Unknown has been one of the biggest peddlers of store exclusives. For a while it seemed like every single marvel comic they had an exclusive regular and virgin cover.
The exclusive market has been dying a slow death lately…aside from a few Spears early covers and a few absolute Batman books it’s been very quiet. People finally wising up.
Only a few artist exclusives seem to generate fomo these days.
Unknown needs to get with the comic blind bag scam…package some of those worthless exclusives into blind bag comic packs with a few “chase” books and clear inventory…
Also, claiming 90% off entails the new “value” in a sense right?
If I tell you my item is worth $100 but I’ll sell it to you for $10, the new value is now $10. Worth is subjective and value is determined by how much one is willing to spend, so it’s always changing from one to next.
Unknown put out a pretty honest video about their financial problems. They have to stop exclusives for the foreseeable future to keep solvent and sell their backstock. They hope it’ll just take a few more months and they can start slowly again.
Shawn Hudachko from Comics Elite had a pretty decent commentary video about this also.
So that’s just telling us they’re not learning from their mistakes… their addiction to doing so many exclusives likely got them into financial trouble and they plan to slowly choke themselves again when they dig themselves out… makes total sense!!! Maybe they should try to make money another way with comics, not the path that seems to doom so many shops chasing variants and exclusives. Seems the shops that order what they know they can sell are the ones that stay afloat when the market changes.
I actually looked at their sale and they have a lot of good store variants that if you are purchasing for $1 each, I think you could make a profit on. I am tempted.
If you’re pulling out loans to chase the next big exclusive hit… you got just as much luck in using that loan money to buy lotto tickets… sounds like a ticket straight to the failure line and normally failure leads to success but not in this case, cause they’re not counting on actual management of selling product rather than hoping the unpredictable collector market wins them a nice pay day that’s probably just paying back interest on their damn loans…
I will say the last few years I walked by their NYCC booth and all they had to offer was store variant drek. As with many other vendors there. Every year there has been more vendors exclusively pushing exclusives, and less actual comic back issue vendors.
Saw this coming MILES away. Not sure how Comic Mint keeps chugging along…
Comic mint relies heavily on their Facebook group, which helps push sales to the different covers and offerings. It’s not a bad business plan on their part having a built-in audience. If you guys remember in the beginning, comic mint was meant to be an alternate site for selling comics. In fact we covered it. They did an early offer for a CBCS Star Wars number 1 9.8 for like 20 bucks.
