The Story of Burbank's House of Hobbies

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I would consider us a one-stop shop for model making. We've kind of moved in that direction since COVID. Before COVID we had a lot more model trains, a little more variety, and now we have basically become a plastic model kit shop. We've got model airplanes, model cars, science fiction, Gundam, Gunpla, ships, and armor. My favorite part of having a hobby shop is interacting with the customers. I love to joke around with them. You kind of get a feel for them when they walk in the door. I love it when new people walk in and they stand two or three feet inside the door and just start looking around and I'll say, first-timer? And they're like, yep. And I'm like, well, you got a long way to go. Hi, my name is Glenn Bergstrom. I'm the co-owner of Burbank's House of Hobbies. We're a plastic model shop, general hobby shop in Burbank, California, celebrating our 74th year in business. Today, I don't have time to do model trains, but I hope to get back into them as things slow down in my life. I started building kits when I was maybe five or six years old, and I didn't get a lot of help doing it, so I kind of figured it out on my own, which then led into the model trains. My hobby was model trains growing up and then learning about electricity and just how to build things and figure things out. So I would go over to my grandma's house and mow the lawn or wash windows and then head over to this shop when it was on Olive and buy items for my model train layout. The store, technically, it's actually older than 74 years. It started on Verdugo with a name of Galloway's House of Hobbies, and said Galloway was a model builder for Lockheed. He sold it to Sal and Bertha Tarnelli in 1952, and they renamed it Burbank's House of Hobbies. And then the same year they moved it up the street to Olive Avenue, where it was for almost 40 years. I bought the shop 34 years ago. It was my childhood hobby shop. And we stayed in that location for four years and then moved over here to our larger location 30 years ago. Ken Mattia was a customer for many years, and he approached me to see if I wanted to get a partner. So eventually, we agreed. And eight years ago, he became a 50% owner of Burbank's House of Hobbies. And it took a while to figure out our places since I had had the store so long. But now we each have a place. We each do ordering. His specialty is ordering things from all over the world, detailed parts. He takes care of everything foreign, and I take care of most of the domestic ordering. Our employees, over the 34 years, I've had some that were here over 20 years. We've hired more and more people as we've gotten busier. And everybody has a specialty. Some are plastic model builders with ships. Some specialize in cars. Some collect die-cast cars. Everybody's got a specialty. So if one employee can't answer a question, they just refer it to someone that probably can answer the question. Definitely direct the customer in the right direction. For a walk-in hobby shop, a brick-and-mortar store, we probably have one of the largest paint selections and a lot of tools. We have a lot of customers that are always looking for the latest and greatest tool. And we have a lot of customers that come in just to buy supplies. They already have kits, and they've bought kits over the years. So now it's time to build. So they come in and buy paint, glue, the latest tools. The most common comment when they walk up with a basket to the counter is, "I just came in for a bottle of paint." So section by section in the store, when you walk in, it's "Anime, Gundam, robots. Been very popular, bringing in a lot of young modelers. Our sidewall is all die-cast cars, resin cars, you know, things that are pre-built that people collect. Die-cast airliners are real popular. Warbirds. That's the side of the store. And then model ships, model tanks, tank accessories, armor accessories. Behind that, you have kind of an area that's mixed with model cars and model airplanes. Model cars have crept into the model airplane section in some areas, and model airplanes have crept into the model cars in some sections. Depends on time of the year when we get in orders. But, yeah, we carry domestic brands and international, European, and Japanese brands of model cars. There's also a big science fiction aisle with monsters, spaceships, Star Wars, Star Trek. And then on the other side of the stores are paint and tools. Thousands of skews of paint, almost 1,000 skews of Vallejo paint alone. All the major brands. And we rotate those once in a while. If something isn't moving, we bring in another brand that customers request. And then the last section is your glue and paint brushes. And we try to carry all the different types of glues and many different price points on paint brushes. The library was our employee break room, but we needed space. So now it is books and magazines. We have an area in the library that's a display case for customer models. They bring things in, rotate them through, and it's a way for us to show new customers, or when we're trying to show a customer a product, we can show them an example of that method of weathering or that scenery product, because most of them are in that display case. So people come in all the time, and people ask all the time if they can put their models in. We need to be careful because it's full, and we've got to figure out, you know, what models have been in their longest, so we can move into some new examples. We even try to have some kids bring their things in. It's not going to be the same level as someone that's been building models for 40 or 50 years, but it's great to see all different levels of work. And I think today we're seeing more kids building models, but more kids need to get involved because it really does make you think and it makes you figure out things. How to paint, how to follow instructions, follow guidelines, its structures. Model making does fall into STEM to a point. There's a lot of kits out there that that actually move and do things. My daughter and I would build kits growing up, and now she's an engineer. She loved getting her hands involved in building something and thinking about something, but I think there is more cell phones today and less building things, so that needs to change. There have been many challenges over the 34 years. There's up and down cycles, election year cycles, COVID, tariffs, state regulations, federal regulations, insurance. There's so many things behind the scenes that you don't see. The business is never the same year to year. There's always a new challenge. We've survived all these years by making changes when we notice something's starting to slow down. Certain segments of the hobbies slow down, so we replace those items with things that we know move faster, or we try new things to see how they do. We special order all the time, and that is one thing that really keeps us going. From day one, we started doing special orders. We can't carry everything. There's so much out there to carry, and we only have so much space, so now special orders have been something that really keeps us going. There isn't really a typical customer anymore. I'm seeing more families lately. It's starting to get generations coming in. I have fathers with their sons and daughters coming in that said that their fathers brought them to the shop back in the day, and they're getting their kids involved in model kits. So the customers have changed. There's the Gundam and Gunpla have brought in a younger generation. You have retirees who come in who have been building kits all their life. We had one customer come in yesterday that just retired after 35 years of not building a kit and wanted to get back into model building. I've had customers that have been shopping with me for 35 years. We can joke around and have fun with them. They're friends. We get celebrities that come in. You never know who's going to walk in the door, and they just want to shop, and most of them don't want to be recognized. They just want to shop and have fun with their hobbies. But if approached, they're usually pretty nice and take pictures and sign autographs. We're a brick and mortar store open seven days a week. We have a website, houseofhobbies.com. We ship seven days a week. We have Instagram, Facebook, and an eBay store. We had a customer come in once that hadn't been in, and he spent a few hours looking around, and he walked up the counter and said, "This isn't a hobby shop. This is an experience." Show's over. Come back tomorrow.