What a journey!

In 2016, our team launched the Silver Hobo Nickels coin collection. We started by licensing TEN original pieces of art from famous hobo nickel master Paolo Curcio.

The following year, we expanded the collection to include five NEW hobo nickel masters, including Steve Adams, Chris DeFlorentis, Aleksey Saburov, Bill Jameson & someone we didn’t know so well at all…Roman Booteen.

We licensed Roman’s Durer’s Knight coin, along with the reverse Tree, which we chose to pair up with it. Through the transaction, we got to know the mysterious Roman Booteen, and developed a relationship with him.

With the success of the Durer’s Knight coin under our belt, we tried to start a new project, but asking Roman for anything specific is out of the question, and even buying one of his rare collectibles is nearly impossible. So we went to auction and were unsuccessful bidding on his latest masterpiece, the Trap with the Golden Bait. While our $10,100 bid was a record, it fell short of the final auction price and slipped through our fingers.

Determined as we were, we asked Roman for some help and connected with the new Trap owner, and worked out a license everyone liked. Then, we got to work on replicating the master’s creation.

It took YEARS! It wasn’t easy, and the whole story is detailed here – have a read when you get time. When the final product was done and the dust settled, the Trap replica ended up being the most profitable project we’d ever done!

We wasted no time building a sweet website and moving on to the next project, Roman Booteen’s Gold Bug. And the story is very similar – incredible challenge, monumental reward.

We started the THIRD Booteen project – Banksy – just before Covid19 smashed the world economy to smithereens. The pandemic – and the incredibly obtrusive rules, restrictions, regulations and bullshit that came along with it – completely decimated several of our businesses, and even resulted in our family leaving Singapore and relocating to Texas! What a mess!

Since then, due to travel restrictions, quarantines and the like, we have not yet been able to return to Thailand to complete the Banksy project. It is currently on an indefinite hold! To make matters worse, we even secured a production contract to bring Roman’s 7th Circle of Hell coin to life as an incredibly detailed timepiece, and the prototype is already in hand!

In short, we have two Roman Booteen projects on the docket, and we don’t know if or when they’ll see the light of day. Thousands of Booteen collectors are desperately waiting on us, and we are letting them down!