Alright. We are back with another episode of Passionate Profession brought to you by my good friends at eBay. It is fun to revisit some conversations with previous guests on Passionate Profession. I was looking back on the timeline, and I last spoke with, today's guest in April. And I'm excited to connect again with Kurt and Aaron from the BBC Emporium team.

And the topic we have been digging into in these episodes is loyalty and building connection, and building trust. And I wanted to talk with Kurt and Aaron because they really specialize in buying collections. And, obviously, in order to buy someone's collection, you there have to be some level of, trust established. And we're gonna get into all of that. But without further ado, Kurt, Aaron, welcome back.

How are you? Good. Good to see you, Brett. Thanks for having me here, Brett. Well, let's just dive right in, and maybe we start here.

For anyone who didn't get a chance to check out kinda last year and our conversation, maybe share kinda BBC Emporium, who you guys are, what you do, kinda how you go about your business. Kurt, if you wanna kick us off. Yep. Absolutely. I'll give you a brief history of the business and kinda how we came to be.

Both myself and my brother, we grew up in a family business. We're engineers by trade, but we are also big collectors. I collected primarily sports cards. Aaron collected primarily comic books. But I, you know, I think like most collectors, as I was putting together my collection, you know, I was using the traditional sources to buy from eBay, auction houses.

And, typically, with those venues, you're gonna be paying close to full retail. So I started to get, you know, intrigued about going out and buying material closer to the source, maybe at a at a lower price point. So I started to advertise the idea, like, complete collections. And my primary goal was to buy a collection so I could add the material I needed to my collection. And naturally, of course, you're gonna have stuff left over you don't need or you don't want, so you would sell that material.

So started out primarily 100% collector. And as you start buying collections, you're kind of forced to become more and more of a dealer. So slowly over time, started transitioning, becoming more and more of a dealer. Honestly, I became more of a dealer than a collector after several years. It becomes harder to find stuff for your own collection.

But probably about six years ago, I made the decision to start doing it full time, left my engineering career and just had said, hey. I'm gonna make a make a run at this. It's what I love doing in life. So I started the business for approximately two years. Things went really well.

And then I reached out to my brother, Aaron, and asked if he wanted to join the company. So within about two years, Aaron joined the company, and that kind of brings us to where we are now. I I used to live in Colorado, but when my brother came on board, we we moved the business to Iowa. Aaron primarily is in charge of day to day operations, the staffing, the shipping, the listing, and my primarily my primary responsibility is to go out source material and look for areas to grow the business business into. Naturally, as a small business, we both wear a lot of hats.

So we do a lot of different things, but that's kind of, I guess, a brief history of of our company. The I love the engineering background turned into kind of sports card business. And I like to talk with individuals about professional skill sets and applying them to the businesses that they're running in the hobby. And, Aaron, if you wanna address this or Kurt, whichever one, but I'm I'm curious, like, what being an engineer and having that engineering skill set, how has that helped you in kind of building, growing, and scaling BBC Emporium? Kurt, you want me to tackle that one?

I'd be happy to. Alright. So Kurt's an industrial engineer, Brett. I'm a mechanical engineer. And I I would say those skill sets have heavily influenced the operation.

If if you were to come visit, it would look nothing like a traditional card store, collectible store that a brick and mortar setup. It's we're kind of geared towards mass production here, and it's it's more of an assembly line process. We're focusing heavily on efficiency. Everything we do, we're trying to time it, you know, what's the fastest, you know, way we can do something. And to get some perspective to that, if if you think of a person's time and let's just say, pick an average labor rate of of times worth $20 an hour, one minute of time consumed is about 33.

We're we're trying to push cards through at real low price point, you know, in some cases, selling cards for a dollar, many of them a few dollars. And all of a sudden, if we start tying up a bunch of time into these cards, we're already, you know, below water. So that that's really kinda where the engineering skill sets have come to play is in process design, process optimization, and and that sort of thing. One other thing I would add to that, kind of, you know, tying into the theme of of today is one thing growing up in a family business. Our grandfather, he was a pretty influential person in both both of our lives, Taught us a lot about business principles.

One thing that he was very adamant about in our family business was customer service always came first. I think we had a very good product. I'm not saying we had the best product in the market, but we had a reputation for always being there for our customer. So I think having that kind of preach to us during our entire upbringing, I think that's one thing that we wanted to bring into the collectibles business was the idea of we wanted to have, top level customer service. And I think that's helped go a long way in terms of establishing trust with our customer base.

