SALES TO ASTONISH #46 - JUNE 2026

‘Half A World Away’

At the beginning of June I made two trips into London to catch up with people I had once worked with in my days of selling property. One I hadn’t seen for over 12 years, but the other I had caught up with around 12 months ago. Both are still involved in the London property sector in some way shape or form. I spent a few hours with both of them catching up on our lives, family etc and then reminiscing about our shared time together, remembering old events, experiences and colleagues. 

My days commuting in and out of London on a daily basis, working or being on call at weekends, flying to China or Singapore to exhibit our properties for sale seems like half a world away to running The Unreality Store. 

But actually it’s not. 

I still get up early (4am most mornings) although Wilma & Kiki the cats have something to do with that - a paw in the face is usually enough to raise me from my slumber and then the ‘work brain’ kicks in. I still work weekends, whether it’s listing or photography, preparing orders or just answering emails, there’s always something to keep on top of. 

Both of my friends who I met with looked tired. They love their jobs, work long hours in high pressured environments, and as I can attest that kind of work/life balance takes its toll. However, the offset is that both are paid very well and probably don’t have too many financial worries.

I found myself in a similar position to them, but decided that I was approaching burn out and it didn’t matter if my employer wanted to sling a few extra quid my way each year to make sure the salary was good, the simple fact is that money cannot buy time. I was fed up with a 4+ hour commute on top of the working day and literally doing what the French call ‘Metro. Boulot. Dodo’ roughly translated to Train. Work. Sleep

So I quit.  And made the best decision of my life to start The Unreality Store. 

The reason why I started this column with the REM song title (or Oasis if you prefer) was that over the past 7 years I’m conscious that some of the reasons I quit property sales (long hours, stress etc) have started to creep back into my day to day routine. I still try to do yoga once or twice a week, can spend time watching WWE with Hermione our rabbit on a Tuesday afternoon whilst I list products (in fact she gets upset if we don’t have that time together) but work is beginning to take over again. And this time round with things as quiet as they have been over the last 18 months, without the financial recompense 

I’ve written the start of this column whilst having a Guinness in a pub just off Oxford Street. It’s a Thursday. There’s new stock on the website including the start of items from a large RPG collection I had bought that finally turned up, (remember the missing DPD parcels from last month? Yes they arrived although a week late and slightly worse for wear)! I’ve had the usual upturn in website traffic that comes with new stock and an emailer/socials to announce it, but as has been commonplace I’m still witnessing a large amount of people adding items to carts but this does not translate to sales. 

Now look, selling comics, graphic novels, RPGs and other items can occasionally result in huge profit margins especially when there is a hot or rare item in a collection that sells for £000’s and it’s been bought for 50p or £1 for example. But generally a lot of what I sell is around £3-£4 and the margins on those items aren’t so great. But they are cheap and I always thought that I would get a reasonably high turnover of these type of items. They are the ‘bread & butter’ sales which pay the bills and selling the higher value items would enable some of the larger profit margin to be reinvested into buying new collections. It worked for a while but now it seems like the audience that regularly bought 10-15 £3 comics buy less frequently and tend to put items in the carts to maybe return to at some point in the future.

Now the cold harsh reality of this is that if it carries on for much longer there will be a point where they return to the website to find that it’s not there.  Times are tough,

I know, but as a niche online business trying to keep the lights on when I experience the same online buying patterns of someone who uses Amazon is just not working for me. 

I’m realistic to know that The Unreality Store has no God given right to exist. It exists because I have a client base that likes the website and the way it operates, they like the fact that the items for sale are priced fairly, are shipped quickly and securely and no matter how much someone spends there will always be something extra put in with their order. 

I know this because they are the themes that come as a result of having 1250 5* Reviews on Trustpilot. Which is something I’m immensely proud of and as always I’m grateful for people taking the time to leave a review. 

What I have found though is that in many cases once the initial euphoria/dopamine hit or whatever it is that gets people excited about ordering something to complete a collection or to re-read someone from their childhood again, it’s easy to forget the good experience they had ordering from The Unreality Store and by the time they are ready to order something else I’m not front and centre in the thought process. That’s not to say over the last few months I’ve seen a few people become regular weekly or fortnightly buyers, but certainly not in the numbers that I had hoped for or indeed need.

Facing into another month where it was becoming apparent that I might struggle to pay the bills yet again I turned to a Father’s Day sale. I’m thankful to say that the sale was successful but as he’s often in the case when I have a moment to reflect it made me think the impact of running a sale on the overall business. Whilst I could talk about at length the financial aspects of selling stock at 50% off ,one of the things I and undoubtedly many other small business owners, tend to miss is the value of their own time. It’s almost never factored into a small business unlike when you are salaried.

The Father’s Day sale generated a large amount of orders the impact of which meant that in some cases (and I did apologise to the buyers) orders were shipped a week after having been placed. Simply the time ,and also in this instance the hot weather, meant that it was difficult to collate all the orders to get them out in a timely fashion. 

Running a sale often means that I start work earlier and finish later and the job leaks into the weekend plus it also impacts my ability to list new stock for the coming weeks..I’ve mentioned before that I feel a large part of my audience is very ‘forward focused’ and by that I mean is ready to look at the new stock going up on the website twice weekly but rarely interested in the older more historic stock. Running a sale often means less new stock in the store in the subsequent week.

A sale also gives me the opportunity to look at what people are buying and it always throws up one or two surprises this time round I think I sold pretty much all the issues of Classic X-Men.I had in stock at that point in time.  These are a relatively cheap way to re-read some of the classic Claremont and Byrne X-Men issues. There are some brilliant Art Adams covers on the earlier issues of the run and also Jon Bolton back-up strips which I don’t think have ever been re-printed (but I am sure there’ll be somebody out there that’s far more knowledgeable on that than me who will be able to confirm or otherwise).

The end of the month finished on a sad note as we lost Hermione our house rabbit who was the source of much companionship whilst I spend my days listing products we spent a good few hours over the last 18 months watching WWE wrestling together and things like five seasons of Animal Kingdom and a whole host of Korean thrillers. She’ll be sorely missed.

🐰🐰🐰.