Yahoo Movies YouTuber Supercar Blondie Is Launching an Online Auction Site for Rarified Rides
Alex Hirschi has driven and reviewed a lot of supercars, but now she’s gearing up to sell them, too.
The 38-year-old Australian, who is behind the popular YouTube channel Supercar Blondie, will launch a new online auction site on April 2. SBX Cars will hold 15 to 20 auctions per week with lots that run the gamut from multi-million dollar supercars to luxury yachts.
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Hirschi was a broadcast journalist based in Dubai before she created Supercar Blondie with her husband, Nik, in 2017, but her love of motoring was instilled at a young age. “I grew up in a very small country town in Australia, and we were always in the car for hours, even to get to the nearest city,” Alex tells Robb Report. “So I spent a lot of time in cars, and my mom and dad loved driving . . . so it was less about a passion for cars and more about a passion for driving,” she says of her draw to the world of automotive.
Yet Alex never initially had aspirations to become an influencer. “I grew up without social media, so it was never really even an option for me as a career,” she says. As for how the media side started, she explains: “I had a local radio show and would cover local events, some of which were car launches. I got the opportunity to drive a Bentley Flying Spur for the weekend as a press car, and that was my first moment. Nik and I then went to every car event we could find on the weekends, apart from our full-time jobs (Nik was in banking), and we would track down cars to film. Within a year, I had built up to 50,000 followers on Instagram. We had tapped into what people wanted on a mass scale, the layman’s perspective of cool cars.”
The supercar-focused YouTube channel, which currently has some 18.5 million subscribers, has since expanded to become a fully-fledged media brand with 65 full-time employees working out of Dubai. SBX will operate primarily from Los Angeles and Dubai, with another dedicated team in London. The auction house hopes to fill a gap in the market by offering top-tier vehicles to collectors in a convenient and timely manner.
“While we were building the media side over the last few years, we got lots of emails coming in from people saying, ‘Hey, do you know where I can buy this car,’ or ‘Do you know where I can sell this?’ We didn’t have the time to pick up the phone and manually call everyone we knew,” says Alex, “so we asked ourselves how we could best connect the buyer and the seller, and a premium auction platform made sense.”
Bring a Trailer is already auctioning off multimillion-dollar cars but offers cheaper rides, too. Another U.S. competitor, Cars & Bids, caters to car nerds by selling niche, late-model Hondas and Subarus. SBX, on the other hand, will be the only platform to auction classic cars, hypercars, supercars, and other rarified vehicles.
“It never made sense to open a high-volume platform that caters to $10,000 to $20,000 hobbyist cars, because that’s not the brand we developed,” says Nik. And while the Hirschi’s “started seeing other digital platforms being able to sell the multimillion-dollar cars,” they also noted that the scope of those platforms was limited. “You have a platform in the U.K. that doesn’t dabble in the U.S. and a leader in the U.S. that doesn’t dabble in Europe. But our audience is in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S . . . it’s global, so we’ll cater to that,” says Nik.
Social media cachet may also distinguish SBX from traditional auction houses, such as RM Sotheby’s, Barrett-Jackson, and Gooding & Co. Sellers will have the opportunity to showcase their vehicle on Supercar Blondie ahead of the auction, providing them access to a large audience of deep-pocketed collectors. (Supercar Blondie channels reach an average of two billion people per month.)
SBX managed to secure more than $100 million in consignments before launch, according to Hirschi. Some of the first lots to be sent under the (digital) gavel will include a Mercedes-AMG One hypercar, a Tesla Cybertruck, a Hyperion XP-1 prototype, and the Icon yacht by BMW and Tyde. Other highlights include a one-of-three LaFerrari prototype and a one-of-nine Lamborghini Veneno roadster. In addition, the site will offer classics, such as the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing, a Lamborghini Miura, a BMW 507, an Aston Martin DB5, and an Isdera 036i Spyder. Not a bad initial lineup.
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