Issue #32

Hello! Mat here and this week we take a look at a category that I've completely ignored over my reselling journey and that is baby and kids shoes. Did you know that they can sell for close to $200? That's during a cost of living crisis too! We also have some garage sale scores, a software mascot plush that sells for over $100 (yes, a software mascot...) and plenty of sales for you to look through and more. But first!

In This Issue

• Issue #32

• What I’ve Bought

• What I Sold

• Win a Free $200 Mystery Box

• Flip Weekly on Social Media

• 100% Free Resources to Help You

What I’ve Bought

Whenever I find a cool graphic t-shirt like this, I’m looking at 3 things:

1. The tag.

2. The stitching.

3. Any date markings.

This particular t-shirt had what appeared to be a vintage Bonds tag, a double stitch and hiding in the very bottom left corner of the frame, a date.

Unfortunately it’s not a home run. 90’s Yogi Bear t-shirts are selling in the $50 range however you can’t deny it’s a cool find and a dope shirt. I have it listed on eBay for $50 free post and $30 on Marketplace.

In my constant quest to utilize every school foot of thrift store retail space, I decided this week to pay attention to a new category: children’s clothes and shoes. I’m recently an uncle for the first time so I know first hand how expensive some children’s brands can be so I thought let’s start there, thrift stores may be ignorant to the category. I think it’s important that we get to know as many categories as possible before honing down and dominating, so let’s take a look at this pair of shoes I singled out.

The thing that grabbed my attention was the large branding on the front. In contrast to the pairs surrounding it which had very few markings besides a logo or lettering on the sole, this pair had “Double B“ right across the strap in a boujee font. There isn’t enough time in the day to look up each individual item in a thrift store so you need to develop your own markers, whether that’s logos, material, stitching and so on.

If you want to know why some people can’t afford to have kids anymore, take a look at the below graphic.

Okay, so this is an expensive brand. The brand itself isn’t Double B, it’s something called Miki House and it’s a Japanese brand that sells around the world. Their kids shoes start at $60 and only go up from there. The cheapest pair they sell is $69.99 and they’re sandals.

Something I thought was interesting was that they were marked at $8 wheras a pair of baby Nike’s were right beside and they had $15 - staff obviously pricing based on the known brand. So on one hand we have a more obscure brand vs a mainstream Nike and in terms of pricing, it looks like Miki House has a higher ceiling. Compare their cheapest slip ons.

This gives you and I a bit of encouragement because it means we may be able to pick up some good quality, high selling brands for a decent price. In terms of these specific shoes that I picked up, we have very little on eBay but they are available elsewhere.

I honestly have no idea what this particular market is like on eBay but I listed them for $49.95 with free post and if they sell that would generate a cheeky $20 profit. It’s not much, but I thought for $8 it’s worth picking up, at least for a lesson and crash course. Plus I feel like I learn more when I’m actively engaged and involved with a market, not just doing baseless research online.

Right next to the Double B shoes there were these cute Baby Brazil Logo Thongs by Havaianas for $5. These sell on Havaianas website for $40 and probably could have been a triple or quadruple your money on Marketplace, especially with Summer around the corner, but I decided against it despite how cute they were. One of the good things about kids shoes and clothes are that they grow up so quick that in some cases they do so before even getting a chance to wear or put on the item! That means we can get brand new inventory super cheap and we don’t have to deal with the wear and tear that adult clothes and shoes experience.

If you’ve been here since Issue #19, you know I never leave a bulk collection of original Goosebumps behind. Back then I found a tub full of 50 original Goosebumps for just $6. I said then I was unlucky to not have the complete 62 set as that fetches a sale price of around $700 - $800. However this time?

I still wasn’t that lucky. However, I was able to find 73 Goosebumps made up of:

• 4 x Special Editions - all 4 are First Scholastic Printing.

• 9 x Series 2000 - all 9 are First Scholastic Printing.

• 50 x Original Series - 30 out of 50 are First Scholastic Printing (#32 has an unused Goosebumps tattoo).

• 10 x Reader Beware - 6 out of 9 are First Scholastic Printing.

I’ve talked a lot about Goosebumps before so I wont go into extreme detail, I’ll just say that I paid $60 for this lot (a tad on the expensive side) however it does make up a $299.95 listing price and should give me around $160 profit. Building towards a collection of all 62 could be fun, but only pick them up if they’re less than a dollar, in good condition, are the original and are First Scholastic Printing (check the index page). Also if you’re not building a collection, still look inside an original Goosebumps and check if there’s any bookmarks, tattoos or stickers as that can turn the book from $10 into $50+ and would be worth buying.

I spotted this fully laminated 1997 poster of Anaconda in the thrift and had to have it. I remember the first time I ever saw this movie, it was at a gathering with a friend group for a “Bad Movie Marathon Night“, which by the way, is a horrible reason to get together, and despite finding it to be terrible (surprise) I think the poster is pretty cool and for just $6 I know I could flip it on Marketplace for close to $30. Movie posters are very collectible, and I would like this on eBay but it’s laminated and can’t really be rolled up to fit in a poster tube but keep an eye out for movie posters - the more of a classic the movie, the higher it goes for on eBay.

