The Feathered Serpent originated in 1986 as an Exotic Animal Breeding business, specializing in reptiles. The name originates from one of the ancient Aztec gods; Quetzelcoatal, a rough scaled viper from the region who was believed to be half man and half snake. After one year the Department of Natural Resources contacted me to see if I would remove unwanted reptiles from resident’s homes and provide educational lectures for the many state parks employees.
During this time I was the first to successfully breed, in captivity, several generations of the Leaf-tailed Geckos from Madagascar in 1993 and assisted the National Aquarium in Baltimore with their breeding project of the same species. The reptile industry soon became difficult to maintain sufficient profit to warrant the extensive labor and feeding cost. Thus was born the concept for Dragonsaye Auctions.
In 2001 I set to task the rekindling of my penchant for one of nature’s mysteries, rocks. As a youth I was often chastised for rocks in the washer, my mother bought my first tumbler at age 10. Soon after she became rather ill and to pass the time she started making cabochons and jewelry. Unable to sit at a machine I did most of the rough work and trimming as needed. As I grew other interest’s replaced my fondness for these gems and I joined the service. After years of wandering, getting married and having children, and the closing of my business, I decided to start anew.
I sought out some of my old wholesale vendors and began acquiring rough material to sell and slab. Entering the auction market seemed like the best avenue to regain a solid business market, so I set up shop on the leading auction site of the time. I was soon disenchanted with the fee structure and the lack of personal customer service. My wife and I wrote down all of the things we liked and a list of all the ones we didn’t. We combined the two lists together to provide an alternate auction site, with a more customer friendly atmosphere.
Taking the money from my 401 K, we invested our future to begin this enterprise with the hope of making enough to augment our retirement. It has been slow going for the first 18 months but we are gaining ground. Our first month’s total hits were 3000+. By December we had 500,000 and 4 months later we eclipsed 1,300,000 hits. We were ecstatic. However, that was short lived as MSN instituted a new Server Security upgrade which caused many smaller sites to be flagged as Dangerous. This is not the case; we have a Security Certificate and many steps to ensure against spam and viruses. Our hits took a serious nose dive! We have addressed the problem and most servers have approved us to operate. We are still having some difficulty with one major server and hope to have this problem fixed soon.
All in all it took 40 + years to come full circle. So I guess the old adage is true; “Once a rock hound, always a rock hound.”
