Turning stamps, coins and postcards into track and trains!

Turning stamps, coins and postcards into track and trains!

The fantastic restoration of Midsomer Norton station on the world famous Somerset and Dorset Railway has been funded in part by stamps donated by members and supporters.

This is such an easy way to raise money I'm amazed all rail restorations schemes don't use it. And as an addition incentive we now offer £15 per kilogram for GB stamps for rail restoration groups. This is for line restorations, rail museums, loco and rolling stock restoration groups, miniature lines and model engineering groups.

To start please email your details to leysiner@aol.com and we can get the ball rolling within minutes. You can send direct from your base and/or get your supporters to send directly. We also take coins and postcards for which we pay £5 per kilogram, also all world stamps (without GB) at up to £25 per kilo for rail groups.

Just think how much money you are throwing away when you throw those old stamps away!!

keep them coming!

We now have over EIGHTY charities on our books. Many collect stamps and send to us directly, others get their doners to send direct to us, others do both!

The big news is that from 1 February 2014 we have DOUBLED the price we pay for GB stamps on paper, from £5 to £10 per kilogram.

We are also now buying coins, banknotes and postcards. We pay £5 per kilo for these (and it doesn't take many coins to make up a kilo!)

As always to sign up please send an email to leysiner@aol.com and I will allocate you a code that you can use when you send material in or when you ask your donors to - this ensures everything received is properly allocated.

Remember, you don't have to be a charity. Small groups, schools, scouts, guides, sports clubs, heritage railways etc are all welcome to sign up!

This is a very easy way to create a steady cash flow with very little work and once set up it runs itself. Our biggest donors raise over £20,000 a year from this source!

big push

We are sending out 5000 leaflets to charities in the UK as our customers are more desperate than ever for good quality kiloware. Remember that we can take any quantity of stamps from just a few in an envelope to entire warehouses full. So if you've been thinking about setting up new income streams there's never been a better time. Forget the recession - we have greater demand than we've ever seen before!

up up up

We have now increased the amount we pay per kilogram, effective immediately (and for existing charities registered with us from 1 January). We now pay £5 per kilo GB unpicked, £19 per kilo World (without GB) unpicked.

Demand is heavier than ever so please get involved with this easy way to raise money for your charity or group!

2009

(Above is the Somerset and Dorset Railway at Midsomer Norton, one of our charities)

Yes, we're still buying stamps, and the new SecUrity Machins will make no difference to what we want or what we pay!

As I haven't posted to this site for over a year I thought I'd just remind everybody what we do and what we need.

We buy kiloware from many charities, from small ones sending 1kg a year to big ones sending 2 or 3 tonnes!

We want all recently collected kiloware, both GB and World. It MUST be unpicked or unsorted in any way. Ideally the stamps should be trimmed to within about 1/4" of the perforations and on single paper (front of envelope only). Normally we would expect GB kiloware to include a small amount of all world material. For GB kiloware we pay £4 per kilogram.

For World kiloware we pay £15 per kilogram.

We can offer such a high price as we are retailers, not wholesalers, with hundreds of regular small buyers.

We will refund postage on large lots (10kg+) if good high value commemoratives or full sets are used to stamp the box.

We will also send prestamped envelopes to smaller charities for lots up to 1kg. This service is free of charge.

We are happy to accept stamps from individuals providing the funds are then made out to a specific charity.

We will collect large lots (100kg+) from charities within 50 miles of Bristol by arrangement.

easier still ...

I can now offer FREE prestamped envelopes to allow you to send 1kg lots to me. These are stamped to cover the 2nd class rate. It's important that these are weighed carefully to be exactly 1kg in gross weight (including the envelope itself). If you need envelopes please let me know and I'll send a batch to you. Remember this is at no cost to your charity!

even easier

I'm now able to offer a pick up service for kiloware collected within a 50 mile radius of Bristol. The only rules are that the amounts need to be 50kg or more and that it may take a few weeks for me to be able to make the pick ups. This is really to make it as easy as possible for charities to use this method of fund raising.

collecting stamps the easy way

There is a far easier way to make money from donated stamps than the old fashioned way of collecting from numerous doners, storing in a warehouse then finding a wholesaler willing to pay a few pence a kilo!

You can make a contract with a third party to do all the collecting for you - you use their address for sendings. You then receive a monthly cheque covering payment for all the stamps received by weight. You do the publicity for the appeal through your own in-house publications etc using the third-party forwarding address in all your promotional work.

Just think - no work your end, no warehouse/shed, no staff tied up processing, no opening of envelopes ... just a regular cheque covering everything that's been collected!

For more info please email via the side bar!

money for nothing?

Not quite, but getting your supporters to send in all the stamps they get in their mail is a fairly easy way to gain extra funds for your charity - if you do it right!

What collectors want is untouched and unpicked material - that is stamps that are sold on EXACTLY as received. This way they make the finds and are willing to pay much more for regular quality sources. I pay around 4 or 5 times what other dealers do for material like this - one charity alone has raised over £60,000 in the last four years just from the stamps they have sold to me!

Most dealers who buy in kiloware (stamps still on paper) pay around 50p to £1 per kilogram. For the right material (which just means following my guidelines below) I pay £4 per kilogram at least, sometimes more, and repay your postage on sendings of 10kg of more (or on 1kg lots). Yes, this is just for regular British (and a few foreign) stamps that we see on letters and parcels every day.

Now for those guidelines! There must be NOTHING taken out, not a few pretty stamps for your own or children's albums, not that nice mint booklet that somebody's dropped in or those few interesting items from the Falkland Islands ... ideally the stamps should be on single paper (just the front of the envelope) and cut carefully to within 1/4" of the perforations. Stamps should then be weighed into either 1kg or 10kg bags and sold on (preferably to me!) as quickly as possible.

You're probably now thinking - how are we going to get all these stamps, and where are we going to store them? As a charity you should have many supporters only too ready to send stamps in, you need to get the message to them first through your house magazine, newsletter or if you run shops through a well displayed and presented notice with somewhere to put the stamps (preferably transparent). Even a small charity can run a national campaign via radio/TV especially if they are looking for funding for a specific telegenic project (with the 'ahhh' factor!) For storage you should have some members with a spare room, dry/clean outbuilding or such like. Or a newer idea is that you turn over collection/payment (but not marketing/publicising) to a third party, have your doners send direct leaving all the storage/admin work to them.

Over the next few weeks I'll be looking more closely at specific elements mentioned above so you get a clearer picture of how this works. Of course I may be teaching most of you how to suck eggs!