How viable of a business is a collectibles store – keywords cards knife sword action figures etc?

I am interested in opening in a collectible store one day as a business with me and a cousin. He knows a lot about swords/knifes, I know a lot about card games, we both know a bit about figurines and just generally what should be in a collectible store.

How is the lasting power on stores like this?

Would we need some sort of special item to sell swords/knifes as well? Not a lot are plan to be sold but enough for it to be a factor.

What type of location would I be looking for? Places like las vegas or smaller areas like growing towns?

Would people be more interested in an updated style to a more clean modern look? Basically maturing the business.

Would it work with a main focus on trading cards?

Any other info you can/want to share.

Comments

One Response to “How viable of a business is a collectibles store – keywords cards knife sword action figures etc?”
  1. mercierarmory says:
    May 30, 2010 at 8:38 pm

    sword and knife stores are a dime a dozen in the large cities. I think if you were to actually pull it off in vegas the only way for it to be profitable would be for the shop to be near the strip and it’s obvious that won’t happen. It would be just too horribly expensive.

    You would have to focus on one area of interest. Trading cards OR blades. Not both. You probably need to focus on one aspect of collecting.

    If you do the cards thing, obviously that would be easy. But check out the area to see what the main field of interest is in the potential customers. Is there a big sports market? Then focus on sports cards. Is there a bigger gaming market? Then focus on that. I’m sure if you were to get it off the ground, it would be a bit of trial and error, but I think it would still be a gamble.

    If you focus on swords and knives, I think the best sellers always tend to be the cheap crap swords even though I don’t like them. More people are going to be willing to pay $50 for a sword like object that is meant to hang on the wall than there are going to be people who want to pay $500 or more for a true, quality, functional replica. The only way for a sword and knife store to do any good business is to sell in a city that I would honestly say has over 250K people. I have seen those types of stores go bankrupt just because they can’t stay in business because their main demographic is such a narrow group of people. That you have to set it up in a bigger city to be able to appeal to more folks. Of course if you were to offer online selling, that could help, but the internet is flooded with business like that already.

    Either way, no matter what you decide, any business is going to be a gamble. If you can get it off the ground I applaud you for that.

    Good luck!

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