Stamp Business
Steve Rubenfaer has been an entrepreneur for more than 40 years, beginning in 1980 when he started a stamp business at the age of 12. Steve was a well known stamp dealer in his home town of Detroit Michigan, where he frequently rented tables at stamp exhibitions and sold stamps to collectors. He was often mentioned in the local news. Because the stamp business in Detroit was small, Steve soon had to explore other cities to sell stamps. In 1982 at the age of 14, Steve travelled to Milwaukee to sell stamps at the largest stamp show of the year. By 1983 Steve was travelling all over the country, by himself, selling stamps to collectors.
Steve Rubenfaer sold stamps throughout high school and college in Los Angeles, and moved to New York after school to continue selling stamps. Even though New York is the center of stamps in America, Steve soon moved back to the West Coast because he liked Los Angeles better than New York. Steve had a retail and wholesale stamp business, mostly focusing on United States stamps, selling both to collectors and stamp dealers. He travelled extensively for business, to most major cities in America.
Steve Rubenfaer exited the stamp business and got into other enterprises, always running his own companies. In the early 2000’s, he became interested in the stamp business again, because of the Internet and the changes it would make in the stamp industry. The Internet is the perfect medium to sell stamps; before the Internet, a stamp dealer had to carry a massive inventory, hoping someone would happen to need something that they had. This not only tied up valuable capital, but also was difficult physically, as dealers need to travel often with their inventories.
With the Internet, a dealer with a stamp can be connected immediately with a customer looking for that exact item, anywhere in the world. Steve saw that this would revolutionize the stamp business, and started RubyStamps with a partner in San Francisco. RubyStamps became the largest seller of stamps on Ebay, and the largest seller of stamps online in the entire world. RubyStamps had 20 employees, and shipped thousands of items each month, all over the world, with average sales of $7 million per year.
Steve Rubenfaer left RubyStamps after a few years to pursue other business interests, handing it off to his partner, who continued running the largest online stamp company the world has ever seen.
