eMoviePoster.com

I, Bruce Hershenson, started this company in 1989, as Bruce Hershenson Vintage Movie Posters, buying and selling them (but not auctioning any!). In mid-2000 I approached Christie's Auction in New York City about holding the first ever all-movie poster auction by a major auction, and they agreed, and in December 1990 the auction I completely organized by myself (and I printed the full-color catalog for Christie's) was held, and it took in $935,000!

Over the next eight years I organized auctions at Christie's and also issued mail order catalogs semi-annually, never having more than 3 employees at one time! In 1998, I was intrigued by the Internet in general, and Amazon and eBay in particular (you may not know that in 1998 not only did Amazon have online auctions, but they were on a par with eBay's), and I decided to take the bold step of moving a large part of my business onto the Internet.

I hired an 18 year old part-time college student named Phil Wages to help with the transition, and I hired my uncle, Eli Post, to design my first website, called eMoviePoster.com. Within a year, we were running LOTS of auctions on both Amazon and eBay. By late 1999 I decided to stop Amazon auctions and solely focus on eBay, and I started solely adding them on Tuesdays. and EVERY Tuesday!

In June of 2000 I help my last live auction, Vintage Hollywood Posters 3 (the third of three auctions I co-hosted with Howard Lowery, after ten auctions with Christie's), and I vowed that from that date on, ALL my auctions would be on the Internet, and that has been true for the TWENTY years since!

During the years from 1998 (when Phil joined us), we steadily added employees, as our business grew and grew. Some of those would come and go over the years, but by 2016 we had 34 employees! As we figured out ways to improve and more fully automate parts of the business, we were able to shrink that number to 28, and since we switched to bi-weekly auctions we reduced further to 23 (and in the vast majority of those cases, it was because the employees chose to move away).

In 2016, Phil Wages, who had been "home brewing" for a couple of years previously, told me he wanted to realize his dream and open his own brewery, to be called Wages Brew Company! While I was of course sad to realize this meant he would be leaving us, I wanted him to follow his vision, and so, over the time since, Phil set up the brewery and began to work fewer and fewer hours at eMoviePoster.com.

For the last six months, he had been here five hours at most each week (sometimes not coming in at all for a couple of weeks), and finally this week he told me the time had come to completely leave eMoviePoster.com (due to the demands his business places on him), and so we now bid him not only a fond farewell, but also we all wish for him to have great success with his brewery (see the website at https://www.wagesbrewco.com/ and of course, they are on Facebook as well).

What will this mean for eMoviePoster.com? We don't think there will be much change at all, because, as we said, Phil has only had a tiny presence here for quite some time, as he steadily transferred what he had been doing to several other employees here. And after 30 years in the business, we pretty much have this auctioning "down to a science"!

And if any of you current club members (as of 9/11/20) visit West Plains over the rest of this year, be sure to stop in to the Wages Brew Company and have a brew on me* (just let me know and I will cover it)!

*the offer is limited to the first 500 club members to visit the brewery in person!

And above is an image of our current staff!