Epic Entrepreneurship
Photos by: John Burns
An attorney by training, Scott Taddiken is no stranger to hard work. In addition to practicing law full time for Stevens & Brand, LLP, Taddiken keeps himself plenty busy by providing business consulting services, periodically serving as an adjunct professor at Washburn University School of Business, and by doing work with the Small Business Development Center. One would think that any spare time of his would be spent as far from business oriented activities as possible, and one would be mistaken in thinking so.
“One of my hobbies that I absolutely love is going to garage sales, estate sales and auctions, buying things, and then reselling them on eBay or other places,” said Taddiken.
Taddiken first delved into the world of bargain hunting and then selling his finds—or reselling, as it’s formally termed—in 2002, right around the time he and his wife, Gina, moved to Topeka. As time went on, Taddiken’s hobby picked up steam. His volume of eBay sales was increasing with each passing year, and he needed some help. Fortunately, Gina was happy to step in and help him ramp up the business. It wasn’t long after that when Taddiken found himself out of inventory. He and Gina were selling items faster than they could find them, and they needed some fresh ideas. So, to find a solution to his problem, Taddiken turned to one of the greatest resources of modern times.
“I started watching YouTube videos on how people grow an eBay or Amazon business as a reseller,” he said. “I stumbled onto people who were buying liquidation merchandise by the pallets or truckloads. I started watching people who were doing that, and then a couple years ago, for my birthday, I decided, ‘Hey, I’d like to buy one of these pallets.’ So, we did.”
OVERSTOCKED
For Taddiken’s birthday in September 2019, he and his wife purchased a pallet of returned and overstocked products and brought it home.
“We cut the pallet open and started digging into it. It was a total mystery what would be in that pallet,” Taddiken said. “We had a blast, and I sold a lot of that on eBay, so I got more serious about buying in volume and ramping it up some more. Then Covid hit and everything on eBay started selling like crazy.”
Shortly following this boom in business, Taddiken found himself discussing his new side hustle over coffee with Joe Tongish, a business acquaintance of his.
“Over a period of a few months, we decided to form a partnership and to rent a warehouse to grow this ecommerce business,” said Taddiken.
And just like that, Scott Taddiken, Gina Taddiken and Joe Tongish formalized the business partnership and Epic Overstocks was born.
“I have a full-time job I really enjoy, but Joe was primarily a retired business owner and had a lot of experience, so he was able to alleviate some of the challenges of trying to run the business,” Taddiken explained.
In October 2020, the three co-founders rented a warehouse in downtown Topeka with the vision of buying liquidation merchandise by the truckload, storing it in the warehouse, and selling it via ecommerce platforms, as well as on their own website.
Following a friends-and-family event hosted on Black Friday of 2020, Epic Overstocks celebrated the grand opening of its warehouse in January 2021.
“We got down there, hired a couple employees, and started going,” Taddiken said. “Not long into it, one of the first things we had to deal with was this huge basketball goal. We were looking at each other thinking, how in the world are we going to ship this? It didn’t seem like something that would go on eBay.”
The solution?
“We decided to put it on Facebook Marketplace, and we immediately got a response and sold it,” Taddiken continued. “So, we put a few more things on Facebook Marketplace and before long, we had a steady stream of customers coming to our warehouse interested in the items we had.”
FROM ECOMMERCE TO RETAIL
Quick to capitalize on the potential of this new revenue stream, Taddiken and crew wasted no time in converting their warehouse into a bona fide retail store. Today, the Epic Overstocks warehouse-turned-retail location, located at 108 S. Kansas Ave., is open to the public during regular business hours, Monday through Saturday.
The option to purchase products online remains a cornerstone of the business, but the brick-andmortar element allow Taddiken and team to offer some experiences that simply aren’t feasible online. Most notable among these is what’s known as their bargain bins, or “Amazon bin stores.”
“One of the things we do in our store is what’s sometimes called an Amazon bin store,” Taddiken explained. “We have an area where there are wooden bins and we put several thousand items in there each week, and then the price on them gets cheaper every day. We restock the bins with fresh items on Friday mornings. On Fridays you can walk in and dig through it, and everything back in that room is $10 each. Then on Saturday, everything back there goes down in price to $5, and by Wednesday, anything that’s left is only $1.”
