My Ebay Business– L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven– Part 2

Hi Again Everyone!

I guess the ban­ner above pretty much says it all…well maybe it doesn’t…so let’s con­tinue my story..

Hayao Miyazaki’s Anime mas­ter­piece Spir­ited Away, was my first actual expo­sure to Anime…real Anime, not the Sat­ur­day Morn­ing car­toons I had grown up on…

I watched this movie twice, and I was mes­mer­ized by the sheer beauty of it all…I had never expe­ri­enced any­thing like this movie before.

It was about two weeks after I had watched Spir­ited Away, it was our usual Sat­ur­day night get together to play cards, it was also the night for another impromptu dis­cus­sion about L&K Col­lectible Cards and Comics, and another deci­sion to dis­cuss ( actu­ally, this was more of an intro­duc­tion, if you will ) with my friends and busi­ness part­ners Ken and Chris.

I sim­ply said to them that I thought we should include some­thing new into the busi­ness, and I showed them the DVD, and that was the begin­ning of the inclu­sion of Anime and to a very small extent ( in the begin­ning any­way ) of some Gashapon or Cap­sule Toys.

In the mean­time, there was the mat­ter of another show that I was ramp­ing up for com­ing up in May of 05.

I’ll be hon­est about this here, it was very short sighted on my part to even sched­ule another event so soon after the last, and the only thing I was that was dri­ving me to do this was my job. I had grown to hate my job, and after twelve years of work­ing at the same place, ten of those twelve years in a posi­tion that was becom­ing almost impos­si­ble for me to con­tinue doing.

So, yes I was des­per­ate to suc­ceed, no mat­ter what had to be done, I was will­ing to do it. This show did a bit bet­ter than the last show also, with the addi­tion of some Anime DVDS and some Anime fig­ures sales were brisk, unfor­tu­nately we didn’t do so well with the card tour­na­ments and the minia­tures event. We wound up los­ing money on the cards, and the minia­tures, and broke even on the Anime items. While it wasn’t a great event, it wasn’t as bad as the pre­vi­ous events. I was actu­ally happy with the way this show did, and I have no regrets about it.

Unfor­tu­nately, it would be the last event we would do. I was float­ing a lot of the debt for L&K at this point, and my friend and part­ner Ken had laid out the expense for the rental of the space ( this time at the local Hol­i­day Inn ) for the day, and it was pretty expensive.

Ken and I had become pretty dis­il­lu­sioned with every­thing con­cern­ing the busi­ness, and around this time Ken was tak­ing on a dif­fer­ent posi­tion at the job, more of a super­vi­sory posi­tion which took a lot more of his time, and after sev­eral weeks of slow sales on Ebay, Ken decided to opt out of the busi­ness as far as being an active partner.

I also was fac­ing another prob­lem around this time.…with my father.

My father had been very ill for a few years, fight­ing Emphy­sema, and later con­tract­ing Blad­der Can­cer. My dad had been very brave and fought very hard against his afflic­tions, but in the end he even­tu­ally suc­cumbed to his illness’s in August of 2005. In a way, it was almost a bless­ing for him to finally pass on. Going to work every­day, being called away at any given moment to race to the local hospital…it had become more than I could endure on sev­eral levels…trying to make L&K work, work­ing at my job ( or rather at this point ) try­ing to just func­tion at said job, and now tak­ing my mother in to live with us would put more strain on me and I was just burned out. I wound up tak­ing about a month away from the busi­ness all together. It would be Octo­ber of 2005 before I would do any­thing with L&K again.

No more events, it would be back to mak­ing L&K work on Ebay. Period.

This would again be my mis­sion, and to this end I had got­ten myself an account with a whole­saler out of Cal­i­for­nia named AAA Anime, and placed a first order with them for around $300.00 to estab­lish my account with them.

At this point, I should just let you, the reader know just a bit more about the in’s & out’s of Ebay… first, Ebay has become very com­pet­i­tive over the last few years, and when we launched L&K on Ebay, we were not sell­ing any­thing unique or spe­cial through our store, and unfor­tu­nately there were ( and still are ) alot of Ebay­ers that sell the same things that we were sell­ing at the time…we didn’t have any­thing going for us at the time, that would set us apart from every­one else…

In the mean­time, I was get­ting reg­u­lar emails from AAA Anime that had items that they had for sale, and upcom­ing Anime pre-sell pvc fig­ures. In hind­sight, I should have paid more atten­tion to those emails from AAA.…and even­tu­ally I would…only thing was, I didn’t pay atten­tion to those emails untill around March or April of what was now 2006.

