Toys to Retirement Weekly Wrap-Up
Hope everyone is having a great Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend...
Hello friends,
I apologize for being a day late on this one. I’m sure most of you are struggling to find time to breathe right now as well with the craziness of the holidays and Black Friday. A good problem to have though! I’m really happy with how my Black Friday turned out:
A record day for me, with revenue surpassing the 25k mark across my two main platforms. The best part? This is with constantly raising minimums on most of my heavy hitting ASINs. There are a couple duds that I just let keep selling, but anything that was showing trending down in sellers I kept raising the minimums and… they kept selling.
A great question was asked in a group I’m in yesterday, which was something along the lines of:
How exactly do you strategically reprice your items during peak season?
For me, there is no scientific formula or hard rules that I follow. I am simply always refreshing my sales and if I notice something is selling a lot, I’ll just raise my minimum by $1. If it keeps selling, I’ll raise it by $1 again. I’ll repeat that until I hit a sweet spot where it’s no longer selling, and then based on how many units are priced below me, I may start pricing downwards by 50 cents or so. It’s just a constant game of trying to nudge your price upwards as we continue to go deeper into peak season, with the prices reaching their height around the week before Christmas. If our discontinued product selection was good, then the price should hopefully stay the same or increase in price after Christmas, just sell slightly slower.
I also recommend using a “Yo-Yo” strategy in your repricer:
This will have your SKUs jump up to their maximum price every X amount of minutes, and stay there for X amount of minutes. Not only will competitors hopefully follow you with their repricers, increasing the price of the item, but you will get sales at your higher price point. Yesterday, I had an item I’ve sold hundreds of at $55 sell a few times at $69.99 due to this strategy.
Subscriber Q&A
Thank you guys for all of the kind words on my subscriber Q&A from earlier in the week. I didn’t realize how many people were itching to have these sorts of questions answered. Please, don’t be shy! Continue to message me questions on Twitter/Instagram/Substack so everyone can learn! I answered all of these:
How do you handle prep?
How do you handle storage?
How come you tell us specifically what you’re buying with LEGO, but not with other toys?
How do you decide how deep to go on a purchase?
How do you decide when it’s time to sell an item for a loss / break even / low profit?
Where do you buy most of your toys? Do you ever pay full MSRP?
How do you reverse engineer your profit goal?
I’ve seen you mention profit per square foot. What does that mean?
What are the best toy brands for beginners?
Will you ever start an investment lead list?
Are there any toy brands you avoid?
How do you feel about debt?
What are the best tips you have for someone new to toy investing?
Aren’t you afraid you’ll be restricted in LEGO?
LEGO is trending favorably…
If you guys followed my LEGO analysis series, you know one of my biggest battles is trying to identify sets that won’t tank. Stuff that flies under the radar. Because of that, I usually try to avoid sets that are “obviously” good that I feel everyone else will jump on. I’m happy to report that some of the sets I was worried about already seem to be disappearing. I was shocked to see how quick the Exotic Pink Parrot set from Target sold out. That set may not tank horribly after all, depending on if there is a post-Black Friday restock or not (still very possible).
Other sets are disappearing without a trace, such as another Target exclusive Star Lord’s Helmet.
We’re also starting to see Amazon go out of stock on several sets — fingers crossed we avoid those reprints.
Don’t forget to set your Keepa alerts… I’ve spent thousands this week on sets that had very quick blips of discounts. Can you believe 31120 was only $63 with a limit of 20 for a few hours? What a steal.
Tip of the Week #5
Shoutout to Lego_Aficionado (Saunders) on Twitter for putting me onto this one. Giftcards.com is having a crazy sale on LEGO gift cards right now. Using the code EPICDEALS you can buy up to $5,000 per day at 10% off. I bought a few grand worth to use online and in-store, as well as for the upcoming deals that will inevitably be happening in December. Every percent off matters…
Give Saunders a follow, he’s also a great LEGO resource to be learning from.
Two new LEGO sets added to the Final LEGO 2024 Overview…
Scroll down to the **NEW ADDITIONS** section. I added two new sets this week that I’m actually kind of excited about and have started buying.
Gonna wrap this one up here folks. Short newsletter week, but hopefully some solid value and money-saving/making tips you guys have been able to put to use. Need to get caught back up on prepping, ordering more stuff, and we’ll be back next week as we enter into December. Oh baby.
Do you know if the Giftcards.com 10% works along with Rakuten? If I had a $175 order from lego and used a $150 gift card, would I get the % back from Rakuten on the 175 or just the amount left over charged to the credit card?