October Ends With Stamp Sales of $4,438, and The Solidification of My Business Model

October ended with just over $4,400 in stamp sales. It was an excellent result given that I was on vacation with my family for the first half of the month, and only really did a lot of new listings in the past two weeks. There are two things about the sales total for this month though that really do stand out:

1. There were really only a few items over $100 and nothing over $250 included in that total. In contrast, most months in which my sales have exceeded $3,600 have included high ticket items that skew the total. This month, the sales have been built up organically from mostly low value items, that have been selling in volume. 
2. Nearly all the sales this month were for modern material after 1947, and a small portion was for Newfoundland stamps. There were a few earlier stamps sold here and there, but it has become very, very clear that there is a considerable amount of demand for the modern material when it is properly and accurately described. The demand for this material is at least as great, as the earlier material, and the prices are much less elastic. 

So it has become very apparent to me that the best approach for the business now is to focus on the modern material and to list material only when I have sufficient quantities on hand to make it worthwhile. It has also become apparent that many of the paper varieties on the modern material are not nearly as common as collectors think, and this scarcity definitely adds to the interest of collecting modern material in a specialized manner. An example of a purchase that came in this week, illustrates this concept nicely:

This is a sealed pack of corner blocks of the 1974 Keep Fit Summer Sports Issue. It was one of the first sets released by Canada Post in a long series of stamps issued to commemorate the 1976 Montreal Olympics. It contains four corner blocks of 4, or 16 stamps in total. A seller on E-bay had 200 of these sealed packs for sale, and was selling them at auction in bulk. 

This struck me as a perfect lot for me to buy because I could check the packs for paper varieties and could then list this item in depth after combining these packs with the blocks that I already had on hand for these stamps, as I had not gotten around to listing this issue yet. So I placed a bid and bought them all. 

The Unitrade catalogue that collectors use lists two different paper types for this issue. However, when I examined these blocks, as well as the ones that I already had carefully, it became apparent to me that there are actually five different types of papers. Two of these are both striking and common, but the other three are much scarcer and require more experience to spot. I sorted all of the block packs into four of the five identified papers. Here is a picture of what the stacks of packs looked like after I was done sorting:

The stacks in the back of the picture are the two main, listed paper varieties, and as you can see the stacks of these are almost, but not quite equal, and are vastly taller than the two tiny piles in front. This indicates that although there are two common paper variations of this issue, there are also two varieties which are actually very scarce. It is difficult to be absolutely certain of whether this sample of packs is random, and therefore representative of the entire population of packs remaining on the market, but there is certainly no reason to believe that it is not, because four of the five varieties that I had identified are present here. So it makes sense to highlight their scarcity and charge a premium price for them to reflect their scarcity. The quantity here is such that once I list these this week, it is very unlikely that I will run out before I get a chance to replenish them. So I am able to preserve the value of the labour I have expended on this listing by keeping the listing alive, rather than having it die because only 1 stamp was listed and it sold. 

That is the key to expanding this business: list only what I have in sufficient quantity, buying whatever is offered in quantity, to be able to do this. This way I can move through my stock, buying as I go to bolster my inventory quantities. This way I can also keep customers apprised of the new discoveries as I list material. So, it is all very exciting!

I have finally secured the services of Joseph Perrone, a promising young philatelist, to assist me in putting the finishing touches on our retail website for Brixton-Chrome. I anticipate that this will be a year long project, but both Joseph and I are excited to be working together and look forward to rolling out the completed website to our customers. 

So onto a new month, with renewed enthusiasm and excitement for the continued growth of the business!