I’m still picking up VHS players out of sheer nostalgia and the fact that they sell extremely well - you’ll see an example in the What I Sold section of this newsletter. This VHS came wihout the remote, instructions or AV cables however there was a brand new AV cable just a bit further down in the electronics section for just $2.99 that I picked up. Getting home I tested it out with a copy of The Bear In The Big Blue House (remember that show) and it worked perfectly. This should go on to sell for around $100.

I spotted this anime looking plush for $2.99 and I had no idea what it was from. She had these really long banana looking things hanging from her head so I looked her up. I have to be honest with you, I struggle when it comes to anime, half the time I can’t tell what the characters name is or what the show is called and it makes me feel really old. This is who (what?) she is:

So it’s the mascot for a piece of software. I’m not kidding, it’s like the 2024 version of Clippy, the Microsoft Office Assistant.

Please don’t expect me to explain any further. Back to the plush, like I said it didn’t have any tags and once I got home and researched a bit further I had a feeling it might be fake, apparently this character is popular to counterfeit, and this is why:

There’s very few versions of this plush, I guess the banana version is rare. Nevertheless, it’s listed up for $39.99 and we’ll just see what happens.

Heading to garage sales for a moment, I scored a sealed pair of Sony earphones but I also stepped out of my usual area and got this R.M. Williams wallet. I was surprised these were still there, she told me that somebody arrived at 6am, 2 hours before opening to look around and then that 6am buyer was annoyed because somebody else came the day before and picked up “around 30-35 items“. So it was heavily picked over and I wasn’t the first to look around.

I paid $1 total and there’s only 1 active listing for the earphones and they’re asking for a bit…

I don’t see any exact comps for this particular model however similar earphones from back in the day are selling for between $50 - $100 so I’ll try my hand at the $99.95 mark. Now in terms of the wallet, I picked it up for 3 reasons:

1. I wanted to learn more about wallets.

2. It was R.M. Williams which is expensive.

3. Inside the markings indicated it was genuine kangaroo leather.

I can’t remember where I heard it from, but it seems that any “exotic” type of material can usually garner a premium. However, after getting home I was unsure whether this was real. Why? I couldn’t find anything like it online. This usually isn’t that big of a deal to me until it got to the next thing. The quality just didn’t seem there. I looked at the stitching and it looked a bit inconsistent even though all of them are hand stitched. Then I put some pressure on the wallet and it basic fell apart in my hands. Maybe that happens when a kangaroo leather wallet is really old? I’m not sure. If it was real, kangaroo leather wallets by R.M. Williams can go from anywhere from $50 to $200+.

I promise I’m not only going to be picking up Sony products from now, this was $10 and I figured it could be flipped pretty quickly. I tested out the radio player and it worked. The cassette player I got a $1.99 cassette from Savers and it worked without a problem. I tried running it just on batteries and it also worked. Great, that’s now on eBay with sold comps going up to $69 (heh).

What I Sold

I don’t know what happened this week, but I found myself on Monday needing to ship off 2 VHS players. The total cost of both was $35 and they sold for $269.90 combined. This is now 3 VHS players that I’ve bought and sold and for some reason I’m not sick of them yet. Maybe it’s the nostalgia, maybe it’s the fact they all seem to sell for over $100, or maybe it’s that it’s so satisfying putting them into an Australia Post Large Box as they fit literally perfectly. I try not to repeat buy too many things, I’m not here to pick up “bread and butter“ type items to make a living, I like the unusual and weird but when they sell within 7 days and each time I get to test out a nostalgic VHS movie on them, why not?

2024 Clippy The Office Assistant lasted just over a day, she sold in 25 hours for full asking price. It seems I should have listed it higher however at the time I was thinking I had a fake plush, or at least a plush with no tags and didn’t value it as highly as I guess others would.

This 1996 Vintage Yogi Bear t-shirt lasted just a single day on eBay before it was sold locally via Facebook Marketplace for $40. $10 into $40 in a single day and it went into the hands of a Yogi Bear fan so it’s a win all round. I don’t seem to come across as many vintage t-shirts these days but any I do find I pick up - they all look so cool.

Do you remember when I visited the garage sale that was being run by an M&M’s collector? If you haven’t read it yet, check it out here. I bought a few different things from an M&M collector selling off their collection and this was the score of the day. An all over print, M&M and Nascar collaboration from 1999 that was purchased for $10 and had sold comps of over $200.

It had a few stains that I needed to get out but overall it was an awesome buy. It’s taken a little while to sell because I mean… it’s a single t-shirt listed for $200 however just before publication it’s sold on Marketplace for $85. I tend to underprice my items on Marketplace because I love that cold hard cash and it does seem a bit silly to end the listing on eBay when it’s had 21 views, 6 watchers and listed at $209.99 but that’s the way it goes.

A few other things I sold this week:

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