Today Juliz Schultz has a rare post to her blog titled “Buy High Sell Low“. Julia talks about taking advantage of the infamous ’summer slow-down’ on eBay to build up your inventory for the time eBay picks up in the fall.

While I don’t agree with everything she talks about (for example, while a summer slow-down may exist if you are selling what is essentially ‘retail’ merchandise, I don’t believe it exists within the antiques/collectibles market), but she does offer some good ideas regarding potential sources for eBay inventory.

And I couldn’t agree more when she says:

“One of my many mistakes as a buyer for my business is being short sighted. I have a tendency to think if it doesn’t resale for the price I want in the next few weeks it isn’t worth the bother of picking it up. This is a mistake especially when you have room for inventory. As the stock market dictates a buy low and sell high mentality so does the wholesale - retail business. We need to keep in mind that holding inventory that is sure to go up in value is an investment and will return significantly if we are patient and wise in our listing timing.“

In fact, I recommend you take it one step further.

Don’t just look for inventory that is sure to go up in value. Do some research and use what you already know, and be willing to take a chance on inventory that, while not popular now, has the potential of increasing dramatically in value a ways down the road.

Years ago before eBay ever existed, I used to set up at flea markets around Minnesota and Wisconsin nearly every weekend throughout the summer. At the time you could find numerous children’s lunch boxes for sale at nearly every flea market in the area. No one collected them, so prices were low, ranging from $1 to $5, with most in the low end of that range.

One of the things I specialized in at the time was advertising items and I knew that crisp, colorful graphics, was one of the reasons these items were so popular with collectors. It just made sense to me that eventually lunch boxes would catch on because, in many cases, their graphics were even more dynamic than many advertising items.

I began buying lunch boxes. If it was in excellent condition, I bought it. Before long, my wife began complaining because our basement was being taken over by piles of banana boxes filled with lunch boxes. Within two years, I literally owned more than two thousand lunch boxes.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the only person hoarding lunch boxes. A gentleman from the east coast, who was doing the same thing I was, wrote the first price guide with some rather inflated prices in it, and began promoting his collection on local radio and TV. It was picked up by the national TV networks, and the next thing you know people all over the country were not only collecting lunch boxes, they were paying the crazy prices from the ‘Official Price Guide’. Within a year, my basement was empty and I’d made a killing.

A short time later, I did the same thing with typewriter ribbon tins. No one was collecting them and you could find them everywhere you looked for $2 or $3 each. My logic was that there was already a huge number of people collecting other types of tins - coffee, tobacco, spice, cocoa, licorice, etc. Prices for all these kept escalating, and I believed that as many collectors were priced out of the market, they would look for other kinds of tins to focus their interest on. An added advantage to typewriter ribbon tins was that they were small enough that a large number could be displayed in a relatively small area.

My wife didn’t complain quite as much this time. Probably more because I could store a lot more ribbon tins in a banana box, than I could lunch boxes. The piles weren’t quite as large. That was a good thing, because it took longer for ribbon tins to catch on. That was okay though, because when they did, my cache was larger than the lunch box cache had been. When they finally did, once again I made a killing.

Over the years I’ve successfully managed to do the same thing with aspirin tins, North Dakota School Of Mines pottery, Dikota pottery, Rosemeade pottery, and several other things. Have I always had winners? Of course not, but the winners have far outnumbered the losers.

If you have the money and the room to do something similar to this, go for it. The eventual profits can be enormous. It will require some research on your part along with some common sense thinking based upon what you already know about current popular items, but by using due diligence you can give yourself a good chance to be sitting on a hoard of something when everyone else decides they need to have what your sitting on.

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