Nov. 17, 2022

Somewhere in between games of Pokemon, Madden and Halo, a business owner was born inside Bobby Brockmueller.

A business centered around vintage video games has grown into CaveGamers, which Brockmueller began while in high school and which now has started construction on a 54,000-square-foot office and warehouse to support its growth.

“We’ve been pretty incognito,” Brockmueller acknolwledged. “We’re super excited for this new warehouse because we’re going to be able to put everything under one roof, and not only will we do that, but we’ll have a lot of room to expand.”

Growing up in Brandon, Brockmueller was “a big gamer,” he said. “I played a lot of video games in high school, and I just had a big interest. It was a fun thing to do with friends, and once I graduated high school, I was looking for a way to make some money without having a real job.”

At the time, a flaw in the Xbox 360 video game system was causing some of them to overheat easily.

“So I saw there was a need to repair them and found a YouTube video that showed me what I needed to do to repair it, and that’s how things got started,” he said. “Buying broken Xboxes and fixing them.”

The fixes began to fail, though. They’d work 30 or 60 days, and then the customer would be back looking for a refund or replacement.

“I realized this is probably not a long-term thing, but it got me into buying and selling video games, that whole world,” Brockmueller said. “So I started finding good deals on Craigslist or pawn shops and selling them on eBay.”

That became the model for the small business he ran while attending the University of Sioux Falls for computer science. He’d find video game systems or games that required minimal cleaning or repair, fix and test them, and resell them on eBay. While running track and cross country, he stayed a fifth year in school and added a business major.

Then, it was decision time.

During college, he’d been able “to build up some good capital to work with,” and he had a sense the business could work.

“Computer science, you can get a pretty good job developing software, and that’s a good career and I really liked it, but I decided I wanted to give it a shot because I thought if I put full-time effort and hired some people, it had good potential, and I though I’d regret it if I didn’t give it a shot.”

His first hire was a longtime friend in 2015, right after college graduation, and they got to work in a 1,000-square-foot space in Brandon.

“We didn’t have titles for a long time because when you’re just a two-man show, you do a little bit of everything,” Brockmueller said. “He’s now our sales and procurement manager, so he does a lot with repricing our stuff and listing it on different selling platforms and sourcing inventory.”

While they started with a small retail space, the online side of the business grew so fast they had to abandon in-person retail, he said.

“It was sad because it wasn’t that it wasn’t doing well – it was that the online was doing so well,” he said.

For the next few years, they grew in Brandon with “stuff stacked to the ceilings, boxes everywhere,” he continued. “At this point, we were selling a lot of toys, used video games, new video games, a lot of products. It wasn’t just used games.”

But while new product could be ordered through a supplier, used ones took a lot more to source.

“Especially old and retro, the only place you can get it is directly from consumers or pawn shops and places like that, but that’s not scalable,” Brockmueller said. “So we have a lot of places where we get used stuff, pretty much all directly from consumers, a lot of online places where people sell stuff. So we have to process a lot, one or two units at a time. It’s exactly like treasure hunting.”

2020 tipping point

A few years into the business, CaveGamers had moved to an 4,000-square-foot warehouse in Tea. That became small in a hurry, so when a neighboring business moved out, CaveGamers took over that space too. And then came the pandemic.

“You have all these people staying home looking for things to do, and they don’t really want to go shopping at brick-and-mortar stores, so they go online. And we were selling video games, which was a product people would buy that would give them some peace and something to do,” Brockmueller said. “And we sold online, so we kind of hit the jackpot. 2020 was huge for us, and in 2021 we were able to maintain the same numbers as 2020, and this year is about the same as last year. So the pandemic was huge.”

Everything sold, he continued.

“It was video games, it was toys, action figures, a lot of retro games,” he said. “I couldn’t believe how much stuff we were reselling. We just got all this demand for our products, and we were able to hire people pretty easily to fill the labor.”

That didn’t last. Supply chain issues with new toys forced ordering ahead and unpredictability in arrivals. Inventory ordered for Christmas came late and had to be stored.

“We started growing too fast and running out of space, and we eventually leased another space in Sioux Falls, so right now we’re operating out of two spaces,” Brockmueller said. “There were definitely some struggles, but overall things went really well for us. We were super fortunate.”

CaveGamers now has 18 employees with merchandise split among multiple locations and still not enough space.

“We’re having to crawl around pallets,” Brockmueller said. “Basically every time we see these buying opportunities for products and to expand into new stuff, we don’t have the space, but we still try to buy.”

The new warehouse is being built off Interstate 29 between 12th and Madison streets, and the hope is to move in during the summer of 2023.

“I’m guessing when we move into our new building, we’re going to be growing pretty quickly, so then we’ll definitely be looking for more people.”

In the meantime, there’s a holiday season ahead, which means Brockmueller and his team likely will be working long days sourcing, selling and shipping handheld Nintendo systems, Wii and plenty of Pokemon games. On the toy side of the business, “it’s a lot of collectible toys,” Brockmueller said.

“We sell a lot to Amazon fulfillment centers across the U.S. … and when someone buys from us, Amazon will ship the product to the customer for us. So that’s really nice, but you have to be sending stuff out to those fulfillment centers already in October for stuff you’re going to sell in November and December, so that’s what we’re doing through October and November, just sending as much as we can do those fulfillment centers so we’ll have enough stock to sell.”

It all leaves little time for Brockmueller to devote to the hobby of his childhood. These days, video games generally are work, not play.

“I do (play) sometimes, but not nearly as much as I used to,” Brockmueller said. “It’s just very hard with all the time demands of the business to find time for it, but it’s kind of become my video game – the business. It takes strategic thinking and trying different things. It’s fun and it’s a challenge, and you learn a lot from it.”