CRe04: Geek Inc. Jarrod Greer

My friend Jarrod Greer describes himself as a “serial entrepreneur,” and I have to admit that the title fits. Jarrod will trade on almost anything, and he regularly travels both locally and states away looking for people selling collections or even unique individual items that he can either resell or simply because it strikes his fancy. While we were recording the podcast, I was sitting directly across from one of his more recent acquisitions, a stuffed badger (Whom he promptly named Leonard) he had brought back from his latest buying trip. “I told them I hoped we could make some deals,” Jarrod laughed. “But regardless, that was going home with me.”

Jarrod’s journey started a long time ago, he says, when his parents would drive him to reptile shows so he could buy assorted reptiles and then sell them to buy more. “I never met a hobby that I didn’t try to turn into a business,” he said. “I always thought that if I could make money off what I enjoyed, then it would subsidize doing more of it. If someone would introduce me to remote control car racing today, I’d have a remote-control car business within six months,” he laughed. And given his track record, I’m sure it would be profitable.

Speaking of that track record, Jarrod and his wife Jaime own the popular Inner Geek stores in Ashland, Kentucky, and Huntington, West Virginia. They also own a sports card store called Pack Busters located not a block from the Inner Geek in Huntington. The Ashland store focuses on comics, and the Huntington store has a heavy focus on books, but both are available at both locations. And they both carry the collectibles that were part of Jarrod’s childhood – and everyone else’s because he likes anything cool and collectible.

“With comic books especially, having the stores has allowed me to see massive amounts of cool comic books I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to own in my life if I wasn’t in the business,” he said. But surprisingly, although he is passionate about collecting, he is less passionate about keeping those collectibles. “I don’t have to keep it,” he said with the thrill of the hunt creeping into his voice. “I just want to find it. With comic books specifically, I want to find this amazing issue of Spiderman that is really hard to come by; but once I have it in my hand, I have climbed that mountain. I’ve made that conquest, so now I can sell it and go on with my life.”

“It’s the challenge of finding cool stuff; that’s the comic book store for me.” And the thrill he gets is fueled by stocking the shelves of those stores. “I love crawling through people’s attics with a flashlight, and as you pan the light across the room, you catch on some boxes and go, “Oh my God, that’s the thing I’ve been looking for six years.” It’s a treasure hunt,” he said. “But once I have it in the van on the way home, it’s different. I guess I’m not a hoarder,” he laughed. “I just really like finding things.”

The roots of Jarrod Greer’s insanely popular comic and toy conventions in Lexington and Huntington can be traced back to his interest in reptiles – and not simply the fact that he once traded some snakes for a comic collection. “We were promoting reptile conventions across the state,” he said. “We wanted to do one in Lexington, and I reached out to the Lexington Convention Center. But for various reasons, they really didn’t want me to do a reptile show in the building at that time. And I told them that we should get to know each other and asked what kind of shows we could do there.”

The response he got was a question about what sort of things he was interested in. Greer said he replied that he liked comics and toys, and that was the beginning. “They said they didn’t have a comic con there, so we started one in Lexington just so we could get our foot in the door to do a reptile show. In the vein of you never ‘know what the future holds for you,’ six years later, I was out of the reptile business and was a full-time comic convention promoter. And coming from being a comic convention promoter, we needed a place to call home base, so we ended up with a comic book store.”

The original “home base” was a store in the Ashland Town Center in Ashland, Kentucky. “The manager of the mall at the time likes to tell the story of how I would send her pictures of empty buildings (mall storefronts) for two years and tell her that if she would like a business in that building to let me know. But I didn’t understand how mall real estate worked at the time,” he admitted. “Sometimes a store will set empty for three months waiting on an opening of a particular brand, but to me, it was just an empty spot she could rent to me,” he said. “But it finally worked out. She called me at nearly five o’clock one evening and said, “I have a building I can lease you if you want.” I didn’t even know what I was going to do there, but I said yes,” he said.

“Then I called my wife and said, “Don’t kill me, but I just leased a building in the Ashland Town Center,” he said. “She asked what we were doing, and I said I don’t know. But we’ll figure it out,” he laughed. Jaime Greer was happy, he said, that he could finally move his office/collection/mancave out of their basement. “So we basically started that store with my collection of stuff, and a $2,000 collection I bought.”

“But I have been extremely fortunate to be in the right place at the right time,” he said. “Opening a comic book store in the mall when they never really had one was something we didn’t understand the true value of until we did it. By opening a business in the mall, where people walking out of JC Penney’s saw us immediately was magic. When we opened the store, people automatically just came in and gave us their money.” The experience, he said, was something he wasn’t prepared for. “It was like, “Wow. We have a viable business almost immediately,” We were in the right place at the right time, and at the time we were the only comic book shop in Ashland,” he said.

Society as a whole, he said, was also realizing that comics were a viable medium as both an art form and as the basis of blockbuster movies. So the combination of the lack of a local store of its kind for some time, the growth of the industry, and a surge in pop culture allowed him to “Catch lightning in a bottle,” so to speak. “It really was the right place at the right time, and we were blessed to have an almost instant success with it.”

Jarrod’s Inner Geek is no longer in the mall because he purchased a building off Greenup Avenue on 16th Street in Ashland to accommodate his growing customer base. “But I still believe that the mall is a great place to start and incubate a business,” he said. Even today, he said if he came up with an off-the-wall idea for a business, the mall would be his “first look” for a destination. “It’s hard to quantify what the built-in foot traffic of the mall will do for you,” he said.

Through new business startup, purchasing and rebranding a bookstore (formerly Empire Books) in Huntington’s Pullman Square, and developing a healthy online presence, Jarrod Greer has also maintained his convention through a 100-year pandemic. Not only that, but he started another convention during that same pandemic. He said that the convention’s appeal is its mechanics – a broad spectrum of things that appeal to different people all under the same roof. And he said that, at its core, a convention is a social gathering people might not even know they need. “It gives people the chance to come out for one weekend and embrace the thing they think they are alone in embracing. And then when they get there, they realize there is a massive community around those things they are into. The commerce aspect of it is a necessity, but at root it is a social gathering and I believe they are successful sole because of the social aspect.”Going back to what he said earlier, being successful financially allows him to put on a wonderful convention each year. And because seeing people enjoy themselves is part of the thrill of the chase, so to speak, he is always looking for ways to improve the experience to keep things going.

Inner Geek Ashland can be followed here on Facebook and Instagram

Inner Geek Huntington can be followed here on Facebook and Instagram

Lexington Comic and Toy Convention can be followed here on Facebook and Instagram

Huntington Comic and Toy Convention can be followed here on Facebook and Instagram