Larry & Sandy Hogston

Larry playing his banjo

Hogston Traders is a new and growing company in the online market place. My name is Larry Hogston, and along with my wife, Sandy, we started this business back in January of 2006. I will try to give you a brief history of my life and the events that led to the creation of Hogston Traders.

I have always had a burning desire to learn and to unravel the past. As such, I have had many interest and hobbies over the years. I guess I an explorer by nature. Some of my most interesting endeavors were: archaeology, cave exploring, fishing, hunting, fly tying, archery, chess, music, coin collecting, treasure hunting, flint knapping, electronics, computer programming, engineering, designing & inventing, etc. I worked for several years in the mining industry as a mechanical designer which led me into computer programming. I recently resigned from my career as an independent financial adviser to pursue other business ventures.

Sandy has worked for the past 20+ years in an office environment. She has been such a big help in organizing our business, not to mention supporting us financially through the lean years. We have been married since 1992, but as Sandy likes to point out; we dated for 13 years first. I guess it took her that long to slow me down as I was always off on some adventure or working.

Our business ethics are modeled after our life; honesty and integrity. That is what matters the most to us at Hogston Traders. You can rest assured that we will always be up front and honest with all of our listings and that we will always go the extra mile to keep our customers satisfied.

So why did we create Hogston Traders? In December 2004, Sandy was diagnosed with breast cancer. A few months later, I suffered sudden permanent hearing loss in one ear. These events led us to realize that things can really change overnight. After a year long touch and go struggle, Sandy has won the battle with cancer and is doing fine. I spent a lot of time going to hearing specialist with no luck of recovering any of my hearing. I am now plagued with one of the worse cases of tinnitus (perceived noise in the ears) on record. This makes it so hard at times to communicate especially over the telephone. Being a musician (I play the banjo), this has really been hard on me losing my stereo hearing. These two events were really tough on us financially as well as emotionally. We started Hogston Traders as a means to make a living should either one of our conditions take a turn for the worse.

Hogston Traders has made agreements with many wholesalers with products which include electronics, DVD, tools, computers, etc. We have many methods of acquiring products for our eBay store; estate sales, yard sales, flea markets, selling items for others through the Selling Assistant program, etc.  We hope to be selling custom built software applications in the near future. I am in the process right now of designing some much needed software tools for eBay users. We will only try to sell items through Hogston Traders that we would own ourselves.  The only problem I foresee is getting time to list everything on eBay. We are already in need of a much bigger warehouse and we haven even got started yet.