The I love that. And just from what I gather in the beginning of this conversation, from what I remember the last time we spoke, like, being a collector is very important to the way you approach your building your business and servicing your customers. There's so many new businesses popping up and, you know, the hobby last year was crazy. The it's turning into a big industry, mainstream news. And you have people who see opportunity and money and new revenue streams popping up starting these businesses who've never really had any, run-in collecting for themselves.

How has being a collector first shaped kind of the way you think about interacting with your customers and and building your business? That's a great question. I I can address that, Brett. I think first off is being a collector allows us to empathize with people that we're buying collections from. And and probably the biggest thing we can empathize with is the connection you form with your hobby, with your collectibles.

Kurt and I are not high pressure sales tactics guys when we're trying to get someone to sell their collection, you know, or trying to buy a collection. A lot of times, it'll take multiple visits to get through that. And we try to give the their collect collection the attention the collector deserve the collection deserves and the collector believes it deserves. And, you know, as to how being collectors shape us, it's dealing with the volume of cards we're we're selling. There's a lot of repetitive tasks.

It's a lot of hard work, a lot of hours. And if we didn't enjoy the collectibles or the hobby, it would get old really fast. And I think that's kinda what energizes both of us to, you know, put the time in and and rhyme through the work. I remember, just I think, Kurt, you were talking about driving a U Haul in our last conversation and picking up collections. And maybe as we're like we did a little background.

We just, like we're diving into the topic. Like, when someone hands you their collection, and you get to that moment where you're able to acquire a collection to help, you know, drive your business forward, what what sort of responsibility do you feel in that moment? I would say one thing Aaron's kind of mentioned is one thing that's important is I try to be very I'm very low pressure, and I'm very transparent during the entire process. I wanna show them the background in terms of how I'm arriving to what I think the value of their collection is. I want them to understand how I arrived to that number.

And I I honestly, I'll even go as far to show them that, hey. Here's what I think the value of your collection is. Here's the percentage we pay. I wanna be very transparent because at the end of the day, I want them to feel very comfortable with the decision they're making. And the other thing that's, you know, was kind of an unexpected thing is is when it comes to collectors, there's a very strong emotional tie to collecting as well.

So one thing that I've learned is when you go out and you buy a collection, it's much more than just a financial transaction. I've I've had a guy break down and start crying and give me a hug after he sold the collection just because it was something that him and his father had put together. And just there's this kind of like that that emotional tie to your childhood or previous things in your life that surfaces quite a lot when it comes time to sell that collection. So you always wanna be very respectful of that process. As Aaron mentioned, you know, it's this is something that we didn't get into for a financial reason.

Like I said, we kinda got into it because something we're passionate about. So, you know, when we go out there, it's not all about the dollar for us. We wanna be respectful, and that's kind of the main focus when I go out and buy a collection. I wanna I wanna dig into, like, the the reality of buying a collection. There's a lot of content on people buying collections, but it's it's edited.

You get the quick videos, and you see kind of, like, maybe three different steps in the process when there's, like, a 100 steps in the process. And I think whether you're, like, looking to get into kind of a similar business to what you're into where you're buying collections or perhaps you're sitting listening to the show and you have a collection of cards in your basement, you're looking to get rid of it. I wanna kinda get into, the conversation around, like, what what's the reality? Like, how important is communication? Like, how do you set the right expectations?

So maybe we dive into, like, when when when you when you get a lead, like, when someone has a collection, they send you an email or they give you a call. Like, what does that ideal conversation look like for you all when you're evaluating if it is worth your time to get on get in in a car or get on a plane to go see what that's what the makeup of that collection is? Sure. I I can I can I can speak to that process? I can tell you this process has evolved for me over time.

Starting out, I was much more willing to when I got a collection lead is to get out there, get in front of the person, and then try to close the deal. However, what I've learned is, and as you mentioned, Brett, expectations can be all over the place. I had a guy, for example, want to sell me a Roberto Clemente rookie. A low grade Clemente rookie, probably gonna be maybe a thousand dollar card. Well, he had seen where a PSA 10 had sold for, like, a half million dollar.