I don’t remem­ber exactly how many fig­ures were shown in the email I had cho­sen to finally notice, but I do remem­ber that I decided to list five fig­ures that were being offered as pre-sell items from it. I remem­ber that there were a few sales after I listed those pre-sell fig­ures, not a lot ( if mem­ory serves me, it was prob­a­bly around seven sales ) but that was enough for me to see that I might have stum­bled onto something.

And then came May…which just exploded as far as Anime fig­ure sales went.

I had con­tin­ued to list Anime pre-sell fig­ures using the AAA Anime emails, usu­ally list­ing what­ever fig­ures they were solic­it­ing thru the email newslet­ters I was receiv­ing, and sales were thru the roof! I wasn’t used to this, and I wasn’t pre­pared either for this influx of sales.

I had to start orga­niz­ing my busi­ness to keep up with the steady influx of sales…I should just come right out here and say that orga­ni­za­tion and myself are not a good mix..I tend to be a pack-rat and I save and horde everything…and every­thing I hoard is every­where! It dri­ves my wife crazy…sorry dear. So here I am in my home office, with Ebay sales receipts from all these fig­ures, pretty much all over the place and I’m start­ing to lose track of how many sales of each fig­ure I’ve actu­ally sold…not good.

The other thing that I was doing that I think helped with this burst of sales was offer­ing to ship these fig­ures world wide. There was only one prob­lem with this lat­est development…I was offer­ing a flat rate to ship these fig­ures world­wide ( a HUGEEEEEEE!!!!!! mis­take I would learn very quickly..) of course being a neo­phyte at ship­ping inter­na­tion­ally, I would soon learn ( of course the hard way ) that a two lb pack­age being shipped to France, might not be the same price to ship to Italy or Spain or even Hong Kong..I wound up eat­ing a lot of cash in the end for ship­ping the­ses fig­ures, on top of the prob­lems that become inher­ent in ship­ping a pkg out­side the USA if you are ship­ping a pkg, using the less expen­sive means of get­ting the item to your customer.

In the end, 2006 was a learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me, and while the sales were great, the expenses ( includ­ing the ship­ping costs I had incurred ) pretty much can­celed out what I had made on the sales of the figures.

2007 would see some real changes for L&K.

The most sig­nif­i­cant would be the deci­sion to change the name of the busi­ness from L&K’S Col­lectible Cards and Comics, to L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven, and chang­ing the name, would bring with it a def­i­nite shift in focus. I had decided to con­cen­trate all efforts for L&K to focus on the Anime fig­ure side of things, and this would neces­si­tate a design change for the Ebay store, which up to this point had just been their basic Ebay store­front tem­plate design.

I had watched an anime series called Tri­gun, and I fell in love with the cat ” Neko ” from the series, and decided that he should be the store’s new ( and only ) mas­cot, thus his addi­tion to the new store banner.

Another new thing would even­tu­ally be the blog that you are view­ing now which had it’s start on Word­press, sim­ply as Fan­boy and would later be moved and be re-titled as Fanboy@50, my obvi­ous nod to my own age. This blog is in some respects an exten­sion of the L&K brand, and I have already used Fanboy@50 as a plat­form to show­case some of the Anime fig­ures that I list at L&K’S Anime Otaku Heaven. I am slowly try­ing to change the design of the blog hope­fully to more reflect what is dis­cussed here. Hope­fully in the future I can do some­thing with ban­ners ( or mast­heads ) that will have flash in them, but again, that is for the future…hopefully some­thing I can insti­tute this year.

And this takes us to the present.

I am very proud of what has come before as far as L&K is concerned…there have been a few twists and curves along the road ( if any­one was read­ing posts that were pre­sented in these pages and at another blog that I was post­ing at bluecol­lar life con­cern­ing what I went thru with my Mom, than you know it was quite the ordeal for myself, my fam­ily, and for my mother ) to get to where I am now, and I have a long way to go but I am dri­ven to make my blog and L&K thrive, together.

In clos­ing, I just want to thank every­one who has been read­ing my blog, and to those of you who have made pur­chases at L&K, and I also want to thank Don Miller of Mak­ing Sales, Mak­ing Money, for pro­vid­ing the impe­tus for me to actu­ally write this lit­tle post about my busi­ness and myself.

So until next time…this is Lew and I still remain your fanboy@50…