In early 2003, Hae Yoon was riding
her dirt bike in the hills of Bishop, California, with her friends,
enjoying the rush of the wind in her face. Far off was the highway,
with a truck barreling down it, and Yoon couldn't resist trying
to race it. My family shouldn't worry, Yoon thought, giddy.
Riding a dirt bike is perfectly safe, as long as you know what
you're doing...
Then she noticed the barbed-wire fence in front of her.
Yoon, now 32, had quit her job as a marketing manager for an
event-planning company in November 2002. She was planning to start
her own business in the yoga industry, when she discovered dirt
biking isn't really perfectly safe. After a successful back
surgery, Yoon moved in with her brothers, recovering and living off
the money she had saved for her business. By the time she felt up
to striking out on her own, it was spring 2004. She moved back to
Los Angeles and attempted to reignite the business she had almost
started.
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She planned to produce yoga-mat bags, among other yoga-related
accessories, but after spending several thousand dollars on some
prototypes, she realized it was too expensive a venture to
attempt--and besides, her savings were almost depleted. With
Christmas coming and no career to speak of, she was beginning to
feel a bit demoralized.
About that time, she found some cashmere sweaters at a great
discount and started selling them on eBay just for the fun of it.
"It was just something I stumbled on through a friend,"
says Yoon. "He mentioned a place where he got all this great
merchandise for outrageous prices. I put [the sweaters] on eBay to
see what would happen, and I sold out in 48 hours."
Yoon was enlightened. Yoga wasn't the answer; eBay was. She
began selling women's apparel full time this January, and
already, her business is on track to pull in between $300,000 and
$400,000 in 2005. "The benefits have been enormous," says
Yoon, whose hallway and dining room are full of inventory, though
she eventually hopes to move to an office and have employees.
"I want to work 10 times harder than I ever did at my previous
jobs. It feels great to know you're creating something and not
working on a project for somebody else."
Brick, Mortar and Morale
The 21st century had arrived, but nobody at Machinery
Values felt like celebrating. In 2001, founder and CEO Gene
Valitt, now 64, was afraid he would be putting up a
going-out-of-business sign instead of celebrating the company's
30th anniversary. The industrial machine dealer in Harrison, New
Jersey, had gone from 70 employees to 35, from making $20 million
annually to less than $10 million. The way it looked, the future
partners--Valitt's sons Andrew and David, 39 and 36,
respectively, and Rick Lazarus, 37, who all work in various
capacities at Machinery Values--had little future to look
toward.
COO Art Lazarus, who had become a partner in 1995, kept trying
to think of a way to stop the damage. "We went through a very
difficult time--the recession, 9/11 and a three-and-a-half year
period where business was really lousy in our industry," says
Art, 59. "People weren't expanding, prices dropped, and
our revenue dropped. We were losing money."
The breakthrough came when Art began to think about their
"dead inventory," $250,000 worth of metalworks equipment
and odds and ends. It was all perfectly good material, but was
inexpensive enough that they could never justify spending
advertising money to alert customers it was available. So they just
kept collecting a warehouse full of items. "We said,
'Business is lousy, we're sitting around here--we should
put people to work clearing this stuff out, cleaning it,
photographing it and selling it on eBay,'" Art
recalls.
Everything sold, to the point where Machinery Values was
bringing in as much as $20,000 a month. Art started scrapping the
catalogs they produced two or three times a year--which cost the
company about $100,000 each time--and began marketing their
products through eBay instead. Now, a few years later, the company
brings in over $1 million a year--or about 15 percent of its
sales--from eBay. Art says eBay has also introduced many customers
to their business, bringing traffic into their warehouse. Counting
indirect sales, Art credits eBay for bringing in 30 percent to 40
percent of business--and saving the company.
It's Good to be Home
Dralle believes eBay has saved her quality of life. And why
shouldn't she? After her grandmother passed away in 2000 at the
age of 88, Dralle kept the antiques store running for a while, but
had to close up shop two years later. The overhead was too high,
and a lifetime of memories lingered. Running the business without
her grandmother around just wasn't the same. Meanwhile, Dralle
had visions of working out of her house so she could be with her
kids.
Today, Dralle's website links to her eBay Store, which brings
in approximately $250,000 a year selling antiques. That's not
even counting her earnings from her series of eBay books with
titles like The 100 Best Things I've Sold on eBay.
And just as she hoped, she sees her children a lot more than she
ever did when she put in 50 hours a week at the store.
"Now, I take them to school and pick them up, and they know
they can come in [my home office] and do their homework," she
says. When they aren't in school, they can ride around with
Dralle, who spends much of her time canvassing garage sales and
looking for treasures she can sell on eBay. She cites a recent
example of a wood carving of a bird, which she recognized as a
piece of work by a master carver. She paid $2 for it, but plenty of
collectors were quick to recognize its value. The top bid for the
carving was $2,052. "Those are the ones that make me jump up
and down," says Dralle. "Really, I'm just so happy
that I can live wherever I want, and I love what I'm
doing." It's one of those intangibles that nobody can put
a price on.
Geoff Williams is a writer in Loveland, Ohio.
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