And he figured, you know, his he knows his wasn't as good. He figured it's it's still at least worth, like, a 100,000. So there's there's there's you know, the people that have these expectations are are wild. And so what I've learned to do is when a collection comes in, the first before I even consider traveling, what I'll do is I'll first try to collect as much information as possible regarding the collection, whether it's inventory list, pictures, quantities. I wanna get an idea of how big the collection is, what years they're from, and what conditions the cards are in.

My next step is then is I'll I'll put together a rough evaluation remotely based on the information they sent me. And, really, the whole purpose of that step is is I wanna gauge what their expectations are. You'll find out pretty quick, you know, if you give them a range and say, hey. Listen. Here's where I think I'm gonna be.

You'll find out real quick. I'd say there's maybe half of the people even wanna go beyond that point. A lot of people think their collectibles are worth way more than they actually are. So before I even consider traveling is I want a rough agreement from the other person that, hey. Yes.

That number that you're thinking or that range you're thinking sounds reasonable. If I'm on the same page, I'll then go on-site. I'll go through this stuff much in more detail. I'll confirm any assumptions I've made. But the days of going out to a collection where I have no idea where the person's at, to me, it's just not worth the potentially waste of time and energy.

So a lot of background work upfront before I even go on-site. How important is that? And I'm sure it's evolved as you suggested over the years. How important is that line of questioning upfront? And have you, like, found there to be any questions that you have unlocked just based on your own process to understand if there this is, like, a a green flag situation or you ask question that will elicit, like, a red flag that'll prevent you from pursuing it forward.

Like, talk about just, like, your your your line of questioning and and things that you ask or you've learned to ask over the years. Here's what I've learned is the majority of people looking to sell their collections are very uneducated when it comes to cards. So a lot of times, I'll get a phone call and say, hey. Listen. I got Babe Bruce and Lou Gehrigs and Ty Cobbs.

And, unfortunately, I'm I'm probably a bit jaded at this point, but when I hear that now, it's like, I don't even get excited anymore because nine time probably 19 times out of 20, they're gonna be, like, modern cards from nineteen eighties that kind of show these guys figures. So what I've learned is is based off, like, verbal descriptions and stuff they give me, I put very little weight in that. I typically I I'll ask for pictures. And once again, that's kind of another step where if people are serious about selling, they'll put in some work on their end to document the collection. For me, a bit of a red flag is is if someone says, hey.

I got all this stuff, and you're like, well, can you send me six or seven pictures so I can get a general idea? Like, if they're not willing to do that, they're probably not real serious about selling the collection, or they probably don't have really good stuff. So to me, it's just like pictures, things like that. During that whole process, you'll you'll learn a lot about what they actually have. Like I said, it's very common for people not to know much about cards, they're kinda going into the process blind.

Quite honestly, I would much rather buy a collection from a seasoned collector that understands what he has. He understands the pricing. He understands how the industry works. It's much easier to go through that process with someone like that versus somebody that just inherited a collection and they have, like, no idea what they have because there's a lot of education and information collecting that's required upfront in those cases. Is there a specific moment, let's just say last year, of an ideal scenario where you went through your process and then it caused you to go out and it was, like, after you left, it it was, man, this is I got great cards.

They're happy. We're happy. And I'd love to know, like, maybe let us in on, like, what that look like. And then, also, I'd be curious once that collection is in your possession, like, how does what Aaron is working on start taking shape and just, like, building the operations around, like, the cards and what goes through and gets sold and what gets kept. I'd love to, like, take an example and just get the listeners in on the inside of, like, how it all takes shape.

So do you kinda want, like, a an example of a good outcome or a not so good outcome? Let's do let's do a good outcome. Aaron, is there any any specific collection you can think of that would be a good example? The Swanson collection out of maybe Wisconsin was one of the last ones. I can speak to that a little bit.

Oh, go ahead. This is an example again where reputation and trust come into play. So a comet collecting customer of ours up in Wisconsin got a lead from his he worked at a school. The baseball coach there commented he was selling his card collection, and he got a quote from some dealers out of Michigan. And my friend said, hey.

You need to run this by Kurt and Aaron. They'll give you a quote. And turns out he had pretty much complete set runs all the way from 1952, maybe the current. He was missing the '52 mantle. Pretty much had everything else.

