We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Matthew Heffelfinger a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Matthew, thanks for joining us today. What were some of the most unexpected problems you’ve faced in your business and how did you resolve those issues?

We took nearly 6 months to negotiate our lease. It took so long because the property manager would take 4-5 days to respond to every edit we gave them. I’m extremely lucky I have a family member that is in real estate law because it would have cost me a fortune to hire someone for this process. Constantly having to edit and remind them of previous edits was tedious and started off the relationship with me 100% aware that their one and only job was to try and milk our contract for every penny it could be worth and take as much advantage of us as possible. Landlords and their property managers are predatory, you cannot trust anything they say and you need everything in writing and signed by all parties. No matter how nice they seem when you tour the property or talk on the phone, the second you’re their tenant their only purpose is to squeeze as much money as possible from you so the NY investment firm that owns them can report record profits to shareholders.

I knew it would be a back and forth, I didnt know it would be such an aggressive attack on our finances. I was prepared to argue over the security deposit and maybe some rent increase limits, not literally every line of the document.

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.

I’ve kind of been in the industry, in a way, for the majority of my life. I’ve been playing card games since I was a kid, with Pokemon, Magic: the Gathering, Yu -Gi -Oh, all of that stuff throughout the periods of my life. Pokemon was when I was very young. Yu -Gi -Oh and Magic were more in my high school age, but I actually started selling Magic cards when I was in the library at my high school. I actually almost got expelled for it, because you are not allowed to do that. I did it anyways, so I’ve always kind of been involved in the industry, in a way. I just made it a little bit more formal when I spent all the money to secure a lease on a property, built all the fixtures, and did all the repair work on the building and everything. So yeah, it’s been a lifelong thing for me, but it got serious, I would say, probably around 2014, when I took a job at a nerd bar, where the whole thing was you could drink and eat, craft beer and good food, and rent board games and play board games in the pub. I was one of the first three people to host Flesh and Blood, a new trading card game that came out in late 2019. So that kind of got me into hosting games and being a TO, a tournament organizer. So that was kind of my beginning of what I would find to be a passion of hosting games, bringing people together, doing prizing, celebrating the things that people enjoy.

I think the problem, “problem”, that we solve for our clients is really just a lot of people need a place to hang out that isn’t their house and isn’t work, that third place. That’s because while it’s great to, have a nice lunch break with your coworkers or, you know, hang out at your house and bring your friends over, sometimes you really just don’t want to do either of those things or sometimes you’re really mad at all of your coworkers because of some stressful project or something like that. You need a place that just isn’t either of those places because you do spend honestly the majority of your life in one of those two places. So, we give our customers that third place to hang out, enjoy themselves, leave everything else behind. It’s a nice feeling to have a space like that and know that people get that feeling from what me and my wife have created.

What are we most proud of? I think we’re probably most proud of that, just that, what I was talking about. The space that we’ve created, the amount of people that come up and say that they’ve felt uncomfortable in game stores before because they’re a woman or because they’re trans or because they’re queer, but felt welcome and at home in our store is simultaneously saddening and heartwarming. Sad that they were made to feel that way in the first place, but heartwarming that we could provide an alternative where they don’t feel that way. It’s an industry stereotype that game stores are filled with just sweaty, overweight white dudes with gross beards and terrible body odor. But I think we’re moving past that as an industry and just as a culture. There are definitely still those kinds of people, and there’s definitely sometimes where I have to tell somebody, hey, maybe put on some deodorant. But I think we’re moving away from that and it’s really nice to have been a part of me and my wife building this inclusive space where people that aren’t comfortable in other stores feel comfortable with us. A lot of people would say like, oh, look at what you’ve done, how many games you support. Your sales are pretty good. But at the end of the day, I could be getting that same paycheck from something else, a regular job, a 9 to 5. I could be getting more of a paycheck from 9 to 5, honestly. But nothing quite replaces that feeling of, I created something that other people needed in their lives and appreciate a place where they will likely make lifelong friends and make core memories in their lifetimes. For people in the hobby stores aren’t just (or shouldn’t be) just a place to shop, they’re a meeting place, a play space, a place where everyone meets over the common language of a good game.

Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?

Being a solo operator I’ve missed payroll more than once, sadly. Not in the way that the business didn’t have funds to process payroll, but just in the fact that being a solo business operator I am only human and have accidentally missed the deadline to run payroll and have it deposit on time. I had a business partner, but that’s a story in and of itself! It’s just been a lot of learning and a lot of finding ways to remind myself to complete all of the tasks that I need done on various days. Payroll, taxes, preorders for new product releases, event planning, etc.

We’ve definitely had some weeks where 3/4 different games are releasing new sets and we look at the cashflow and just gulp. We had a week where Magic, Flesh and Blood, Pokemon, and some other games where all coming out in the same weekend and our orders for that weekend where somewhere in the 30-40 thousand dollar range. Its a really stressful feeling looking down the barrel of $40k in debt and just thinking “I really hope this product is as popular as I think it will be…” Luckily, so far, we’ve never been off the mark by that much. We’ve lost a few thousand on some product, but you just have to live and learn, that’s how our industry is. All of the risk is on the backs of the stores selling the final product. Producers and publishers have already made their profits by the time it reaches us, and our distributors have already made their money before it gets to us. We’re the only people on the line if a product is released and is defective, or simply not enjoyed by the players, and sales are hurt because of that. I can’t go back to my distributor and return product (not usually anyways) I’m simply stuck with dead product and a bad investment that I need to liquidate.

Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.

I started in 2014 as an online retailer, mostly just to get access to better pricing on hobby items I enjoyed myself! I started just buying things I enjoyed under the guise of being able to sell them to people later, but then about 6 months in I decided to take it a little more seriously and started a subscription box for Magic the Gathering. I called it Commander Cube and the idea was good, unsustainable and not profitable, but good. I would hand build custom card packs built around one of the most popular formats to play MtG and then ship them out to people. They got to pick some of the basic parameters of the box, but I had free reign to do whatever I wanted outside of that. The box involved a lot of interesting product sourcing for the side items, perusing Etsy, ebay, and other sites like that to find items that would be interesting to my clientele. I started that off with a friend, but they quickly lost steam and like I said, it wasn’t sustainable or really profitable. So I quickly ended that. Then Flesh and Blood released in 2019 and I used my retail license for something much more meaningful to my career. I started buying product like crazy and went from spending a few hundred a month at my distributor to spending a few thousand a month on product. I did what are called “case breaks” where I would open a case of booster boxes that people had prepurchased certain section of and send them out the cards after the case was opened. I would stream the breaks and people would watch as the case was being opened just hoping that the slot they bought paid off. I really got to notariety with it simply because the community was so small back in that time and then COVID happened and everything shut down, collectible cards hit a massive boom, FaB more than others even. I opened a card on stream that had started as a $300 card or so, went to $500 before I was streaming and when I opened it the card was at about $800 and selling like crazy. Now? That card is currently around $12k. I sold it in the random slot of that case break for $50! At the time the maths made sense, $50 slot for a 1/10 chance at a $300-$500 card? But then it quickly stopped making sense with its meteoric rise.

I scaled all this up over the year or so I operated The FaB Arsenal (my online site) and then started thinking bigger and better. I had been running tournaments for our local players at The Cloak and Blaster after COVID restrictions and fear calmed slightly, vaccines had rolled out and life was returning to “normal” albeit masked and distanced still. But players kept telling me that they enjoyed our events and all the hard work I put into making them happen and I just kept thinking “I could get rid of the rest of my job and just do this and be happy” After a year or so of that I decided it was simply time to take that leap and drop my entire life savings, all the money I borrowed from family and got from my grandfather passing and just throw it into the dream of my own store, with my own events, with my own sign on the building.

Contact Info:

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