The baffling world of Official Issue Personalized Stamps....

Been a while since my last blog, and I do apologize for that. Been very busy as I am now one of the two coordinators for the Stamp Catalogue listings over at the Colnect website. Colnect has developed into a very well maintained wiki-style Stamp reference catalog online that continues to add new material every day.  It is also the only place you will find information all in one place cross-referencing published catalog numbers among the major stamp catalog numbers.  Want the know the Michel number for a certain Gibbons stamp, for many countries that information will be right there on Colnect's listing for that stamp (and more information is added each day). 

The only thing Colnect does NOT do is provide valuations, but in my opiniton that honestly that is something better left for collectors to use the internet for to comparison shop between different retailers. I know that another major online stamp catalog does provide valuations, but to be honest I have never been comfortable with how they are determining those values.

Anyways check out Colnect because it really is a great resource for collectors!

As someone who is a fan of new issues (and I hope to get my new issue listings back going again soon!) I have come across a question for which there seems to be no set agreement, which my position now at Colnect has reinforced.  How to handle Personalized Stamps that are issued by national Postal administrations with designs created by the Post office, not individual consumers.

Here is an example from February 2018 from Belgium :

The Smurfs turned 60 this year and while Belgium also produced a regular commemorative issue for this anniversary, it ALSO produced this sheet of 10 self-adhesive stamps using the frame of their Personalized Domestic Rate value.  The base frame is the same as for the personalized stamps one can order from BPost Belgium, but the designs were made in house by BPost, and you can purchase the sheetlet from the Philatelic Bureau (which you can NOT do with customer-submitted personalized stamps)

The stamps have complete postal validity in Belgium, and this is just the latest in a series of "National Personal Issues" that BPost has produced over the past few years.

Yet in spite of the fact that the stamps are available from the Post Office, and have complete postal validity, and are printed in quantities similar to commemorative issues (they are not just a limited run of say 500 stamps), none of the major stamp catalog publishers list stamps such as these, not even (to the best of my knowledge) the Belgian Catalogue Officiel Belges des Timbres-Postes, the catalog of reference for Belgium.

Rather odd, don't you think?  Personally, I would argue that given these are official stamps issued by the Belgian Post office and available to all consumers, and are going to turn up in collections and kiloware, it makes perfect sense to consider them fully valid issues as part of Belgium's yearly stamp production and should be treated as fully legitimate issues. 

Yet the big four catalog pubishers seem to choose not to give these any philatelic status whatsoever. I could understand if these were produced by a private consumer (as is the main reason for issuing personalized stamps in the first place) whch would make trying to keep track of the potentially millions of different "face design" stamps would become a cataloger's nightmare.  But when it is the Post Office itself that is designing and producing these stamps, that is something different entirely, and I do think the catalog producers are dropping the ball by simply ignoring these issues and simply grouping them all together as "personalized stamps".

And Belgium is not alone in producing these kinds of "Official Personalized Stamps" - the Netherlands, Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Japan and Brazil also have produced similar issues this year (and I am sure there are others I am not aware of), and some of these nations have been producing these for several years now.  One of my new interests philatelically is to try and work out all the issues that have been produced in this manner, because I think this is an area of philately that has been under-researched (better to say ignored??) by most collectors.

Now keep in mind not all postal administrations issue personalized stamps in this way, even though many postal administrations do offer the ability to produce personalized stamps.  In some nations, the personalized element is a se-tenant tab that is attached to a stamp design. This is how Personalized stamps were first developed when Australia launched  them in 1999. And in general, the major catalog DO give catalog number status to the stamp designs which are printed with se-tenant labels that can be customzied. 

India had taken this method one step further with the creation of their "MyStamp" program which combines a special commemorative issue (often of local or regional relevance) with se-tenant labels that can be customized. Michel (rightly) lists all of these as part of the regular India listings.

Below are a couple of the Mystamp Issues so far from India for 2018 :

In 2017 India produced over 30 different "MyStamp" issues, and Michel gives each one full catalog status.  Yet Michel does not list the official personalized stamps from Belgium such as the Smurf issue above.  Inconsistency is nothing new in stamp catalogues, but it does seem odd to me?

As technology continues to move forward, the definition of what constitutes a legitimate stamp issue by a national postal administration continues to evolve.  Collectors of course can choose to collect whatever they want, but for Catalog publishers the question of what to include and what to exclude is one they have to deal with on a daily basis.  And as a catalog coordinator on Colnect, I now understand some of that frustration they must deal with with collectors saying X should be listed or Y should not be listed for whatever reason. For me though, if a personalized stamp frame is printed with a design commissioned by the Post Office and then made available to collectors nation-wide for use on mail, it really should I think be included as part of the official stamp program for that nation for that year.