We quoted him on the '52 set. Like Kurt said, with kind of, you know, here's what we paid for the complete set. He's like, let's talk. You know, it was better than the other quote. Two trips later, we had the entire collection, you know, and all all the commons, but, again, a lot of the stars too.

Emotionally, it was really hard for him to party. He ended up keeping the Hank Aaron rookie, Desert Shield, Chipper Jones that he brought back from the war. He was a veteran. So there are certain cards that really, you know, were attached to him. But then now Kurt and I were looking at each other, and we've got, you know, hundreds of thousands of cards.

And it's like, okay. Where do we go from here? And to your point, you know, it's kind of a triage, and this is where buying collections can kinda get out of hand a little bit is we prioritize what we wanna list and what we wanna go after and put in the store, and then everything else goes in storage. And that's where this this piece that goes in storage. We're really careful about what we buy because, likely, we'll never get to listen some of this stuff, and so it just keeps piling up.

And what we do wanna list, like I talked about at the start of the episode, we wanna list in scale. And so we have what we call our war chest, which is high priority items that we wanna list, but we'll keep them unlisted until we reach what we've termed critical mass to where it makes sense to run these things through. And so that's kinda my job, and it's a moving target. Kurt does the buying. He's okay.

What are we gonna run? I can tell you, like, the next five sets that we're gonna run here, you know, there'll be a compilation of maybe the last 10 or 15 collections we bought. But it's, you know and then once we run decide we're gonna run that set, there's a sort operation. There's a grading operation, a scanning, kind of this assembly line process that I was talking to you about. That's awesome.

The what interests me about that story is the fact that this individual had gotten other quotes, and you were referred in and then gave them a quote that was higher, and then they decided to sell to you. I would love to maybe learn and digging into, like, the transparency portion of this and the trust portion of this. Like, so often in this industry, there's so many so much transactional thinking where individuals trying to sell card or buy card, and they see opportunity to make a quick buck. They don't look at, like, the bigger picture or the long term relationship or impacts that could happen over time. They're looking right in the moment.

When you're, like, in a deal like that where it's highly competitive and there's a lot of maybe offers on the table and probably a lot of those are individuals trying to take advantage of a person who doesn't know what they have. Like, how how do you position what you're doing in that deal and do it from the lens of, like, we're going to be honest, and we're going to be trustworthy, and we're gonna pay strong? Like, how do you think about it when you're in a situation like that deal that Swanson deal in order to make sure that you're the ones obviously, a higher offer is probably helpful, but maybe dig into that and just how you establish trust with with those individuals who have their collections and are looking to sell. That's a great question, and I'll I'll address it. At the time we bought that collection, Kurt was in Colorado.

And so I made the trip up to to Pete's home, and we we established a lot of trust. I spent the entire day going through his cards, and I had Kurt on the phone. I was the eyes and ears looking through the cards with with Pete right beside me. I was given approximate grades on the high value cards. Kurt was taking all that information down.

And at the end of seven or eight hours, we had a spreadsheet, you know, with full transparency of what his cards were worth, what his sets were worth. And it's a little bit uncomfortable grading someone's cards with him watching, but, you know, it's it's one of the key points where a lot of times there's some difference. So I was being respectful, but also honest with the grades. I think that built some trust that we went through every one of the key cards. Yeah.

I never did ask him what the other dealer's quote was. That night, we gave him Kurt worked up the estimate live so that at the end of the day, we had a offer for his collection. I went to sleep, barely went to sleep because it's like, I don't know if we're gonna get this, you know, and is it gonna be what he wants? And, you know, the next morning, he's like, relax there. You guys were almost twice what the other dealer was.

And so and the reality is we probably overpaid. You know? We probably would've just sold it, you know, if we were a little bit higher, but we felt we needed to do the right thing and, you know, honestly, in this collection. I don't know, Kurt, if there's anything you wanna add. No.

I'll say this. You know, when it's always nice being the first person to give a quote on a collection. Like, it's you never want other competition involved, but one thing that I have learned is if I hear another dealer or two have put in a quote, to me, I I almost like that just because, historically, I know nine times out of 10, our quote's gonna beat that other quote. The it's it's the the trickier part is kinda like when you're the first quote. Like I said, a lot of times, it might be under their expectation.

