January 2007
	People

Entrepreneurial ESP 

This Missouri warehouse employee knows a thing or two (or 3,000) about sales. Just ask him about the wedding dresses.

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At a Kansas City clothing boutique liquidation sale a few years ago, John Stamp had an epiphany. He was there to buy the defunct store’s shelving, but they were also selling $3,000 wedding dresses for a few hundred dollars. “I decided to buy a couple of hundred dresses,” he says. He sold them out of his house for a profit. “Two years later, people still knock on my door asking if I have more dresses,” he says.

Although that was his most unique salvage-turned-sale, it was not the first such experience for Stamp, a school district warehouse employee. He began when he was 13. “There’s something so exciting about taking things that are undervalued and reselling them to people who want them,” he says. He has sold everything from tools to lingerie, and used the money to repair his car and pay for his children’s college education. 

Stamp’s salvaging philosophy is to keep it small. “I’d rather sell 10,000 roller springs to some painters I know than hold out and sell them on a larger market, like eBay.” Although it’s a fun hobby, Stamp says that he has no plans to turn salvaging into a full-time job. “It’s a tough way to make a living, and I’m just having more fun this way.”                        

 —MISHRI SOMESHWAR