Matthew Powell and L.J. Landrum
L.J. Landrum and Matthew Powell help people identify which toys have a place in their store, and which just have a place in the owner’s heart.
Earlier this year, the business partners moved Totally Rad Toyhouse from its original home, which opened in Woodbine in 2019, to a new location at 6309 Charlotte Pike. With the move, they were able to combine warehouse and retail spaces.
Collectors themselves, Landrum and Powell keep it real with their customers. Sometimes that means suggesting a customer sell a prized toy on their own rather than going through a middleman like Totally Rad.
“I always tell people, especially collectors that bring me a collection, ‘If you think you’re going to regret selling it, don’t bring it to me,’” Powell says. “I’ve done it before. I’ve sold collections and regretted it.”
What money they may lose due to that earnestness, they gain back in, for instance, a rare Japanese toy worth $300, or a $400 sale of a single My Little Pony figurine. (The male ponies are hard to come by.)
“This woman walked in and she had just gotten her inheritance or something, and she dropped like $2,500 on ponies that day,” Landrum recalls.
The store focuses on vintage toys from the 1980s and earlier. Transformers and G.I. Joe figures fly out of stock, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are, well, evergreen. People love Jem and the Holograms, He-Man and Care Bears. In the summer of Barbie, however, they’ve had more sellers than buyers.
“Every grandmother got their granddaughter a Holiday Barbie every year thinking, ‘It’s a special edition — better hang on to it,’” Powell says. “Unfortunately, so many grandmothers did that — they produced so many of them — they’re just not hard to come by. They’re actually worth less now than they were when they bought them.”
The same is true for Beanie Babies. The shop has a disclaimer that they don’t accept sales of the slightly stuffed plush, and yet they still get multiple calls a week from folks claiming they own valuable bears. Most aren’t worth very much.
“Just because somebody listed it on eBay for $50,000 doesn’t mean it sold for $50,000,” Powell says. If so, he says, it was probably money laundering.
A rule of thumb in the toy world is rarity. The highest resale value often goes to toys made at the end of the run, when kids began moving on and manufacturers made fewer.
The toy-collector industry is geared toward “boy” toys, but the demand is there for “girl” toys too, Landrum says.
“I don’t like saying ‘girl’ toys, ‘boy’ toys, because of how we live in society now,” Landrum says. “If a boy wants to come in here and buy a Barbie, I think that’s rad. But when you’re looking at nostalgic toys, that’s the only way you can say, ‘This was geared toward girls. This was geared toward boys.’ I think the collector world is sort of geared more toward men, but the girl stuff is the hardest to get and keep. If we get it in, it sells super fast, and it’s rare that it comes in.”
Landrum’s personal collection is of what she calls “green girls” — wicked witches, She-Hulk, Gamora, Poison Ivy. She’ll pick up some nostalgic favorites, like Rainbow Brite or Fraggle Rock. Powell’s personal favorites are He-Man, ThunderCats and SilverHawks. Without going too deep into imagining the sentience of the toys, they picture the figures as being happier when they are not stored away in an attic somewhere and can have a second life.
“We were the first generation to have so much thrown at us as far as cartoons and toys and things,” Powell says. “It was such a big part of our childhood. Nobody thought 40 years later, a lot of us would be like, ‘Man, I’d really like to have a Voltron sitting on my desk like I had as a kid.’”
Toy collecting is becoming more and more mainstream, the pair points out. In a post-Marvel Cinematic Universe society, Powell says, the toys aren’t just for nerds. A stop in the store allows people to participate in another trend: healing the inner child.
“It’s going back and trying to hunt down things that you either had as a child that you remember or for something that you really wanted that you’ve never got, and kind of feeling that little void that’s always been missing.”