But as soon as they go out and gather a second and a third quote, a lot of times they come back and say, hey. You know, your quote was was best by far. So, yeah, I I I enjoy I actually I actually think the multiple quotes actually has helped us historically. Did so this the so many dealers have this reputation of it can be just simply at shows or maybe it's buying collections of just trying to price gouge and trying to, you know, make their margins. But it seems to me that the dealers who are paying strong for cards and collections build this reputation over time.

Like, the hobby is like a high school. Like, everyone shares, like, oh, I did business with them. It was great. They pay strong. So do do you find that paying strong for collections, like, that has a ripple effect of the word getting out, especially if, you know, you're in another big deal and someone's familiar with you?

Like, do you look at that not just, like, the short term of buying the deal right then, but just, like, what the ramifications can be to buying a collection, in your next deal or six deals down the road? Absolutely. And I think to me, I think it's it's a long term strategy where there's two there's two there's two potential effects. Like you said, the hobby's big, yet the hobby's not big enough where, like, reputation's an important thing. So we wanna treat people fairly because it's the right thing to do.

But, also, it's like if you start, you know, not treat people fairly, it's gonna come back and work's gonna get around, and it's gonna have a negative impact on your business. And I would say the other thing that we've seen is repeat customers where you treat someone fair. You know, a lot of times that person still has other collectibles. They still collect. They're gonna come back to you later on.

Like in Aaron's story, we're starting to get a lot of references. People that we've bought their collection, they know other collectors. So what we found out long term is, like, you go, you pay a fair price. You know? Yeah.

Maybe in the short term, you coulda got by by paying a little bit less. Our experience is long term, we're gonna pay back in multiples by paying strong for material. You you always hear that they're like, we I get caught up in this where I look at, like, Instagram, for instance, and say, like, this is the hobby. And then I'll go to a show like The National. I'll be like, that's not the hobby.

Like, look at this. This is like there this is ten ten to 50 times what I think the hobby is. And then, again, there's the hidden hobby where there's people all over the world with just insane collections in their basement that maybe was their grandfathers and they've just inherited. And they're not even collectors like you alluded to and just don't know the value, but they've got these amazing grails in their collection or in their basements. Maybe talk a little bit about that, just like the hidden size of the hobby and, like, I'm sure you come across some crazy stuff and just even cards that, you know, haven't been publicized or haven't sold in years.

Maybe talk about just that experience and helping the audience understand that, like, the hobby is much broader than probably our own view of it on whatever digital channel that we're interacting with on a regular basis. No. For sure. I would say, you know and once again, when I look at the hobby, you can segment the hobby in multiple different segments. I like to lump it into two large segments.

You got your modern and you got your vintage side. And we primarily play in the vintage side of things, but a lot of people, whether it's like Facebook, Instagram, hobby boards, there's people that are in the hobby that are very active. And I think a lot of times, people coming in the hobby get involved in those things. They kinda think that in their mind, you know, probably 90% of the hobby is involved in these different things. Where in reality, I would say the people that are involved in Instagram and the social media platforms probably represent less than 5% of the hobby, and that might be in that might be generous.

The one thing that really continues to surprise me is in our eBay store, for example, we still see when new customers come in and buy stuff. And we sell, you know, hundreds of items a day. And I'm still shocked that on a daily basis, the amount of brand new customers that we see come into our store. So I think the one thing that people really don't realize is how truly big the hobby is. As you mentioned, a lot of collectors tend to be private individuals, and they don't like to put their stuff out there.

They like to stay private. And I would say that's probably representative of a good portion of collectors. And, yeah, to your other question, Brett, in terms of stuff that's still, you know, hidden in basement collections are coming to light, I would say every month, we're seeing collections that have never seen the light of day that never been, you know, through the hobby at all. One one recent one here, and we we're still working on this collection. I don't know if we'll ever get it or not, but it was a it was a person not not super somewhere in the Midwest, and it was a son of a dealer.

And the dealer, he would always buy vending boxes and vending cases straight from tops. And he would create sets, and he would sell the sets. Well, when he passed away, they just kinda shut down the operation and put it into storage. And we had the opportunity to go through and look at that collection. But you're talking about pack fresh cards from the sixties and seventies that were still sitting in unopened cases, unopened boxes.

I mean, it was it was mind boggling to see, like, the condition of that material. It's kinda like a like a time capsule that after after the gentleman passed away, like, the stuff just wasn't touched. And, you know, that's we don't see collections like that on a regular basis. But, definitely, childhood collections, we see those on a very frequent basis come to market. Aaron, is there anything that still surprises you after doing this for so long?

