Lynn Dralle got her start on eBay the way many people did in the
late 1990s--she was searching for Beanie Babies to buy.
For those who are too young to remember, or for those whose
pop-culture memories are fuzzy, this was a decade in which tiny,
furry stuffed animals created by Ty Inc. were decreed collectible
items because of their limited availability and short manufacturing
lives. It was an age in which otherwise rational people were
suddenly buying the stuffed animals by the dozen and occasionally
paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for an individual stuffed
Beanie Baby, certain they would recoup their investments tenfold.
It was an age of Beanie Baby magazines, books and collectors'
cases.
"They will come back again," the Palm Desert,
California, entrepreneur says confidently, citing a Beanie Baby she
recently saw on eBay with a bid of $1,150.
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Whether Beanie Babies will be as good an investment as old coins
or comic books remains to be seen, but in that period, they were a
profitable venture for entrepreneurs like Dralle, who bought Beanie
Babies on eBay to sell as future collectibles in her
grandmother's antiques store. The experience went so well, she
couldn't help but start shopping on eBay for herself. "My
grandmother bought me a vase when I was 13, and I had never found
another piece like it," explains Dralle, 42. "Now, I have
13 of those vases, and every time I buy one, it reminds me of my
grandmother."
Silly, sublime, sentimental or strange, every entrepreneur has a
story about how he or she started on eBay. While the tales are
different, one plot element remains the same: eBay improved their
quality of life--not to mention their income.
Nomad No More
Six years ago, Tim Siegel, then 30, was going places.
Specifically, he was driving from Minnesota to Guatemala, after a
friend convinced him that he could make a lot of money selling
medical equipment down there. It was worth a shot. Siegel's
degree in criminology had led him into a job managing
telemarketers, which he considered the worst job he ever had, and
then into management at a hospitality company. The upside of his
second job was that he got to visit far-flung lands like Guam and
Malaysia. So when a friend convinced him of the financial gains to
be found selling medical equipment in Guatemala, Siegel figured he
would, at the very least, get to do something he loves: travel.
True enough. But while the 3,000-mile trip by truck--and school
bus--was at first an adventure, it eventually became exhausting.
Siegel's friend had been right. Because Guatemala's
infrastructure is so poor, those with money are willing to pay top
dollar for what they need to buy. As Siegel says, "If a
surgical table is worth $1,000 here, an end user in Guatemala would
pay two to three times [that]. That is also true with vehicles or
just about anything else. So many people currently export down
there, I would guess it's very tough to make a profit
now."
But not back then. Siegel would always sell his vehicle after
all the goods were sold, then fly home. But it was still a
challenging journey.
In 1999, the same friend suggested he try selling his
merchandise on eBay, and Siegel leapt at the chance. A fetal
monitor bought for $250 sold for $500, and Siegel knew he was never
going back to Guatemala. Today, Siegel has an eBay-based company
called Matrix Medical that sells mostly medical and
dental equipment to buyers around the world, with about 5 percent
of sales from other products.
Siegel hopes to eventually have his own warehouse, a bigger
truck and employees. In a recent month, he brought in $36,000, and
his 2005 gross sales should be just under half a million
dollars.
"It's nice not risking my life driving 3,000
miles," says Siegel. "These days, I'll buy anything,
because I know I can sell it. My confidence level has risen a lot.
When you buy something for $500 and can sell it for $8,000, it
really blows your mind. I'm sure without eBay, I'd have
been successful, but it's hard to say what would have happened.
Would I have kept going to Guatemala and crashed somewhere? Now I
can buy something and literally have the money for it today, as
opposed to waiting." And driving.
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