We were lucky to catch up with Louie Arbs recently and have shared our conversation below.

Louie, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

We started as regular collectors. We had our pull list set up with a local shop and for the most part things were going well. Then I discovered the comic groups on social media and from there it was on. At first I started just downsizing my extra books. Then I started buying collections locally I would find at garage sales or community sites. I would keep what I wanted and sell trade the rest. This led to building numerous relationships in the community.

During this time we kept experiencing issues with local shops missing our pulls or not filling in the quantities ordered. This frustration combined with a pretty good sized client list led us to get our own distribution account with Diamond and start offering new books to clients.

In a very real way Hero’s Corner Comics was started due to other stores mismanaging our pull file. That is now our main focus at the Corner, people’s subscriptions and preorders.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Hero’s Corner Comics is a literal mom and pop shop. My wife and I started the business due to our passion for comics and a desire to help others get books they want at a good price. We have both been reading and collecting comics since we were little kids.

We provide several options for clients to link up with us to manage their pull files. The main one one we recommend is syncing with us at League Of Comic Geeks. This website has free and paid tools. To link with us and manage your pulls/subscriptions is free. Here you can see everything coming out, pull what you want to order, subscibe to what you want each release and then it reports to us to make ordering much less of an ordeal. We also have a store group on Facebook where we have a weekly post with highlighted books that are on final order cutoff.

We have done retailer exclusive variant covers in the past but we do not make that a focus of what we do. Our main focuc currently is subscriptions and final order cutoff preordering. Final order cutoff is the last date we can order books from the publisher to be guaranteed though sometimes allocations happen. For those clients we offer 30% off retail off the vast majority of comics. There are a few non-standard books we can order and the discount varies.

Have you ever had to pivot?

The covid period was madness. There was a lot of money being spent on exclusive variants and those variants helped us to create a following. However it almost seemed overnight the spending stopped. Thankfully we saw the writing on the wall and had slowed down on exclusives. We still had to take out a loan to cover the last projects we had committed to. It was during this period we decided to make subscriptions our priority focus and it was a great decision. While sales have dropped since the peak they are steady and not dependent on high risk exclusive variants.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

As stated earlier we built our community from social media. I think honesty and transparency are key on social media. You have to put yourself out there. Let people know who you are and what you are about. All you have there is your reputation and word travels fast in collectible groups. Don’t avoid when an issue does arise. Treat people how you want to be treated.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.heroscornercomics.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1243207699371461
• Other: league of comic geeks sync link

  https://leagueofcomicgeeks.com/store/heros-corner-comics-des-moines-ia