INCREASE IN FEMALE BUYERS IN THE STAMP TRADE - IS IT JUST ME ???

[bl32]

Over the years the stamp collectors were predominantly male. Then about 2 years ago I noticed a swing to more and more female buyers. Is it just me or do other stamp dealers notice the same swing ? Is this swing just in the stamp trade or is it universal across all categories ?

Bill Lynn

[pierrelebel]

I have been selling stamps by mail for over twenty-seven years.

The ratio of female buyers has been constant as far as my customers are concerned.  No change has been noticed in the last few years.  Same old... same old.  The average age of my customers is 66 (younger than me).

[mr.elmwood]

More female buyers, or, are you shipping to female names. Big difference.

I sell car parts. I ship to a lot of female names. I brought that up in conversation at an eBay meeting. It was quickly explained to me that women still control the purse strings in society. This from a table of women.

"Honey! Can I buy this?"

[reallynicestamps]

Which is of course as it should be.

We recently closed our B&M store. When Ian started in business 35 years ago, we met little boys brought in by their fathers or grandfathers.

Women collectors were rare. I'd just tell the wives how to find Holt Renfrew or hand over a stack of women's magazines I kept under the counter to amuse them while they waited.

By the time the store closed, we had about 15-20% female collectors in the shop or viewing the auction. And a few working for us. Little girls were bringing in their parents a couple of times a month. And the girls were telling their parents about collecting and were, frankly, more knowledgeable than those grandparents of yore.

The deal with kids of course is that ,while they are the future (Chris Green was brought into our shop by his father 25 years ago), the immediate customer is likely to be the parent whose interest is ignited by the child.

[art-in-the-making]

If pinterest has anything to say about it - the numbers of females will be on the rise - or already have been.

I have seen statistics that 92% of pinterest users (or pins, I forget) are women.

Stamps seem like a natural for Pinterest also. It's almost a digital-age metaphor for stamp collecting in some kind of a way.

[ricarmic]

Hi Bill! I would say that I too have noticed more female stamp buyers in the last couple years, although I do not have any statistics to back that up. 

It certainly seems that there are more then there were a few years ago!

[fornax1049]

There are more at my stamp club that 15 years ago. We usually get about 30 people at a meeting. 15 years ago we had one regular woman now about 4 or 5 is typical. Average age though keeps rising to about 68 or 70 now.

[recped]

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@mr.elmwood wrote:

More female buyers, or, are you shipping to female names. Big difference.

I sell car parts. I ship to a lot of female names. I brought that up in conversation at an eBay meeting. It was quickly explained to me that women still control the purse strings in society. This from a table of women.

"Honey! Can I buy this?"

---

This is what I see, lots of female names on the PayPal account but the actual buyers are male in most cases. Record collectors are primarily male, probably slightly less so than 30 years ago but still the vast majority.

[femmefan1946]

The real holdbacks to taking up a hobby are time (which is why the gap in any hobby is late teens through late thirties- school and work are paramount) and money.

When women really* entered the workplace and started getting reasonably good pay, we were able to spend some of our wages on stuff that interested us.

Some of us went for stampcollecting, some for scrapbooking, some took up skydiving, or bodybuilding or gourmet cooking or bookclubs.

My mother, born 1911, and my grandmother, born 1870, were both working before during and after marraige.