About Us

History

eMerchandise.com was originally founded in 1997 and by the early 2000s had grown into a powerhouse e-commerce company, acting as the online, order fulfillment arm for companies such as HBO, Sony and Paramount. Unfortunately, the owners of the original company made some poor decisions and are now selling ponchos in Guatemala. A new ownership group took over in 2006. This same group also owns and operates SuperHeroStuff.com, a leading online retailer of superhero and comic book merchandise.

At eMerchandise, we are dedicated to locating and putting up some of the coolest licensed products youll find on the web, even some of the Twilight stuff that everyone loves to hate. Were not just some company schlepping junk on the web for a buck; were a company comprised of people who actually like this stuff. Many of us are geeks who read comics, watch Anime, and camp out at the movie theater the night before Harry Potter comes out. We like the stuff we buy and we try to make sure its well-made.

We have ongoing personable relationships with our suppliers, so if theres a problem, we wont give you the "runaround." Well do our best to let the manufacturer know that your Spider-Man puffy doll has threads coming out of its head or the lead paint flavor of your Chinese glassware doesnt taste as it should (just kidding). We ask all our suppliers to meet current safety standards, so you can be assured our products are safe and bursting with fruit flavor. Thank you for checking us out, and if you have any comments or suggestions or if you just want to complain about your job or something else, feel free to let us know and well do what we can to help.

Jon Belzer

Having graduated top of his class with an emphasis in insane spreadsheet analyses, quantum number crunching and advanced negotiations, Jon brought his UCLA MBA, CPA venture capital skills to eMerchandise and rescued it from the hands of ineptitude and incompetent handlers. Under the weight of insurmountable problems, the once heavy hitter company, eMerchandise, was facing an implosion of biblical proportion. The mix of incompetent management, software developers committed to creating long-term job security through labyrinthine style code and poor purchasing habits that resided on the common practice of throwing darts at random items placed on the wall, eMerchandise was on the brink of failure.

Jon’s many business savvy skills enabled us to resuscitate eMerchandise and get the company back in the black, serving customers and having fun. These skills include: out-of-the-box thinking, an immovable and adamant belief that workers should work because they like to and they should be thankful they have a place to go for 10 hours out of the day, his ability to negotiate special deals with vendors (through incessant nagging and hours of endless haggling that would make a used car salesman proud), and the impressive capacity to say, “the check is in the mail,” with a straight face.

Jon is also credited with the genius of acquiring other websites and placing them under the eMerchandise umbrella, SuperHeroStuff.com being the most prominent of them.

Ronando Long

Ronando joined the eMerchandise team in 2007 and heads up our Purchasing team. He is the founder, designer and original janitor of SuperHeroStuff.com, which was acquired by eMerchandise in 2007. With a strong desire to sell superhero t-shirts, not knowing any better and not letting ignorance of web design or e-commerce stop him, Ronando persevered where smarter, and wiser, people would have thrown up their hands in frustration and given up. Through sheer tenacious, bullheaded perseverance and luck, not one to let lack of funds stop him, Ronando made the decision, at the behest of his much wiser wife, in 1999, to go with creating a Superhero e-commerce website instead of selling hot sauce. No, really, Ronando went to the extent of purchasing both URLs at the same time, the other being HotSauceShop.com, which is still available at the writing of these biographies, and went on to bask in the light of “The Largest Friggin’ Superhero Store on the Web.”

In 2007, Ronando merged Superherostuff with eMerchandise and found renewed life in working more hours per day and no days off. Gone are the days of sleeping in till 7:00 am. Ronando has been tasked with the role of “Major Purchasing Dude,” and it is his buttocks that are on the line when a new product line doesn’t sell. One might find it easy to purchase Marvel T-Shirts or Spiderman Underoos, but deciding on whether to go with Bob Marley t-shirts or Pirates of the Caribbean action figures is a little more challenging.

