I thought I’d share my point of view as store owner as well since I think we do things a little differently from other stores.

When I opened the store, I was opening a few blind boxes from each series and selling them two or three dollars more than the blind price regardless of rarity. I was quickly plundered by flippers and left with the common figures, so I quickly changed to a price scale – a few bucks more for the common figures, up to double for rarer ones. But it wasn’t seem enough to deter flippers. For example, when 123Klan left me a dozen of their Dunnys from the French series, I had people writing wanting to buy the whole lot (I was selling them 20$ apiece).

Nowadays, I still keep my scale and try to adjust my prices to half of eBay’s for the rarest ones (2% and less). I found that it makes local collectors happy (they can get what they want and still pay less) but it fends most flippers away.

Now, while the hardcore collectors purchase the rarer open boxes and casual ones don’t mind the common figures, I still get stuck with lots of doubles. What I do is that before ordering more blind boxes when I run out, I repackage my open boxes and label them as “fake blinds”. I warn clients they won’t get the rarest ones, but they pay the lower blind box price. Casual collectors still get the thrill and the lower price and I’m selling much more of the older pieces (I have to say that casual collectors -do- seem to love blind boxes).

Like you mentioned earlier, the leftovers kill small stores. I still have Invisible Plans, Trexis, and BUDs from when I opened. Without getting into details, a store needs to sell from half to two-thirds of a case to start making a profit. Fake blinds are a way out.

Now I could go into how chains like UO kill the chance of us ever selling out on some series by discounting them at 50-90% off after a few months, and whether it is better for manufacturers to sell to them (and cheapen their brands) or to us (and lose on quantity? I’d like to see numbers…), but I guess that’s a whole other debate…

Green robot Munny is a first piece of our tenth customs exhibition here in Moscow. Glad you’re liked it, I will forward your comment to the artist.

Take care!

Stay in touch!

As a collector I am ready to buy in closed blind boxes only Bearbricks. They’re nice with their themed generic minimalistic designs for regulars and artists pieces always rare and always stands out as something special. Plus they have tons of unannounced figures and ratios per box and per carton is good.

In qees/dunnies and other western blind boxed mini series it looks like artists fighting with each other at one platform and series is so messy, so people often judge toys not by quality of an artwork, but for ratio and I think stores pretty much advocating producers here.

Dehara Pigs, Dalek Space Monkeys, Kubricks….oh man did I drop some cash in that wonderful place. Mad love to Lev!