Back in 2005, Banksy “snuck” into the British museum and placed a fake rock on display. Fast forward to 2018, the rock got returned to the British Museum. To commemorate the occassion, the museum sold wooden postcards for about 4GBP each. The limit was 10 and they actually shipped them to the US for a fee of 10GBP.
Looking back at my email history, it seems they sold out even though I had an order confirmation. Then 3 months later (Jan 2019) they restocked and had them on sale(?) for just 2GBP each. For 10 of them shipped and with the currency conversion, they cost me about $4 each. I think I ordered about 40 of them.
Fast forward a year later and I was selling them for about $50-$75 each on Ebay. I remember getting a few orders from art galleries around the US who also wanted a copy of my British Museum invoice (I guess to prove authencity). Most of my buyers were overseas and used Ebay’s GSP.
And this what it’s going for these days…. The funny thing is that when I sold them on Ebay, I’d peel off the price tag at the back of the postcard. Turns out that keeping it on increases its value (once again, I guess to prove it’s authenticity.) Usually when you sell things on Ebay, you want to remove the price tag just so the buyer isn’t angry over how much profit you’re making, but in this case, it added value. Surprisingly none of my buyers complained. These things were great too since they were so small storage-wise. So yeah, at $300 (let’s call it $260 after fees and ship,) that’s an ROI of 65X on my money. As of today, I still have about 10-15 on hand since Ebay banned my account before I could sell them all, so yeah, thanks Ebay for the ban. I do plan on keeping the rest of them for a while just to see how high they’ll go. The funny thing is that at the time, I considered buying more, but I just didn’t think the item would do this well. Lesson learned for today – buy everything Banksy!
I probably missed it but why did you get banned?
You can search my site ‘ebay banned.’ A couple of posts.
Interesting. Sometimes you win on these sort of odd niche deals. Banksy is widely considered controversial and also Anti-Semitic so I’m sure the value will continue to go up among those fans.
Open a new eBay account?
Just curious about your experience with holding items. When do you know when to let go. Some things get hot and trend up, but then enthusiasm fades and they come crashing down. Any thoughts on this?
I’ve thought about this situation a lot lately since the wife wants me to sell everything off lately. Let’s say it’s been a year since you’ve bought the item – if it has gone up 50%-100% in that time, it’s a good sign it’ll keep going up. But if the item is barely up 10-20%, it’s hard to see it rising exponentially years later, so I’d probably just take the L and move on. The ONLY item that jumped like that for me was the NINTENDO DS PIKACHU EDITION. I held onto like 50 of those for 3 years and they were still going for retail. And a year or two later, now they are going for 2-3X. But that’s the outlier I think. I’d like to see a normal runup instead of hoping things jump like that.