Brian Welch

Brian is our Marketing Director, in charge of all communications to the outside world. Similar to Ronando’s situation, Brian created the superhero/sci-fi action figure website YouBuyNow.com. He too merged his company with eMerchandise and now revels in the joy of working 13-hour days (he was working 15-hour days before). In his original position as Operations Manager for our company, Brian’s role as tyrant (he insisted that all the employees bow before him, present him with gifts each week, and call him “He That Knoweth”) was usurped by one of our more eager and vocal employees. Brian’s current role as Marketing Guru has proved fruitful, as our employees are now able to work without the distractions of the hourly placations and gifts, and our websites are now marketed in front of everybody on the planet, whether they want to hear about us or not.

In his off time, Brian enjoys brewing his own beer. Some might call it snake venom or stew from a witch’s cauldron, but he claims that special tart flavor is but the natural “hoppyness” in his IPAs (and not rat pee), and that his specially brewed Stouts have a unique malty and roasty flavor, not “dead trout” as us lesser refined drinkers might call it.

Tiras Buck

Hired on as warehouse lackey #1, Tiras quickly went from learning how to run a computer (the first he’s ever worked with outside his Radio Shack 1979 calculator, complete with red leds) to being the usurper of Brian’s position and is now running the entire eMerchandise warehouse. Responsible for taking the blame for the whereabouts of all purchase orders, inventory (both shipped and unshipped), packages coming in and going out and lost employees, Tiras’s desk is at the hub of eMerchandise. He has graciously accepted the role of being ultimately responsible for everyone else’s mishap, even while on vacation. Management no longer needs to call, Skype or even send e-mails to Tiras, throughout the course of the day. All that is needed is a strong thought of what needs to be done, and Tiras will be right there to receive and delegate like a madman.

In his off time Tiras manages to read comics enjoys movies, sci-fi, painful exercises and flashy art-rock. Not being able to read a map or figure out Twitter, Tiras fills some of discretionary time playing Street Fighter 2 on his Super NES and insists on refusing to buy a Smart Phone, afraid that it will bind itself to his cerebral cortex, forcing him to watch cable television.

Danielle Deihm

Danielle is our lead Customer Service gal. If there is an angry, calcitrant, obnoxious customer from hell, Dainelle is able to talk him or her off the ledge with her self-taught communication skills of unsurpassed quality. She can literally handle anything thrown at her… including the lonely guys out there who send her stuff in the mail and call up once a week, refusing to talk to anyone but Danielle, asking the most pedantic, contrived questions just to say they talked to a cute girl that week. We would be completely lost without Danielle.

Andy Hollinger

Andy is eMerchandise’s very own Catalog Manager. He makes sure that everything that all the products on our websites are complete with quality photos and accurate, informative descriptions. He personally takes all the pictures of our products and Photoshops them and makes sure all the items are properly categorized in the database and beats the living h*&% out anyone who inputs information incorrectly, like labeling a superhero Marvel t-shirt as a Dr. Seuss item. The database/inventory accountability role is incredibly important and we’re lucky to have Andy around to ensure consistency with our pictures and product information. Andy is one of our hardest workers. His goal is to break his 16 hour record from last Black Friday.

In his off time, Andy is an expert bike mechanic and avid mountain biker and loves Disc Golf. He plans on working with eMerchandise until he retires. Andy also likes to collect Marvel Bowen busts and loves superhero and action movies, especially those made by Quentin Tarantino.

Nick Shepherd

Nick is our lead software developer and all around IT guy that does stuff that nobody else can do, and he’s constantly reminding us that at some point in the not so distant future that he will hold the entire eMerchandise infrastructure hostage unless we recognize him for being a superior being… like all those other IT guys that work at tech companies. His second-most used phrase is, “None of you have any business near any of the code. Now bugger off! Shoo!”

Part of Nick’s job is to evaluate all hardware and software components of eMerchandise and to ridicule the inferior nature of the past designers and developers, reminding us that people with stone axes and pitchforks with a secondary education should never have touched a computer much less built the system we inherited. For the most part he’s right, but we enjoy being reminded of it. Regardless, we’re glad Nick is on our side, especially since he has an infinite number of config files to help us dodge tax targeting bots and Google’s red flagging spider-critters.