These Guys Are My Heroes: Rebranding Raremarq With Founder Chris Tung

One of the organizations at the recent Lake Como Comic Art Festival that was working to make a name for itself – or rather a new name – was Raremarq. If that brand isn’t familiar to you, you may know it better as the auction site Nerd Crawler. Founder and CEO Chris Tung initiated the brand change just before leaving for the festival and sat down with Comicon.com to discuss why the change was needed and what the future holds for the popular website.

Tom Smithyman: Moving from Nerd Crawler to Raremarq is more than just a renaming, it’s a true rebrand. Talk about the journey that the site has been on.

Chris Tung: When I started Nerd Crawler in 2022, it was a web crawler. For those not familiar, that’s an app that visits websites, looks at the information, then tells the user something back. The web crawler was designed when the new original art was for sale in real time. A couple of the sites we started with were Jim Cheung’s Big Cartel store, Greg Capullo grab bags, and Paul Smith’s random drops. If your not familiar, Paul’s art is incredible, but he also drops his art at random times.

I really wanted a piece, so I built this web crawler that would check those website every single minute, and if a new piece showed up that wasn’t marked as sold out, it would send me a text message. I was able to get a couple of pieces that way.

Smithyman: I remember talking to Capullo’s about that years ago. He was amazed by it.

Tung: I made the service available to the public under the brand Nerd Crawler. While some people used it, it eventually slowed down. There wasn’t enough opportunity or pain point. So when Steve Morger, founder of Big Wow and cofounder of the Lake Como Comic Art Festival, was raising money for the Maui fire charities. He was auctioning off an Adam Hughes original on a Facebook groups.

That’s incredibly laborious. You have to email him the bid. He has to post it back on the group with the current bid – just back and forth. So I made a bid, but I put a note at the bottom of the email saying that, “If you need a better way to sell these pieces for charity, I think I can build you something.”

Smithyman: You didn’t win the Hughes, did you?

Tung: Steve emailed me back and told me that I was outbid and that he was interested. So I outlined a marketplace that would allow you to take bids directly on the platform and make payments. I build that in a week and launched it. That first week we had a couple of auctions with Dan Brereton and others, we had more new users sign up than the past six months of the text messaging business.

Smithyman: So you felt like you were onto something.

Tung: And then Frank Cho reached out through Steve to raise funds. And we started a partnership where he offered something new each week in early 2024. And we just kept growing, and I realized that there was something here. But I also realized that weren’t really a web crawler any more. So I knew I needed to evolve the name and the brand to reflect that we’re a marketplace. Not only are we a marketplace, but one for rare things – rare art from amazing creators.

Smithyman: And that’s where the name Raremarq comes from?

Tung: It immediately tells you that it’s special, rare things. The “marq” is for marketplace. But since we spell it with a “q,” it’s a remarque, which is one of the first things we ever sold.

Smithyman: You built the entire platform in a week by yourself? What’s your background?

Tung: I majored in English at UC Davis! I thought I would work in publishing. I got an internship at Marvel Comics the summer of my junior year. I moved to New York after I graduated, but ultimately I found that I really couldn’t get in. It’s just so competitive. So I got a job doing email marketing at a startup. That was a lot of HTML coding. And I ended up at ComiXology. So I got to be in comics, but in the technical space.

After that, I moved back to California and continued to work and learn, so I decided to teach myself how to program. Over the course of the next decade, I was building little apps and things. Two of them were semi-successful, and we sold those businesses. But I wanted to build something bigger. Of course, it was combining my technical experience with something I’ve loved since I was a kid.

Smithyman: You’ve turned this into a labor of love.

Tung: Exactly. I wasn’t super passionate about those other apps that just did OK. Whereas here, my customers are Frank Cho, Terry Dodson, Artgerm, Arthur Adams, Essential Sequential. When those are your customers, and you love this business, every day I’ll happily answer emails or solve an issue with payments to make you happy. Because these guys are my heroes.

Smithyman: There’s a lot of competition for what you do, starting with eBay. Does it take a lot of convincing for new artists to join?

Tung: When you have people like Frank and Arthur Adams speaking about us – they are our champions, and it becomes a lot easier to talk to folks. It also helps to talk to people in person. People realize that I am real. I am genuine. It’s not like some faceless organization.

Smithyman: How does Raremarq make money? What’s your business model?

Tung: Most marketplaces have what’s called a take rate. A platform like Heritage Auctions takes something like 20 percent. And to their credit, they are a massive platform that gets a lot of distribution. You pay for their exposure and the rates that they command. eBay takes about 13.5 percent, depending on the good. We, on the seller side, take 6 percent. And on the buyer side, they can either pay with a credit card or PayPal, which has anywhere from a 3.5 to 5 percent fee.

Smithyman: But you’re not seeing that fee from buyer’s side. It goes straight to the credit card companies. So it’s really the seller who is funding you.

Tung: Exactly. And we feel, at 6 percent, it’s enough for us to pay ourselves and growth this business. But at the same time, it allows us to put more earnings back into the pockets of the artists who have worked so hard to make these pieces.

Smithyman: You have “rare” in the name, which could apply to other categories as well. Do you have plans for expanding beyond comics?

Tung: I think in the future, yeah. Right now, we really want to get this right, though, for the creators and fans who have supported us. There are a lot of folks that we want to bring on board and help. There’s signed comics, signed books. I spoke with another artist here who was interested in offering illustrated children’s book pages.

Smithyman: Sounds like there’s a long runway for the future. Best of luck with the rebrand and the site.