This bin model allows customers to decide at what price point they feel an item is a good deal. Each passing day sees the price of items drop, with the risk being that many other prospective customers are browsing the bins as well, meaning there’s no guarantee an item will be in the bin the following day. And from Taddiken’s end, it’s more cost effective to sell these relatively inexpensive items from the bins than it would be to ship them out to customers, especially when rising shipping costs cut into profit margins that are thin to begin with.
The warehouse and the bargain bins created new opportunities for the business, but Epic Overstocks will always face the task of procuring its products. Virtually every item sold by Epic Overstocks, whether it be on eBay, Amazon, or in their warehouse, completed a long journey through a process known as reverse logistics.
“When you’ve got Amazon, Target, Walmart or other big chains that have either overstock, items with damaged boxes or even customer returns, the big retailers have to send those items back out somewhere, and that’s called reverse logistics,” Taddiken said. “Retailers typically have contracts with brokers who take the liquidation merchandise and sell it by the truckload to people like us. We had to develop relationships with the brokers so we could buy the merchandise.” When a reseller such as Epic Overstocks agrees to purchase a truck or pallet of liquidated merchandise, the reseller either commits to a “blind” purchase, in which the reseller has no visibility into what products will be in the shipment, or to a manifested shipment, where the reseller can view a list of the description and condition of each item in the shipment.
“But I still won’t know exactly if it’s a good shipment until I get it,” Taddiken said. “We try to track which products came in a certain truckload so that we can determine whether we’d want another truckload from that same broker.”
Based on Taddiken’s experience, some brokers and retailers consistently deliver excellent merchandise, whereas with others, the overall quality can be hit-or-miss.
“It’s definitely been a lot of trial and error,” he said. “I think that the industry in general has become a lot more difficult in terms of finding good buys because more and more people are getting into this business. I’ve definitely made a lot of mistakes in buying things I wish I hadn’t, but we’ve gotten to a point where we’ve built some good, established relationships with brokers I trust.”
Nevertheless, the business is typically able to sell most of what it procures. In cases where an item isn’t selling, they will usually donate it to a mission or nonprofit rather than be thrown away.
TOP-NOTCH EMPLOYEES
Profit margins and supplier relationships aside, as challenging and exciting as those elements of business are, what provides Taddiken with the most fulfillment has nothing to do with dollars and cents.
“I think developing a good employee team has been the most rewarding,” he shared. “I know that a lot of businesses are struggling to find help right now, but we have been really blessed. The first people who worked with us were people we just knew through friends or family, and the ones who we didn’t know have become family.
Epic Overstocks is run by a staff of nine employees and managers, plus the three co-owners. Given his “day job” practicing law, Taddiken entrusts much of the day-to-day operations to his staff, Gina, and Tongish.
“I am able to do this because of a super supportive wife who works there, a great business partner, and some topnotch employees. They’re what makes this happen,” he said.
On top of building community in the form of a team, Taddiken has found many opportunities to help out his local community simply by providing essential items at more affordable prices, and at a location that’s fun to frequent.
“We’ve got a lot of customers who are regulars that just get everyday items they might need, but at a discounted price, which everybody needs right now with everything getting more expensive,” he said. “When you see customers buying something as simple as laundry detergent for half of what they would have paid somewhere else, you feel good about that.”
FUTURE AMBITIONS
Taddiken envisions a future for the business and hopes to expand the business’s footprint by opening additional locations, both in Topeka and elsewhere. He also makes a point to look back and give a hand up to anyone who might be thinking of following in similar steps. To the aspiring entrepreneur he offers two pieces of advice.
“Go out and talk to other people who have done it,” he said. “Travel around and visit places that are doing it. Just gather and learn as much as you can. Secondly, tap into good business resources like GoTopeka and the Small Business Development Center where there’s business consulting and people who have experience and can save you a lot of mistakes.”
