Scout Patch Collectors

Sunday Scouting Hot Finds Newsletter September 6, 2020

On January 21, 2019 I published an episode of my Scouting Hot Finds Radio podcast featuring an interview for John Athayde who is the primary driver behind the project. The show notes from that episode include some of the interesting origins and details of the project. What I really like is that reminiscent of the Blue Book effort this is a wholly volunteer driven effort that really is an improvement over anything that came before it.

I have preached in the Hot Finds for some time that the best way to keep our hobby alive amidst these times of overall struggles in Scouting is to share knowledge and create reference projects. We have lost NOAC, an upcoming jamboree along with summer camps and conclaves to the pandemic. But the only consolation might be that with all that time at home I’ve seen more people organize their collections, engage online, and start new projects to keep the interest going.

I have 131 auctions ending tonight on eBay from a nice OA collection that I bought at the end of last year. My hope is that over the next several months that every week I’ll run 100+ auctions from this collection to keep putting new items in my store.

I have also been working on adding items to my Shopify store at www.ScoutPatchHQ.com. Now this is a little bit of cheating because what I’m actually doing is cross listing items from eBay to Shopify. But when I’m done the 2 sites will have nearly the same inventory. Except one store won’t have the middle man collecting 12% of the sales in fees. I also always offer free shipping on my Shopify store.

We are enjoying some time on vacation at the beach celebrating my wife’s birthday. But as I look at the calendar I already have some Scouting events popping up on the calendar. I found out this week that the Florida camp show expo is scheduled for the first weekend of October. Add that to a lodge fellowship, a camp open house and a Webelos patrol camping trip and suddenly I’m gone a bunch of weekends. Isn’t there still a pandemic going on?

CLICK HERE TO OPEN THE SEPTEMBER 06, 2020 ISSUE OF THE SCOUTING HOT FINDS NEWSLETTER