Northbound to The Outer Limits

This past weekend brought the first truly beautiful spring weather weekend here in New England, and it felt like the perfect excuse for a day trip further north up the coast. Without much of a plan, we strapped the two four-legged furry kids into the SUV and decided to head toward Brunswick, Maine.

The one real destination on the radar was Outer Limits Gallery & Studios, a shop that has been a customer of House of Roulx for the past few years and, more recently, officially began carrying our artist trading card series in-store this past fall. I had never actually met owner Brad Nord in person, so it felt like a great opportunity to finally catch up, see the shop firsthand, and experience one of the more unique brick-and-mortar spaces carrying our products.

At the same time, it was also just a good excuse to take in some classic New England coastal scenery after a long winter. Sometimes the best trips are the ones with almost no real agenda beyond getting in the car and seeing where the road takes you.

If you have never been to Outer Limits Gallery & Studios and have even the slightest interest in art, designer toys, or subculture collectibles, the spot is absolutely worth the trip.

Admittedly, I have never really been much of a toy collector or even enthusiast myself. With all the collectibles, memorabilia, artifacts, trading cards, and art we handle across our businesses, toys just somehow ended up being one segment of the collecting world I never spent much time exploring. It was pretty much the first thing I said to Brad walking into the shop, which immediately led into almost an hour of him completely schooling me on the toy world, production processes, artists working in the space, the history behind it all, and in general giving me a 10,000-foot overview of the scene, or at least as much as you can cram into a 60-minute visit.

It was fascinating, and apparent that Brad knows that world as well as just about anyone.

One thing I’ve realized more and more over the years is just how many different subcultures exist within the larger world of art collecting, and the even larger world of collecting in general. Some of them barely overlap at all, almost existing in completely separate universes, while others have always been deeply connected and universally collected across multiple generations of collectors.

I always appreciate fellow entrepreneurs, and I generally find that my wheels start turning anytime I have conversations with like-minded thinkers, even when they exist in slightly different realms of the creative and collecting worlds.

Brad and I briefly discussed some possible collaboration ideas on the toy side of things, and I think collectors can probably look forward to something in the near future featuring the masterful toy production work of Outer Limits Gallery & Studios paired with an exclusive Roulx artist trading card release.

My brain immediately went to those classic 1990s Starting Lineup figures, where you’d get something like a Reggie Lewis figure packaged with a matching trading card, but reimagined through a modern art lens. Imagine a Scott Listfield or Mab Graves astronaut figure paired with an RTC card, all packaged together in a retro nostalgia-inspired blister pack. Or maybe even a full series of Victor Castillo characters alongside a matching card set, and even better, a chase for a hand-painted figure by the artist.

For everyone who made it this far into the read, turn on your imagination for a second and picture the classic Starting Lineup figure at left below, remixed through the lens of the Victor Castillo artwork at right. This should already exist, and somehow it doesn’t… so we very well might need to make that happen.

I’ll definitely be bringing it up with Victor later this week when we catch up to talk more about our Art-Dex series, as he’s wrapping up his signing this week.