Franklin Mint reboot
Frankcoins
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Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV), which was founded by former NASA scientist Alex Mehr and serial entrepreneur Tai Lopez. has relaunched the Franklin Mint, along with other brands Linens N Things, Stein Mart, Pier 1 Imports, Radio Shack, that there is still money to be made from brand names that people recall. Indeed.
Frank Provasek - PCGS Authorized Dealer, Life Member ANA, Member TNA. www.frankcoins.com
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wow, when I felt 2 easy payment when 1 was too much - now I see 4 easy payments when 1 was too much
Yes, "Hurry Up!" and buy a common date Peace dollar, graded by an unknown grading service as MS62 for $303.59!! I think I am going to purchase the remaining stock right now!
You can even buy a set of BU silver eagles for a mere $275/TO!
That is a website I will never revisit unless I need a good laugh.
“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock." - Thomas Jefferson
My digital cameo album 1950-64 Cameos - take a look!
It is a shame they are trying for take advantage of people in this way. But anyone buying is also partly culpable for not doing any comparison shopping or at least a tiny amount of due diligence.
Wow, they inherited the BAD side of the FM.
Oh well, I still love their currency issues of actual coins and even some of the proofs of these....
Well, just Love coins, period.
Who's AACGS? Here are some threads but it seems like no one knows:
How does the Franklin Mint's AACGS coins compare to National Collector’s Mint which offers coins raw? This one might have a mistake as the description is clearly for a "Circulated" coin but the photo is for an "Uncirculated" coin.
Hopefully, they will migrate to using PCGS. Here's a TV offering for PCGS (and NGC) graded coins being discussed on another thread.
https://forums.collectors.com/discussion/comment/12811680/#Comment_12811680
My huge gripe is of course the deliberate mis-factual information. When I was watching Rick's Coin TV thing he has it down to a science. He goes into real numbers about mintage vs grading %'s that really mean nothing and makes things sound astoundingly rare and ignores all relevant info that we in this forum understand...but we new that already...but.... Considering he has actual deeply informed knowledge about what he's selling it's clear how much effort he is putting into twisting the info to sound too amazing, and that to me is shameful.
I spent much of my career in marketing and branding for highly visible companies...I know how easy it is to spin data and facts to sound fantastic or terrible for your marketing message and I'm sure most of you understand this as well. The difference is I/we never took a huckster's approach to marketing that was designed to fool.
This sort of nonsense has actually effected my life directly. My girlfriend's parents are quite elderly and were in their 80's a few years ago when it was discovered they had spent about $50k during a year buying from some shopping channel junk thinking they were buying additional fantastic inheritance for their daughter. It was all junk, worth maybe a couple grand realistically. I won't go into details but it was genuinely disturbing.
The thought of her mom who could barely read her credit card number speaking with the rep who probably had to struggle for many minutes just to complete the transaction while her mom struggled to complete the transactions...which magically got easier and easier each time she called them is just upsetting. In those situations these opportunists are just looking for the right audiences to prey on.
These practices are no different than the fake Windows support scammers who also are happy to wreck the lives of the gullible in any way they can profit from. I don't like the broad simple concept of buyer be ware when the target audience is not able to be aware and is made to feel like they are missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity or just plain scared about consequences which are both nearly identical things if you think about it.
The side note is how much this relates directly to our community every time an enthusiastic starter is absolutely ripped off.
I mean come on...the Franklin Mint group above is taking advantage of a just plain made up grading company.
It's heartless and I genuinely have no patience for it.
Coins are Neato!
"If it's a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone...somewhere...is making a penny." - Steven Wright
The Franklin Mint were actually good coin minters and did good business issuing legal tender coins for other countries. Some of those sovereign proof sets have good demand and prices now. It would be great to revive this side of their business.
These ventures aren't as grossly profitable as you may think. The problem they (we?) have is the amount of money spent on advertising. If you buy from them, you are mostly paying their advertising budget not their acquisition and distribution budget.
It is a problem with all "collectibles for consumers" businesses. How are your Star Wars collector plates doing?
My grandmother started buying "Royal Copenhagen Christmas plates" for my mother in the 1950s. Then my Father kept it up. The last few plates he bought were $120 each but you can buy them for $10 on the secondary market these days, sometimes less. The limited edition plates were limited in the 100k range.
Disney was selling "limited edition" sericels of their animation. The edition limit was 15,000 (or more) in many cases and the price tag was pushing $1000.
I bring all of this up because it actually makes it easy to FACTUALLY sell coins as rare collectibles in that price range.
To a collecting public used to paying hundreds of dollars for "limited edition" collectibles with 10k to 100k editions, how hard is it to sell a "rare" PCGS MS65 1882-S Morgan $ with only 20,000 known for several hundred dollars.
Even better, you get your own custom fancy box and make 500 of the boxes and put 5 common date MS65 Morgans into it and call it a rare, limited edition set of 500. The various world mints play this game with multiple packagings of some of their coins.
This is not to excuse anyone. But there is a reason that the phrase "caveat emptor" goes back 2000 years. You can deceive without lying.
I have some absolutely beautiful classic FM pieces, I love them! But back in the day they were sold as what they were :-)
I love their commemorative pieces for things like the Olympics.
I even own what is arguably the queen mother of all FM pieces...
Coins are Neato!
"If it's a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone...somewhere...is making a penny." - Steven Wright
I actually have 1 of those in the exact same slab I would probably sell for 1 payment!
I have no idea what the profit margin is for this type of business. I just know what the PCGS Price Guide and other market prices are for benchmarking.
