For years people have prodded and nudged, suggesting (sometimes rather impolitely!) that they sincerely wished AGM was an auction so that the item they had spent the past 20 years searching for would not just disappear with someone else hit the 'buy' button a fraction of a second before they did.  "I would have paid a lot more, but never got the chance!" 

I have resisted - forcefully - for a number of reasons.  For myself, I simply prefer the uncomplicated retail model.  I buy it for $600, price it at $1000, and if it doesn't sell after a certain period of time, I start making discounts until it does.  This works just fine for a lot of the 'normal' material in our market.  Intriguingly, though - the most exceptional and interesting items in our world are less predictable, and therefore ideally suited to the auction paradigm.

I will also admit that as fortunate as AGM has been in regards to acquiring great collections over the years, we have also put in a tremendous amount of time, effort and travel expense chasing after collections only to eventually lose them when an owner decides that they would rather send it to auction.  It was after one of these expensive and frustrating experiences that I reached out to my friend James Supp to inquire about the logistics required to start an auction arm of Advance Guard Militaria.

James is a colleague who works at the Collectables table at Antiques Roadshow, runs his own successful appraisal business, and has worked as a freelance technical consultant for a number of auction houses over the years.  Over the extra week that we spent in Alaska in 2023 following a Roadshow event, we hiked through the Chugach Mountains, going over ideas for the venture, and analyzing our observations of what other auction houses do particularly well, and noting also the things they do which could either be improved, or should be avoided completely.  As the days and miles passed, we both became increasingly excited about the opportunities ahead.  Long before it was time to pack up and leave that beautiful state, this theoretical new venture became a reality, and what started as James assisting as a consultant became a new partnership.

It would seem that this was all meant to be: we had planned to spend the next year putting the physical and digital infrastructure together before making an announcement, but through friends and colleagues, word has slowly leaked.  As the news got around, the phone started to ring, and we have been struggling to deal logistically with a wonderful new problem - collections have been arriving faster than I can put shelves together to store them.  Fortunately collections are not the only thing that has been turning up!  We have been exceedingly lucky to hire some wonderful people.  Elissa Boes signed on in June 2024 and has turned into an exceptionally good photographer, with a great eye for detail and framing material in a way that makes it interesting to those of us who collect it!  More recently, Ali Cotton joined us as our social media and marketing director (though her specific job title is "adult supervision").  Many of you will remember Ali as the official photographer of the OVMS Show-of-Shows and MAX Show.  She is responsible for the wonderful teaser posts on the AGM facebook page announcing Catalog 123.

What does this mean for AGM?
For the moment, AGM carries on as usual.  At some point down the road, I think it likely that Bannerman will subsume AGM.  However, there will always be people who want to sell directly rather than go to auction.  We will also always need items for our retail space, militaria shows, etc., so that need not change for now, and the two enterprises can develop parallel to one another. 

However, since we have been spending most of our time on the new venture and less on AGM over the past months, I did determine last year that we cannot in good conscience accept subscriptions for the AGM Insider.  We disabled subscription sales and renewals this spring.  So, the only outward change for the moment is that the catalog preview opens at 12:00 noon for all registered AGM users.  Insider was a great idea; we just did not have the staff necessary to bring it to life in the way that I had envisioned.  We do still have the searchable doughboy database project on the back burner, and will find a way to make use of that resource at some point.