No. There there really isn't. And we're seeing a pretty good window into the hobby through our store, like Kurt says. We're seeing the new entrance, but we're also seeing Kurt will buy something. And I'm like, is this is this stuff gonna sell?

We throw it up, and you'd be surprised at what people are going after. And it's like, I guess there is a niche for that. And so, you know, part part of what we're doing is trying to kind of expand and bring mark bring material to eBay that maybe really isn't there in volume. And we're continually impressed by how people go after it. The I I can't even imagine going in, buying a collection, processing it, and all the different steps, and so much changes.

Right? Values change. If cards are graded, that is constantly changing based on population data. I wanna maybe spend a second talking about the operation and how do you continue to operate at a scale with integrity at the forefront. Like, how do you make sure that integrity doesn't break when the volume of cards coming into your operation increases?

That that's a great question. And there's a few there's a few key areas there as far as I'm concerned. One is on the grading side. You know? It would be easy to let the grading go lax.

You know? But we we've maintained the same grading process whether we've got a backlog of a 100 cards or a 100,000. And the same standards, the same scrutiny, we try to get two eyes on every card. We've got standards established. We have, you training where we try to get all the graders consistent.

And so that's one area we're not budging on. The other area is we've got a great team on the shipping side, order fulfillment, you know, listing. And as as I've seen from my past business experience, you guys can probably relate to it, integrity can get challenged when pressure gets applied. And so we we try to keep the team working in a relaxed environment. Order fulfillment comes first.

Any extra time goes to listing, but we're not putting hard deadlines on. We've gotta have this many cards listed in this day and and making sure things are done the right way and not hurried along. The I think about just people doing similar adjacent stuff as you all, and I think about just how you stand out, how you get your message across in the sea of new businesses popping up, doing similar adjacent things. How do you think about differentiation as a business? How do you think about attracting the right type of profile of individual who you want interacting with your brand, whether that's buying through your eBay store or giving you a call when collection might be available.

I guess, who is BBC Emporium really built for? I I can address that, Brett. So I think one thing that we're we're trying to do, and we've talked a lot about trust here, is to build trust through a consistent way of doing business with us. So we we try to consistent quality with grading, consistent quality with packaging, lead time, all that sort of thing. You know, trust eventually comes through a repeatable result, and so we're we're heavily focused there.

Kurt talked about doing the right things. We don't do a lot of marketing. We probably should be doing more. But, really, the way we attract buyers to our store is through depth of product. And Kurt may have mentioned in the last episode, our vision is to have deep inventory in every vintage card set, sports, nonsports alike.

And it's aspirational. We'll probably never get there, but that's the goal. And we believe that if we if we put the inventory out there, you know, with a good blend of grades and Ron graded, that the customers will come and and will be the stop the one stop shop for people that wanna build sets. So, you know, whether it's a set of a given year, a player set, autograph set, whatever it might be, that's that's the the goal. I don't know.

Kurt, anything you would wanna add to that? No. Yeah. I I think the one business model that I'm always impressed by, I I try to kind of model our company after is is Amazon where, you know, in your reg in your everyday life, like, if you want something and you want it quick, you go to Amazon. You know it's gonna be there, and you know you're gonna get it quickly.

I think that's one model we try to employ in our business where as a collector, when you're trying to, like, finish up a set, you know, and you need 20 cards, nothing's worse than having to go, like, shop four different buyers, and you're paying, like, four times the shipping charge and, like, you're just not quite sure what quality you're gonna get in. So kind of vision that we have is we wanna be that one stop shop where people know they can come to. They know we're gonna have material. They know they can be confident in what they're getting, and they know they're gonna get it quickly. So that's kind of like the model we're shooting for.

Is there been I'm curious just in the the vintage space where you're primarily playing in. Has there any any trends or anything surprise you over maybe the last year or so, like, interest, gravitating or being pulled into a specific, sport or year or player that might be newer? Like, is there anything forming in the undercurrent based on what people are buying at your shop? Anything you you're noticing? I would say this is more maybe of a general observation.