Since you seem to know something about this, what do you think the profit margin is on the $5500 coin above which has a PCGS Price Guide price of $850? I'm referencing this coin because it's a PCGS or ATS coin which is easier to compare.
Of course, a great way to lower a profit margin is to pay your own companies exorbitantly for services so don't include that here.
https://ir.sequentialbrandsgroup.com/financial-information/annual-reports
The company as a whole lost money when they owned the Franklin Mint. They don't actually split out the Franklin Mint operation from their other operations, so I can't address it in this specific case. Then Retail Ecommerce Ventures bought it in July 2020 so we don't have much data on this.
In general, however, if you are a mass-marketing venture the costs are high.
Consider QVC:
http://retailmanagement.us/cost-of-doing-business-with-qvc/
QVC gives you a mass-marketing platform. They charge 47% of gross revenues PLUS saddle you with some production costs.
So if your distribution costs are 60 or 70% of gross sales, your profit margins end up being pretty pedestrian. If you use the QVC numbers for your $5500 coin, you can see how quickly the "profit" disappears
$5500 - $850 = 4650 gross profit
4650 - mass market distibution of $3300 (60%) = $1350 adjusted gross
If you consider a normal business overhead (salaries, real estate, etc) of about 20% of gross sales, you are left with
$1350 - $1100 = $250
Obviously, my numbers could be off by 1000%. LOL. But you see my point. When your mass-marketing distribution costs are 60% of gross sales, your profit evaporates pretty quickly unless you have a huge volume. [Fixed overhead distributed over higher gross sales.]
It's really hard to know exactly what the REV model is. They aren't really running the Franklin Mint itself, they appear to just be using their name. They also appear to be largely operating on the web, so hard to assess their cost structures.
Lol! I actually hadn't even tried to ballpark it, so that's a fun question!
Well I don't know if Rick is actually on TV or not but all I've seen is YouTube live-streams and those are free lol.
He's already got that little fake house set all setup, maybe in his home? It was likely mostly free to build.
He's on an ok quality camera, I'm guessing some sort of DSLR for his video streaming.
There's his cost of internet which he probably already has for his home use.
But also he's not making any YouTube advertising/monetized income, unless I didn't notice ads popping up during his streams.
I don't know that he's doing any advertising, I've never seen any anywhere...but email blasts are nearly free if he's got some email list going from past customers.
I think probably his wife or one of those other sellers that appears with him is likely answering the phone or emails to take orders...on that note if you watch during his live streams (he keeps the comments turned off for obvious hilarious reasons) and there are usually literally about 7 people watching. During live-streams you can see the number of watchers on YouTube.
When I saw him selling those $5500 coins there were 5 watching, and this is true...I popped in just as he said "It looks like we've already sold 2 of these!" and within 2 minutes he was done with that coin lol.
I'd guess his largest overhead at this point is his mortgage and bills and buying those bulk coin purchases...assuming he's even needed to make any new purchases in the last few years. I would imagine he's got thousands of coins already or his buddies also do who he'll share profits with or buy them from.
So unless he's also live-streaming on tv somewhere, maybe a local cable channel??? His overhead is pretty much zero but you know, his time is money lol!
Other than not liking his 'approach' to sales and without knowing how many coins he actually is selling (because he can say anything he wants during those streams about the coins selling like hotcakes!) I would say he's got quite a dream setup there if he's genuinely moving those RARE coins! LOL!
@Zoins I like it when people like you make me think even more about things
Coins are Neato!
"If it's a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone...somewhere...is making a penny." - Steven Wright
Yeah, I don't know anything about "Rick". But if he's actually operating as you say, he's more akin to the folks on eBay who run those "rare coin sales". He may not sell many, but if he sells one it's a big win.
But someone in the basement or on eBay trying to sell a coin for a crazy number doesn't exactly count as a "business".
Especially if you are operating in an internet only environment, anyone who overpays deserves it. You are sitting there in a browser, you could easily type in the item name or description and see what they are actually selling for.
I just have to say that when I first clicked into this I thought @Frankcoins might have had something to do with the Franklin Mint
The current 'Rare Collectibles TV' showtimes:
https://www.rarecollectiblestv.com/about/showtimes
Thanks! I don't watch much tv... so this changes a few of my guesses at his overhead... likely a small group of investors sponsoring and cutting deals for the tiny cable channel times and shopping network type times. I'm guessing those channels have some regular home shoppers who do it as their full-time hobbies?! Unfortunately my girlfriend's parents would've been in that group of fascinated home audience buying those things they promote.
If you see them on the cable shows and they have those count downs available for the items let us know if it appears that they sell a bunch...again, the cable shows are basically free to make fake count downs (Limited Quantities!!! Act now! Only 14 of 250 remaining!!!) as long as they are not using those numbers to up the prices as they go. There's also the "First 200 to order get free shipping" type nonsense lol.
Coins are Neato!
"If it's a penny for your thoughts and you put in your two cents worth, then someone...somewhere...is making a penny." - Steven Wright
Not all the Franklin Mint coin items were junk, and some were high quality that even now can be purchased at reasonable prices with some being rare and very artistic. I hope but doubt the "resurrected" Franklin Mint might go back to some of this type of work and product. Here is an actual circulation strike coin that I bought of EBay from the old Franklin Mint days - compare to the schlock put out by the US Mint (purchase price incl. tax and shipping USD $5.25):
Here is another that is a proof gotten for bullion or slightly less:
Well, just Love coins, period.
It's not clear to me that they resurrected the minting operation at all. They appear to be strictly marketing brands in an online environment