Sales To Astonish #5 - January 2023

Following a busy last week of 2022 due to our email subscriber sale, to begin 2023 we decided to open up the 50% off sale to anyone who visited the website. Various announcements and posts were made on social media and the first ten days of January were the busiest we have been in our 2.5 years of trading.

From variant covers and signed editions to graphic novels and Roleplaying games we sold items from almost all areas of the store.

In terms of comics we saw people buying long runs of issues like Grant Morrison’s epic JLA run, the critically acclaimed Strikeforce Morituri, X-Men, Hulk and Iron Man amongst others. Lots of Bronze Age titles were snapped up at half price including almost all our mid-low grade DC horror titles like House of Secrets, Unknown and Ghosts. By the time the sale had come to a close on 15th January there were quite a few half empty boxes in the stock room which in turn creates the nice problem of how we go about buying in new stock to keep our back issue selection one of the best in the UK outside of eBay

January is always a difficult month in retail as people are generally paid before Christmas, therefore having to wait around 5-6 weeks before January payday rolls around. On that basis we expected to see a slump in website traffic and sales mid-month and it duly arrived. Even the introduction of some great value for money sets in our third Thursday launch of the month wasn’t enough to mitigate against what was a really quiet week. However, once payday arrived things picked up again and the end of January saw us sell a large number of early Sandman and Hellblazer issues we had recently bought in. Key sales were

Hellblazer #1 VFN- £37.50

Sandman #4 VFN - £50

Sandman #8 VFN - £65

On the final weekend of January we took a stall at the Vintage & Retro Market in Market Harborough. Although not specifically a comic fair, other types of collectibles such as coins and stamps, along with antiques, are sold every Sunday so there seemed to be an opportunity to add comics into the mix.

The indoor market also has a number of permanent pitches and on arrival we met up with Peter from Vinyl Culture who has been selling Funkos, t-shirts, autographs and other memorabilia for years. They have a really good selection and it was quickly established that our respective offerings would compliment each other.

The market was busy for the first few hours after opening and we sold a few Star Wars comics and a big stack of vintage White Dwarf magazines to make the trip worthwhile. Diary permitting it’s something we would like to do regularly every 4-6 weeks.

In retrospect January was a busy month in more ways than one and there’s hope that the momentum gained will carry on through February and into the Spring 😎😎