Trouble in philatelic paradise???? The "Autumn of Discontent" for Scott and Gibbons...(Repost & Update)

This is a repost of a blog article from my 1.0 blog originally posted on 24 November 2015

For those of you who have visited either the Stampboards or Stamp Community forums in the last couple weeks, you may be aware that two of the most important names in the philatelic world, Stanley Gibbons and Amos Publishing (publisher of the Scott line of albums and catalogs in the USA) have both been having very trying periods.

In the case of Amos, it seems to be a massive technical failure that has completely eliminated their presence on the internet.  Going to the main Amos Advantage website only results in an error message and a note saying that the company hopes to be back online soon.  But for now, access to the products produced by Amos for the philatelic community via the publisher's own website is completely cut off.  With the holiday season rapidly approaching, hopefully these technical issues will be resolved soon, since I am sure that Amos, like most retailers, depend on holiday sales for a significant portion of their business.

While Amos grapples with internet gremlins of the first order, a much more potentially serious problem is growing for the British philatelic institution Stanley Gibbons.  A few years back new owners of the comany decided to take Gibbons into the world of Stocks, floating what had been a private company with what was, at the time, a fairly successful Initial Public Offer.  The management at Gibbons then began aggressively marketing the Gibbons company as an opportunity for investors in rare philatelic collectibles, promoting the idea that philatelic items could be a good alternative investment in an age of low returns due to the very low interest rates available in the West, and the uncertainty caused by the rapid gyrations of stock markets since the start of the 2008 Global economic crisis.

The year 2015 will likely go down as Gibbons "annus horribilis" in terms of its decision to travel down the investment pathway.  Investors have not invested to the degree imagined, and the auction market for the type of high-end UK and Commonwealth material that is the bedrock of Gibbons inventory has been flat at best and losing value in some areas.  Gibbons stock, which started the year with a value of over UKP 3.00 per share, has now fallen to  below UKP 0.90, a nearly 75% drop in value. 

The fundamentals of the Gibbons company do not augur well for a recovery any time soon. It's internet presence via the Bidstart marketplace (which Gibbons purchases a couple years back hoping to increase its internet-based retail presence) is dire and going through yet another revamping. Profits have not met market expectations, and the result has been a steeping downward slide in the value of the stock. Parts of the Gibbons empire, such as the Catalog business, remain vibrant, but that branch alone can not support a company whose marketplace ambitions may simply have been too big for the resources at its disposal.  Hopefully Gibbons will be able to turn things around, reorganize itself around its core philatelic business, and seriously rethink the idea of being a vehicle to promote stamps as an "investment opportunity" for those seeking a quick profit.  Hopefully this can be achieved without Gibbons having to be "liquidated" in wake of further profit losses, but its unclear just how much lower Gibbons' stock price can go before the marketplace starts to consider that the most likely option. 

For collectors in North America, there is a little solace in knowing that Amos Publishing is a privately-held company, so much less subject to the whims and pressures of a financial market that prioritizes short-term profit over long-term potential for growth.  As disconcerting as the longer than expected resolution of Amos' technical issues is, these issues should be resolvable in the end, and hopefully the financial cost to Amos will not have been too egregious. If Amos was in Gibbons' position as a publicly-traded company, the potential for investor flight gravely damaging the economic health of the company due to this technical crisis would probably have been immense.

I am not anti-capitalist by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes keeping a company privately owned is a better option for the long-term health of the company instead of exposing the company to the whims of the global financial marketplace. I personally think the experience of Gibbons as a publicly-traded company illustrates the great risks that any company involved in collectibles faces.  In the end, philately really should never be seen as an investment tool, but rather for what it is, an enjoyable hobby that, perhaps over the long term, can also be profitable to the collector with a bit of luck, patience and time.

UPDATE : 

Since the original posting of this article back in November, things for Gibbons have gone from bad to worse.  Its share price on the London Stock Exchange is now less than a quarter of what it was in November, hovering around UKP 0.20 or so.  The management team has had to turn to stock owners for an infusion of capital, and there have been more than a few departures from the management team (some I will wager jumping with golden parachutes as is common in the world of investment capitalism these days). 

The Gibbons catalogue line is still being produced (they just released a brand new title Arabia covering the Arabian Peninsula, a welcome addition as this is an area of the philatelic world with little specialized guidance available, especially outside the British-influenced areas along the Persian Gulf) but their Bidstart marketplace looks set to be wound down, and overall the company seems to be on more than a bit of life support at the present.  Hopefully for the futue of the hobby the Gibbons name and its essential production of catalogues survives these troubling times, but it still looks very touch and go as far as the current organizational setup of Gibbons is concerned.