One of the highest-profile retail locations in south Concord is getting a new owner that ironically doesn’t do any store-front retail at all.
NobleSpirit has been selling rare stamps, coins and collectibles since 1960, and for the last 27 years, it’s done so exclusively online through eBay. As early as Thanksgiving, the company could move from its current home in a Pittsfield mill to the building at 234 S. Main St. that is still known to many as the Amish Barn.
Founder Joe Cortese said interest has been unending since work began on the triangular parcel at the intersection of South Main and South State streets, which the company bought and is revamping.
“It’s such a key location for Concord. I get stopped at least every hour when I’m out there by someone passing by and asking, ‘What’s going to go in there?'” he said. “I was really surprised by the level of interest in the building.”
Despite that level of traffic, however, NobleSpirit’s business model won’t change. Sales will continue to be exclusively online — “ours is a business that we can conduct on the moon,” Cortese said.
So why are they bothering to move?
“It’s a lot more prestigious to be in Concord,” Cortese said. “I see tremendous movement in Concord for relationship, personal service businesses… When you tell somebody you’re in Concord, they know where it is.”
There’s another reason. Although NobleSpirit sells exclusively online, it often gathers material in the physical world.
“We’re not looking for foot traffic but the fact that you’ve got 80,000 cars seeing you — somebody in each car has a coin collection, stamp collection. Line-of-sight exposure can be very, very useful,” he said. The company has also found success with booths at market days events.
The building sale price was $500,000, according to records.
Cortese says he started dealing in stamps from a young age and in 1960 started the business to encompass coins and a wide variety of other collectibles. They moved to Pittsfield in 2014. Cortese’s son, Michael, is vice-president.
The company has 18 employees and does business with clients throughout the world, including some who regularly “spend five or six figures,” Cortese said. Coins and stamps remain central, but it also handles items from Pokeman cards to lithographs to pre-Columbia artifacts to comic books.
Cortese says the building at 234 S. Main was built in 1988 and is “a very sound structure.”
“We’re mostly doing cosmetic work,” he said.