Plymouth Meeting resident Jim Drucker has an interesting story of entrepreneurship, commerce, and fandom that came together with the creation of his company, NewKadia.com, one of the world’s largest comic book stores.
“For 25 years, NewKadia has been proof that imagination, innovation, and persistence can turn a few dusty boxes in a basement into a global enterprise,” said Jim Drucker, founder and CEO of NewKadia.
Now. at age 73, Drucker is looking to hand the baton to new leadership with fresh energy and a different skill set to expand the business.
Drucker launched NewKadia in 2000 from his basement in Plymouth Meeting, turning 807 comics from his childhood collection into a 25-year e-commerce success story. The business is now based in Norristown.
“I started NewKadia.com to solve a problem I had — where could I sell my comic book collection? The market was inefficient,” Drucker explained. “So, instead of selling to a local store, we created NewKadia to sell them worldwide.”
Today, NewKadia is one of the world’s largest online comic book stores, having sold 2.5 million comics to collectors in 121 countries.
“About 71 percent of those customers come back again and again. That’s the best measure of success,” Drucker noted. “Our systems process 150 comics an hour — four times faster than our competitors — and reprice every book daily based on demand. We’re lean, efficient, and proven.”
NewKadia overcame a devastating flood in 2022, which destroyed 110,000 books, and quickly rebuilt. It wasn’t the first time Drucker faced seemingly impossible odds. He had already built an extraordinary career in pro sports as the Commissioner of the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) minor league, the Continental Basketball Association (CBA).
Raised in New York, Drucker has called the Philadelphia region home since 1976. His late father, Norm Drucker, is considered one of the top referees in NBA history.
After graduating summa cum laude from the University at Buffalo, he earned law degrees from both Duke University and Temple University. A chance encounter at a 1978 Philadelphia 76ers game — sitting next to a young attorney named David Stern — led to Drucker’s election as commissioner of the CBA, which became the NBA’s official minor league.
Drucker doubled the size of the CBA, increased team values from $24,000 to $6 million, and negotiated its first multi-year NBA and ESPN contracts.
In 1989, Drucker founded Conshohocken-based Global Television Sports, producing telecasts of The Penn Relays on ESPN and Philadelphia’s Channel 17 as well as college basketball games and volleyball and basketball tournaments.
He became commissioner of the Arena Football League in 1994, and in two years, attendance increased, and franchise values multiplied. When he left, his own franchise was acquired by Jon Bon Jovi, who launched the Philadelphia Soul.
“The common thread has always been building something from the ground up,” Drucker explained.
From his original 807 comic books in 2000, NewKadia, which pre-dated Shopify and founded just two years after Google, Drucker has demonstrated that niche e-commerce can be both profitable and sustainable.
“It’s the right moment to hand it off to someone with fresh energy and different experiences to expand upon what has already been built,” Drucker said.
Photo: Submitted