You know, the big fear within the vintage space is always kinda like, is the collector base gonna die out? You know, like, is vintage gonna fade away? Because we've met you know, no one's seen these guys play or people are gonna lose interest in it. And the thing that surprises me, I think it's a very typical it's a very typical pattern you see with collectors where when you start collecting, typically, you're gonna start buying the players that you watched as a kid, the people you're watching today. However, what you almost always see is people, that's their entry point, but then they start going back into the older, the more vintage obscure stuff.

So the thing that surprises me, and it's a continuing trend, is the vintage market is as strong as as it's ever been. There's more buyers as there's ever been. So, you know, that that fear of that, wow, people are gonna slowly die out. It's like, you don't see that happening. In fact, you almost see the opposite.

Obviously, you know, there's gonna be players that are hot and cold. You got your big ones like your Cobs, Ruth, Mantles, Mays, Aaron's. Like, those guys continue to become more and more popular. But, no, I just say in general, the trend that I see is the vintage market continues to grow in all these areas. I'd love to know as we're talking through this, like, what does, like, the publicity of the unearthing of the t two zero six Wagner, another copy?

Like, what what kind of impact does that I I would imagine there's some trickle down effect to, like, interest, more people, like, people exploring maybe end up on your eBay shop. Like, have you seen kind of the ripple effect, whether it's that example or other examples like it from previous years? Yeah. You know, you def I think, like, you know, like the like you mentioned, like, the the recent Wagner that Golden uncovers up for auction, like in fact, he has, you know, his Netflix show. The hobby's definitely grown outside of its typical space and has become more mainstream.

So it's kinda tough to measure how that impacts direct sales. But what I can notice is just, the people I interact with outside of the hobby, people are always coming up to me. Hey. I read this article. I watched that show.

So there's definitely, you know, more awareness being created in the in the general public. And I think what you see you've seen happen probably in the last five years is it's attracted a lot of outside investment money into the hobby where it's become more mainstream. People are seeing these as viable, stable investment opportunities as well. I love that. The maybe just as we're rounding the corner, this conversation has been a ton of fun digging into kinda how you think about running your business and building trust and creating connections.

I would imagine or I hope I hope that there's an individual out there who's got a collection or might have been thinking about selling a subset of their collection, and now they they have a contact and a group of people that they could potentially call if they're trying to sell it. I would love to maybe get some feedback from either one of you or both of you on what every collector should remember before they make that call to someone like you to sell their entire collection. Yeah. I can start off, Brett, and then, Kurt, you feel free to add. But I've got just a few points of advice, you know, in no particular order.

But I think number one is if you're gonna sell your collection, sell it in its entirety. That that's one of the reasons Kurt and I buy entire collections is don't really feel right taking just the best material out of someone's collection because at that point, what's what's left will will have a hard time getting sold. So keep it together. Number two, one of the things I think when it comes to realistic valuations, Kurt and I have talked about this at length. The question really isn't, you know, what can you sell it for?

It's what can someone like a dealer buy it for? And and we'll run into this on a lot of newer sets. It's like, well, we saw this nineteen seventies card sell for this, but the reality is there's tons of material at auction, seventies high grade sets that we can buy, and that really is the benchmark of, you know, what's this worth. So it's not so much, you know, the sum of the individuals, but what what what can it be bought in bulk for? And then I think the third piece is, you know, learn how to grade.

That's that's one of the probably the one of the bigger disconnects is when it comes to valuation, grading is critical, have an understanding of that, you know, and find someone that's got a proven track record. Just don't take, you know, the buyer's word for it, ask for references, you know, do some research, and and make sure you're dealing with someone you can trust. The the only thing I would add to that is a I a lot of collectors simply are not gonna sell their collection while they're living. They just they're they're not gonna do it. We come across a lot of collections where kids inherit it.

They don't know what it is. They're just looking to sell it. They have no interest in it. My advice would be to a collector that's not going to sell his collection while he's still living or maybe he plans on doing it, but maybe something happens unexpected and he doesn't sell it. I think it's a good idea for any collector to leave with their spouse or their kids kind of written instructions in terms of what should I do with my collection, you know, in the case that something happens to me, whether it's contact this dealer, this auction house, whatever.

I think you should always have a plan for how to sell it. So much, great advice. Awesome nuggets. Aaron, Kurt, BBC Emporium team, this was an awesome conversation. Looking forward to, doing another one down the road.

Appreciate the time. Alright. Thank you, Brett. Thank you, Brett.