Snazz Industries

  • Home
  • Snazz Day to Day
  • Guides
    • Lego Investments
    • How to Sell Collections
  • Bulk Lego
  • Contact Us

Day 3: Combing through the Rubble

1/25/2014

1 Comment

 
Picture
Now that you have pulled out anything that has been built, its time to get your hands really into that pile and amass the true value. Hopefully, you were able to find a few figures and a few sets that were not complete earlier, and you have a general idea of what you need to look for. To start, dump the entire bin out. Every single piece, put it on a nice large sheet (bed sheets work great for being able to dump all the pieces back in the bin later). Start in one corner, and shift through the pieces. Take out (in order of priority):
  • Any minifig pieces. Heads, bodies, torsos, hands. These will be invaluable to repair the minifigs in your sets, and also hold the most value overall.
  • Any minifig accessories. Pickaxes, flames, guns, tools. These can be used to spruce up figures, and often sell nicely in bulk.
  • Non-Lego. If there are non-lego pieces like Megablox, make sure you put them to the side to discard them. Selling bulk Lego is often contingent on the fact that you haven't upped the weight with non-Lego pieces.
  • Junk. Along the same lines as above, there should be no batteries, pencil lead pieces or coins in the Lego. Inevitably these always end up in the bin, and now you'll have to sort them out.
  • Baseplates. Anything larger than 8x8 should come out. If you are feeling especially ambitious, any flat plate can come out, as they can be sold in bulk.
  • Rare pieces that have patterns on them. Anything with a sticker should come out, as well as any piece that has a pattern on it or printing. These can be used to identify sets that may have gotten broken up. Also, if you have time, these pieces listed separately.
Ultimately, its a trade-off between time and value. If you were to list each piece individually, that would give you the most return. But most people don't have that much free time, so it comes down to taking the most valuable pieces out and then selling everything else as bulk. I estimate about $15 a pound for sorted, clean Lego. When you are done, weigh what you have and multiply by 15. This is approximatel

1 Comment

Day Two: Assessing Value in Assembled Sets

10/6/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Now that you have all your supplies, its time to start seeing what is valuable. I suggest starting your assessment with the assembled sets, because then you'll have a better idea of what you need to find going through the bulk pieces. If you are simply dealing with a massive bin of unbuilt pieces, skip this day and move onto the next post.

This step is based on intuition. The more you eyeball Lego sets, the better you will get at identifying them. If you have some experience with Lego, then you will be able to identity key themes like Star Wars, Harry Potter and Indiana Jones. Take each assembled set and take a guess at what theme it might be. To get an accurate set number, which will be necessary to sell the set and see if pieces are missing, go to the Bricklink catalog and try to match up your set with one in the theme you guessed. Once you have a set number, this will make it much easier figuring out what pieces you need to complete the set, and how much it will sell for down the road.

With a set identified, the next step is to figure out its worth and its completeness. If its a valuable set, it will be worth your time to hunt around for the extra pieces to complete it. Most of the value of a set also rests in the minifigs--although we will cover minifigs later, make a note of what minifigs the set has and set them aside. Keep a running tally of pieces and minifigs to look for, and this will make the next steps much easier.

0 Comments

Day 1: Getting Supplies

9/16/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
So you have a Lego collection of bulk pieces in a massive bin in front of you, waiting to be sold. Great! This week long series will take you through the ins and outs of making the most from your recent acquisition.

Day One, you are going to need to get the supplies that you'll use throughout the rest of the week. There's no point needing to interrupt yourself later getting supplies, and this will help you get organized. Three things need to be purchased to ensure a smooth packing and shipping operation: boxes, bags, and tape. Once we have these essentials down, we can move on to more interesting things.
Boxes
Pro Tip: No need to pay for boxes. Assuming you live in the United States, you can get all the free boxes you'll need and have them show up to your door the next morning. Load up on some Flat rate boxes as well as some normal priority mail boxes. Depending on your collection, you might need more of a certain size. Lots of completed sets? Make sure you have plenty of medium boxes. Lots of minifigs and accessories? Get lots of the small boxes. Luckily, these boxes ship fast so you can always get more quickly when you need them. Keep in mind that the Post Office is stringent about how things ship. Once you pack something in these boxes, they have to ship Priority Mail. I'd also get some smaller bubble mailers via Amazon for smaller things, like individual minifigs, which can then be shipped more cheaply. Another important note: start stockpiling newspaper, which can be used as packing materials. There's no point paying for bubble wrap when newspaper works just as well.
Bags
You'll need ziploc bags for organization of pieces and figures. In my experience, I used three sizes of bags: minifig sized, sandwich sized, 1 gallon sized. 1 and 2 gallon will be used for broken down larger sets and bulk pieces, while sandwich bags will be used for groups of figures as well as smaller sets. To give you a rough estimate of how many you'll need, 1 gallon holds roughly 2.5 pounds (1.1 kilo), and the 2 gallon bags hold just over 5 pounds (2.2 kilo). These can be purchased online, although I was eager to start and just went down to my local grocery store.
Tape
Almost done. You just need the tape to close the boxes. Get some packing tape and some regular invisible tape, if you don't already have some lying around. The invisible tape is great for sticking on prepaid labels, rather than wasting the larger and more expensive packing tape.

Finally! Time to move onto the exciting things.

0 Comments

    What You'll Find

    Acquired a massive Lego bin, collection or pounds? This is the place to find tips and tricks to sell it all at the highest prices, with the minimum of stress.

    Archives

    January 2014
    October 2013
    September 2013

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.