We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Samantha Diaz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Samantha below.

Samantha, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Often outsiders look at a successful business and think it became a success overnight. Even media and especially movies love to gloss over nitty, gritty details that went into that middle phase of your business – after you started but before you got to where you are today. In our experience, overnight success is usually the result of years of hard work laying the foundation for success, but unfortunately, it’s exactly this part of the story that most of the media ignores. Can you talk to us about your scaling up story – what are some of the nitty, gritty details folks should know about?

As I think back to when our business was just an idea, it’s crazy to think where we are now and where we hope to be in the future! The company started off as an idea and a website, gradually adding products before going live. Our Instagram account was created and we were ready to hit the ground running. In the beginning, we only had a few Pokémon and football cards. We went live with our online business announcements when we had a decent amount on our website. After a slow start, we began selling singles on Ebay and TCG’s website. We had started making some sales on eBay, which was a big hit. As our earnings grew, we started purchasing bigger items like trainer boxes and packs. When we were confident that we had enough, we decided to sign up for our first outdoor market! It was a cold December afternoon, but we had so much fun! We were really excited to be there and share our passion with everyone who visited our booth! After that event we decided to start making Pokémon related crafts like stickers and coasters made with resin. We grew our inventory even more and added more things to our website and Ebay store and we kept doing outdoor events!

We post a lot of our products on our Instagram and Tik Tok and just recently we had a scavenger hunt! For the month of October, we hid 4 prizes around Las Vegas and posted clues as to where they were. We were so excited when the first prize was found within 30 minutes! Our last prize was an Obsidian Flames Elite Trainer Box, and we hid a 3D printed Squirtle around the area we were doing an event. The winner searched high and low for that Squirtle and eventually found it, earning him the Elite trainer box! We were so glad that our first scavenger hunt was a success.

We are determined to make it to at least one local event a month. Although we don’t have a brick-and-mortar store, we have grown a lot. We have a room in our house and part of our garage dedicated to our business. We just sit in our office and brainstorm new ideas and create our crafts. We hope to keep growing and growing so that someday soon you see us standing outside our shop inviting you to come and catch them all!

Samantha, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Our business is an online card shop, specializing in Pokémon cards but we also involve ourselves in magic the gathering, Lorcana, Football, Baseball and Hockey. We weren’t always in this industry, in fact we both have full time jobs in retail. We both loved Pokémon when we were young and after all these years we decided, hey let’s start collecting and help others collect. And now here we are, helping others build their collections and it is awesome!

We pride ourselves on having quality cards and packing every order with extreme care. We also like to provide a little extra in our orders so that our customers feel appreciated! (Which we do appreciate them!!)

We are proud to offer a variety of products and crafts for everyone of all ages. We are currently exploring buying collections that others might want to get rid of for cash or trading. So, keep an eye out on our socials for that announcement!

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

We have been slowly growing our clientele mainly on Instagram. We try to post every few days to keep our current followers entertained. We like to boost a post every so often when it is an important post like our October scavenger hunt so that we can grow in followers and have the hunt be more challenging. We didn’t want the same one person to go hunt for the prizes. So, with boosting our posts and having quality items, we are slowly growing our clientele. We started a YouTube channel, and we are working on vlogging our events so maybe if you visit our booth, you might get a glimpse of yourself!

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

We sell on our own website as well as Ebay, TCG store and Esty! Our website gets a lot of views, but we don’t get too many orders. Which is understandable, there is a lot of fakes out there and a collector can’t be too careful when buying cards from an unfamiliar site.

Ebay is our main site, we have over 200 items posted for sale, and we haven’t had any negative interactions so far. All our customers are great! We have a 100% positive feedback rating because we take pride in every order and package it with care.

We also sell single cards on TCG, we get quite a few orders on that platform. We don’t have any negative interactions on there either. We also have a 100% positive feedback rating there are well!

Esty is a new platform we started to sell on. We have just one item on there and maybe it’s me but it’s hard to post items on there. I hope to start adding more items in the future. But for now, we are selling most of our crafts at our events and on our website.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.legendarycardshop.com
• Instagram: @legendarycard.shop
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=100094493714887
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzUExz8VWqbx1f4nvLW1NmQ