them in a future post…so we were going to start to run tournaments…Magic the Gathering tournaments to be exact, and of course I wanted to make sure that they would be sanctioned tournaments, so to that end I got in touch ( and not without a lot of problems, due to the fact that we were not a brick and mortar shop ) with Wizards of the Coast, the company responsible for Magic, and found that we would have to get another card or comic speciality shop to sponsor us, so that we would be able to offer points to the players that were involved in playing in any tournaments that we ran. I also at this time got involved with a new card game from a company called Upper Deck, the same company that puts out all kinds of Sports Cards ( and now are responsible for the CCG Game, World of Warcraft, based on the hugely popular online game ) called the VS System, which is based around comics book characters from comic publishers DC and Marvel respectivly.
I was so driven to make these events a success, I even got myself sanctioned to be a judge in order to officiate the VS System tournaments in particular.
So in the winter of 2005, we held our first tournament/ comic book and miniatures event, this event would also include our first Hero Clix tournament, which would be sanctioned due to our having a judge who was experienced in playing and judging Hero Clix game tournaments.
There was just one problem with our first event attempt…
First, we had done some advertising, and hoped that the fact that we left flyer’s at some of the local comics shops would be enough to have parents bring their children to where the event was being held…
Second, and this was to be a major hurdle…was mother nature!
The second Saturday of the new year would bring to us an Ice and Snow storm…I know, Lew why schedule a tournament in that mess!
In my defense, I had been making all the plans for this first tournament, including getting the place to play, the local Howard Johnsons, for $100 for the entire day, getting the magic cards and the vs cards that we would need for the day, making sure that what we charged would be enough to at least cover the cost of the cards themselves, and hopefully make some sales between having cards to offer and the miniatures and of course the used comics ( which I might add were four full case boxes comics mind you! ) and of course everything had been paid for in advance. The only thing that I couldn’t plan for was the weather, and unfortunately everything had been set in motion so there would be no turning back.
Needless to say, mother nature kept most of the players away, and the kids who did show up wound up coming to play in the Hero Clixs miniatures tournament.
In the end, we wound up making enough cash to cover the cost of the Howard Johnson’s fee, and not much else, so we went home early that day. I was pretty disappointed with the whole experience, and we went home with a ton of inventory that would have to be listed on Ebay to make up for what we had not made at the tournament.
The original plan was to have another event or two at best that would make up the rest of our push to go outside of the Ebay store…in my excitement and drive to make the business grow ( and ultimately be able to leave a job that was slowly but most assuredly making me very sick on the inside ) I had decided to up the ante and schedule another two tournaments/sales events ( for lack of a better term ) that would take place by the end of June…my thinking at this point was that we needed to try to have consistent events in order to draw people and make a name for L&K…so the next event was going to happen in March of 2005, and would include everything that we had in the first disaster in January.
While this event went a bit better, and the weather was much nicer, it still was pretty much a sleeper, with some kids who were playing Magic, no one playing VS, and again the big winner for the day was Hero Clix.
We did better in the sales department this time around, but still went home with a lot of inventory to have to list on Ebay.
At this point, I was a bit frustrated with how the event had done, and I was thinking of just scrapping the idea of another event all together.
I mean, I was was starting to use my own credit cards to finance a lot of the expense involved with getting the stuff we needed to make these events happen, and that was something I did without hesitation, but it was not something I would be able to do for another two or ( possibly dependant upon my desperation at the job I hated ) three events.
And than one day in April of 2005, I had seen a commercial on television for an item that would change my outlook on the business that ken and I had based on comics and card games…it was a DVD…for a film by the legendary Hayao Miyazaki…
The film was called Spirited Away…and I was!
end of part 1
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