If you walk into my office right now, well, first, I’ll have to ask to leave, I have no idea how you got in here! Nonetheless, you’ll likely notice the following:
- Doctor Doom folded arm bust (doubles as coin bank)
- A baller, nearly complete Marvel Chess Collection
- A full cast signed script from The Office season two “A Benihana Christmas” (Harold Ramis directed!)
- Shoebox upon shoebox full of comics, including literally every issue of 2015’s Secret Wars
The point being, while some adults gravitate towards fine liquors and doctoral certificates, some of us like to highlight Deadpool / Run The Jewels variant cover comic books on our walls instead. Collectibles are sweet, and it’s fun to show them off.
Enter GEMR.
Gemr is a social community and app for people who collect things. It’s free to join, and users can organize, showcase, buy, sell, and trade their items on the platform. (Full disclosure: Gemr reached out to me to check out their site, and we have an affiliate relationship where if you sign up using a link from Comic Book Herald, I get credit. I’m pretty picky about my affiliate relationships, but you’ve been disclosed!)
Basically Gemr is a Pinterest-like social platform entirely geared towards geeky collectibles, comics, video games, and all kinds of rare odds and ends that I’d be super stoked to find at a comic shop or con.
The simplest thing I can do is encourage to you to check out Gemr for yourself. Again, it’s totally free to sign up (as well as the iOS and Android app), and if looking at pictures of Hobgoblin action figures is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
My Favorite Things About Gemr
Clubs –
Gemr organizes collectibles by ‘Clubs,’ meaning you can personalize what you see more to your interests. While a Sailor Moon trading card club isn’t going to do much for me, it’s hard not to run around the house screaming with joy at the sight of a Marvel Figures club.
The Potential Behind the Marketplace –
While a site like Ebay is all about buying and selling – and can occasionally be good for more obscure collectibles – Gemr is all about collectibles. This gives the marketplace more of a Comic shop feel, rather than an online behemoth that also sells subcutaneous IV drips (I might not be a doctor, but Ebay probably sells that!).
The “For Sale” section is limited currently, but I could see this becoming very appealing. I’ll be eagerly checking for Alan Moore’s run on Captain Britain with delicious frequency.
Finally, Gemr features something called “Crowdscore” which basically crowdsources the estimated value of your collectibles. So if you have a weird R2D2 lamp you have never seen anywhere else, you can pawn shop that sweet light among the Gemr community.
Window Shopping
For all that marketplace talk, you don’t actually have to buy anything on Gemr. Instead you get a curated community of awesome things. Sometimes it’s fun just to pop open the app and find a killer collection of signed Wolverine comics.
Not only that, but Gemr has a shockingly large user base already. There are over 24,000 collections (and counting) at the time of this review.
How Could Gemr Improve?
Direction –
I found Gemr initially intimidating. A LOT of people have shared a LOT of things. Getting started is a challenge, and I think Gemr could make the initiation process a bit more intuitive.
Personally, I’d recommend heading to Clubs and navigating these curated communities first before diving into the bottomless pit of “What’s New”.
Findability –
This may be improving as we speak, but the search function in-app was really weak. I may be something of a search nerd, but my search progression of “Gerber Defenders” –> “Defenders”–> “Avengers” netted 0, 0, and 1 result. Not a great sign…
Focus –
Again, as much as I enjoy the idea of Gemr, it’s hard to really know Gemr’s core focus is! Options are great, but what is the one thing that Gemr is great at? Time will tell, I think. Every time I visit I wind up endlessly scrolling through WWE belt collections and sports tickets from every NBA stadium in America, but it’s all so aimless. What is this feeling called killing time?!
End
Simply put, if you like Comic Book Herald, there’s a good chance you’ll find something to love over on Gemr. I’m still navigating how I can use this site, and I only expect it to improve as the large user base grows.
Sign up for a free account today, and if you like what’s going on, enjoy sharing some of your own collectibles!
I like the idea. I’ve signed up for it today, if only there had been a link from this article tho 😉 I’ll have a look through it all later in depth but I think its different, which is hard these days online.
If only 🙂