Fangamer Grows into Its Own Building in Tucson
The former Arizona State Disability Services Adinistration Building at 3655 East 2nd Street sold to Outer Heaven, LLC of Tucson (Reid Young, manager) for $675,000 ($60 PSF). Built in 1960, the 11,259-square-foot building on a .91 acre property was vacant at time of sale and had been vacant for quite some time prior being sold.
The buyer purchased it for locally-owned, Fangamer that Reid Young is also CEO, to relocate the company. The e-commerce store for video games will relocate from its Midway & Swan location where it has outgrown its current space. Fangamer is quite a local success story that wanted the business to be closer to Downtown Tucson with its attractions.
Young is originally from Indiana, married a Tucson girl and found himself in Tucson when he founded Fangamer in 2007 with a group of friends who grew up running an EarthBound fan site called Starmen.Net. The group started off with hopes/plans of using Starmen.Net’s software as a basis for other fansites, but quickly realized that advertising wasn’t going to pay the bills.
He then launched the Fangamer Store in August 2008 with only four products (two shirts, a pin set, and a mug). Within hours the orders were flooding in, and it quickly became apparent that there was a huge demand for merchandise inspired by the older SNES-era games they had grown up with. The company has worked diligently ever since to create merchandise inspired by (and in honor of) those favorite games.
Young recounts, “In 2008, the financial markets were falling apart and it wasn’t probably the best time to start a new business, but we survived and 2009 was a busy year of expansion in which we brought on our second full-time employee, and moved from a spare bedroom into an office.”
“It was in 2010 we brought on our third and fourth full-timers and began working with small, independent gaming companies including 2 Player Productions and Far From Subtle. We also nailed down a booth at PAX East — the start of a yearly tradition,” according to Young.
In 2011 the company expanded partnerships with more independent game developers (like Vblank) and other small gaming companies. It brought on a variety of part-time employees and prepared for a fifth full-timer to show up. The company with employees also managed to cram into an office with more merchandise than it should probably have held.
By 2012 the company finally moved out of its hole-in-the-wall office space attached to the side of a radiator shop in favor of a couple of attached office units, each unit bigger than the old office. By the end of the year, they added yet another office unit, making the office over three times bigger than it was at the end of 2011.
“During that time we focused on partnerships with folks like Attract Mode (leading to our joint art show at PAX Prime), Ashley Davis, Kari Fry, SEIBEI, Zac Gorman, and Klei Entertainment. We also handled fulfillment for several successful Kickstarters for our friends, such as 2-Player Productions’ Minecraft: the Story of Mojang, the Double Fine Adventure, Chris Furniss’s 31 Days of Zero Suit Samus, and our own Retrowear Kickstarter. We brought four new full-time employees into the fold over the course of the year, bringing our army up to eight,” said Young.
Fast forward to 2016 and the company has expanded its office yet again, brought on more full-time employees now be a total of 17 full-timers and 6 part-timers.
Relocation into the new building is expected for mid-July.
Brandon Rodgers, CCIM, Principal, and Tom Nieman, Office Specialist with Cushman & Wakefield | PICOR, represented the seller, R Legacy Irrevoable Trust. Adam Lundquist with Southwest Urban Realty, LLC, represented the buyer in the transaction.
For more information, contact Rodgers at 520.546.2714 and Nieman at 520.546.2728. Lundquist can be reached at 520.591.4553.
To learn more, see RED Comp #3855.