Mylar Man

Casual comic book enthusiasts read their periodicals and then toss them on the coffee table. Would a serious collector do that? Would Superman leave a chunk of kryptonite lying around the Fortress of Solitude? Hardly. CM Plus recently chatted with Bill Cole, president of Bill Cole Enterprises, which sells Mylar sleeves, backing boards and other preservation supplies for paper collectibles like money, magazines, and yes, funny books.

Cole, who founded the Randolph, MA-based company (http://www.bcemylar.com)”>

CM PLUS: You collect Carl Barks’ Donald Duck comics, right?

COLE: Yes! I have what I think is the last Carl Barks pen and ink drawing, which he did for me before he passed away.

CM PLUS: Why do you collect Duck memorabilia? Is it a passion?

COLE: I’m not obsessive about it. I’ll tell you why. When I first got into this business, I was buying [tons of comics], “Spider-Man,” whatever. I would go home and I would read these books, and I thought, ‘wait a second, I want to get away from this.’ So I started reading Disney comics. Carl Barks wrote and drew his stories as the way “life as meant to be,” simple. I just loved it, because it was so much fun reading. I didn’t have to put on my thinking cap. I also loved early Superman comics. My second greatest love is EC Comics, the “Weird” tales, “Tales From the Crypt.” And I’m still a fan of “Star Trek,” “The Outer Limits” and “The Twilight Zone.”

CM PLUS: Are comic book collectors your main market?

COLE: Comics are the main audience. We do business with the National Archives, the Library of Congress, auction houses, paper/money collectors and dealers, magazines and postcard collectors. But I would say comic book collectors are the most knowledgeable [about preservation].

CM PLUS: Are there certain eccentricities about comic book collectors you have to cope with?

COLE: Oh sure. (laughs) I’ve had to fire a customer, and you don’t usually have to do that. If a [Mylar storage] sleeve is 7 ½ inches, we [advertise it] as “plus or minus an 1/8th of an inch variance,” because its going to happen, [the way the sleeves are machine cut]. We’ll get customers who, every single time we send something out say, “oh, this is a 16th of an inch wrong.” Finally, we said to one customer, “sir, we’re very sorry but we can’t take care of you. We can’t satisfy you.” I called up one of my competitors, who I’m very friendly with, and I said “you’re gonna get this guy.” He said, “No, I’m not gonna get him. I had the same problem and I sent him to you.” I said “you son of a —.” (laughs) Both of us swore we’d never do business with him again, but then he came back and I said “I’ll take your business but this is what it’s going to be.” It’s just something you have to live with.

CM PLUS: What medium works best for you to reach collectors?

COLE: It’s hard to say. We’ll promote a special product [with an e-mail blast], and sell very little of the special. But then, our sales start increasing on all our other stuff, because people think, “hey, Bill Cole Enterprises, gee, I need this or that from them.” It keeps our name out there. If you don’t advertise, people aren’t going to come to you. Internet sales are about 95% for us. You’ve got Internet, direct mail and print. All three have got to be done in conjunction with each other, and how you use them will determine your results. I don’t like to do a lot of broadcast e-mails. For us, once a month is fine if we really have something that’s going on. We [recently] did a blowout on Bowen [Marvel Comics superhero] statues. Again, we sold a couple of Bowens and everything else started picking up.

CM PLUS: Has your success online lead you to decrease your use of direct mail?

COLE: We’ve decreased volume, because we’ve gotten rid of excess waste on the mailing list. People who haven’t bought in four or five years and have just been on the list, we’re just getting rid of them. That means our printing bills have gone down, our postage has gone down and we’re targeting an audience that has purchased from us and is more keen to see an ad or mailing piece from us. We don’t do a catalog anymore, because everything is online. We do oversized postcard mailings, which are more targeted. If you have a 100 name mailing list, and those 100 are collectors who are constantly buying from you, well, it’s not the quantity, it’s the quality, and that’s the way we’re looking at it.

CM PLUS: Are you exhibiting at a lot of collectibles/comic book shows these days?

COLE: We had to start cutting back because we hadn’t made any money on some of these shows. It’s very very frustrating, let me tell you. We’re gearing up for Comic-Con in San Diego, and we’ll probably do [sister show] WonderCon again, but the oil situation has been absolutely killing us. It’s costing me about $20 a day to get into work, because I do a 100-mile roundtrip. We held off on raising prices, but the fuel surcharges on common carrier are up about 20%. It’s getting worse and worse and worse. We also don’t do a lot of shows because of the drayage. When we go to a show we ship out thousands of pounds of material to a show. The [exhibit hall] decorators will charge you about $60 or $70 per 100 [pounds] to bring your material in and out of the convention center. At that price, we can’t afford it. At San Diego, we meet the truck—if you’re there to sign for your material, they don’t charge you for any drayage. It’s all built in.

CM PLUS: How’s business overall?

COLE: We’re hearing from retailers that business is down all over for everybody. So what do we do? We’re giving away samples of our new 2 mil Mylar sleeves with a $10 discount coupon for orders placed online. We’re doing more opt-in e-mail marketing. We advertise in the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. You have to keep on pushing. You have to keep on getting new customers—we’re resurrecting [print] ads we did 20 years ago and we’re finding that they’re working. It’s because you’ve got your core collectors and some of these people are long gone—they’re not dying but they’ve stopped collecting. So you have to bring new people into the fold. And new people don’t necessarily understand what Mylar is, what it does, about paper degradation and preservation. We have to teach them all over again.