From a stranger's shelf to our crates
Every record in a Needle to Wax crate has made the same trip. Here's what happens along the way.
It usually starts with a phone call, or a message from someone who saw us at a market. A parent's collection. A lifetime of jazz in a back room. Forty years of records nobody has played since the turntable broke.
We go to them. We look through everything on site, record by record, and we listen to the story first, because the story is part of what we're taking care of.
- 01Dig on site
- 02Log the lot
- 03Clean the jacket
- 04New sleeves
- 05Clean the record
- 06Grade, record first
- 07Our strip, by hand
- 08Into the collection
Back at the warehouse, the collection is logged as its own lot, so every record keeps its history. Then the slow part. Jackets are cleaned by hand. Every record gets new sleeves, inside and out. Each one is dusted, cleaned, then graded: the record first, the cover second, always in that order.
Nothing goes into a crate until we'd be happy to take it home ourselves.
Last comes the strip: our own, printed in-house and put on by hand, so anyone flipping through can read the year, the label, the pressing and the grade without pulling the record out.
Then it waits in our collection for the right market and the right crate, and, eventually, the right person.
