How BuckleSpot Started

"Belt buckles? What's a belt buckle?"

As a kid that grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, that's exactly what I asked myself when I first started this whole operation.

In October 2019, I started buying and selling all sorts of items. Anything from a boat horn, to video games, to Precious Moments figurines, and more. If it was sellable, I probably bought it and sold it.

One year later, on a Saturday morning in August 2020, I went to an estate sale in northern Iowa. Most of the items were older kitchen items and tools, nothing too important. However, in the garage there was an entire plywood sheet with 70+ belt buckles, all hung with nails. After negotiating with the gentleman running the sale, I ended up buying the whole board, packing an 8' x 4' piece of plywood into my SUV in the process.

I got home, pulled the buckles off the board, and put them on Facebook Marketplace for $10 each with $5 shipping.

They sold like HOT-CAKES.

I was completely sold out by the next night and was pretty proud of the sales. A couple of weeks later, I had another opportunity to buy about 50 buckles or so. I decided to try the same experiment again. 

Round 2 also sold like hot cakes, selling out within the weekend.

At this point, I had multiple buyers asking me if I had a Facebook page for selling buckles. In October 2020, I decided to make my own belt buckle-selling Facebook group called, "Zac Myers Belt Buckles For Sale."

Totally original, I know.

The group was off to a slow start, with only one buckle post per week and few new members every week. Then, in January 2021, it kind of just "blew up." 

Out of nowhere, the group grew from 90 to 200 members in a three-week period. It just kept growing and I had no idea what to do.

To keep up with the demand, I started making three buckle posts per week. That only fueled the fire, nearly doubling the group size again to 375 members in another three-week period.

That's when BuckleSpot came to existence. After realizing I couldn't keep up with 10-20 messages/hour, I decided to make a website to handle the volume. 

In February 2021, BuckleSpot.com was born. I had originally thrown around some other names for the website, including BuckleWorld, BeltBuckles, and BuckleStop, all of which were taken. 

Like all great discoveries, the name "BuckleSpot" was an accident. I tried saying "BuckleStop" out loud but got tongue-tied, and "BuckleSpot" came out of my mouth.

It was like a lightbulb went off in my brain. It was perfect.

After that, BuckleSpot was on a roll. Within a week, I had the website up and running.

And now here we are, selling belt buckles for all to buy.

As the website grows and the Facebook group grows, I will continue to keep posting buckles. Eventually I would like to increase the volume to 4-5 posts per week.

But we'll see how that goes :)

Thank you for taking the time to read BuckleSpot's story. It's been quite a journey so far and I feel like we're just getting started. I look forward to continue working with you all.

And, as usual:

Thank you for your business!

- Zac