eMoviePoster.com

In 1989 I (Bruce Hershenson) was looking for a new business to get into, and I settled on vintage movie posters. At first I thought I would solely buy and sell, but so many of the best ones seemed so inexpensive to me that this evolved into "buy and never sell"!

The following year I had so many posters I didn't know what to do with them all, and I found another fellow in a similar situation, and together we approached Christie's Auction House in New York about doing an "all movie poster auction" (something no major auction had ever done) and they agreed, and that first auction took in just under a million dollars.

I soon had people from all over the world asking me to help them sell their movie posters, and before long I was doing a million dollar auction each year, plus issuing two semi-annual sales catalogs, almost all with consigned posters. The best part was that I only worked around 8 months out of the year, and only had a few on again off again employees.

But by 1998 this "Internet thing" came along. I realized it had the power to wreck my old business model, because suddenly you could buy posters online 24/7, 365 days a year. Over the next years I turned my entire business into an online one (first partly online, and then entirely on eBay), and many of my old time customers told me I was crazy to do so. But I soon had a two million dollar a year business.

In 2007 eBay declared war on online auctioneers, raising my rates 40% overnight. I responded by moving my business entirely OFF eBay, and now my old time customers told me I was crazy, but now because they didn't want me to leave eBay.

But I followed my gut and completely left eBay, and my business has steadily grown, and has averaged five million dollars in sales the past 4 years (and will likely surpass that in 2017)! We now hold 140,000 plus unique auctions a year (solely vintage items)! The number of customers we have had continues to grow, recently passing 43,000. And over 2,000 people have entrusted us with their items to auction for them!

The number of people I employ has also steadily grown, from 3 to 5 to 10 to 20. But the last four years we have remained steady with around 30 employees, sometimes a little higher. Some of those people have been with me ten or more years, and they are the heart and soul of the business. Every year one or two move on to other endeavors, and each time we do our best to replace them with someone as good or better.

Here are the 30 people who currently make eMoviePoster.com the best auction site in the entire world!

and here is a cartoon version of how eMoviePoster.com came to be, from the ultra-talented Erik Andresen!