Where It Started

I'm Luis, and honestly LOT57 started because I was broke in college and obsessed with cars. I wanted to sell real ones, the 10 or 11 grand kind, but that money just wasn't there yet.

One of my wife's friends had been selling diecast for years. I went to visit him, saw what he was doing, and something clicked. If I couldn't flip real cars, I'd flip the tiny ones. So I started in my apartment: two little boxes, three or four different cars, listed on eBay.

That's the whole origin. No boardroom, no plan. Just a collector who got tired of the runaround and decided to build the shop he actually wanted to buy from.

It Was Never Just About Selling

My favorite part of this whole thing isn't the sales. It's the people. Customers don't just come in, buy a car, and leave. We talk cars all day. What's dropping, what we love about it, what we don't. Those turn into real friendships.

That's the kind of connection you just can't get in most businesses. On paper it's a business, but really it's my hobby and my life. It's wild that you can build something around the thing you love most.

Going Live

For a while it was just eBay and Facebook Marketplace. The next real step was launching the LOT57 website, my own home base instead of living on someone else's platform. After that, a customer I'm close with kept telling me to try live auctions. I was slammed, so I put it off for months, then finally gave it a shot.

My very first live show pulled 60 to 80 people in the session. Folks were blown away by the cars, because most of what they'd seen live was just Hot Wheels. I started at 4 PM and didn't stop until around midnight. In that one session I made more than 50 new friends. That's when I knew this was different.

Why the Cars Are Different

Every reseller starts with the basics: Johnny Lightning, M2, Auto World, Hot Wheels. But the first premium overseas piece that really stopped me made me think: there has to be more than the usual stuff.

So instead of going down the same road everyone else was on, I started building relationships directly with the makers overseas. Today we work direct with names like Inno64, Error404, YM Model, BNDS, and MicroTurbo. Most shops just resell whatever a distributor hands them, the same cars twenty other stores already have. I wanted you to log in and go, "what ARE these cars?"

And I've always been a quality guy. Everything I touch gets the quality treatment, down to the cars, the packing, the shipping, all of it.

The Name

Back in 2019 I was hunting for a name, and I didn't want something obvious like "diecast this" or "diecast that." On eBay, people sell whole collections as lots, and I knew I'd have a lot of cars, so "lot" had to be in there.

The 57 is sentimental. My dad loves '57 Bel Airs, so that number always meant something to me. And Supplies because I never wanted to box myself in. This year I started wholesale, actually supplying other people with diecast, so it turned out to fit perfectly. Lot, 57, Supplies. Boom.

LOT57 Exclusives

The part I'm most excited about is the exclusives, collabs you won't find anywhere else. It started with the Muddy USA build, the Auto World x LOT57 1983 Chevy Silverado K10 Lifted, made on Auto World tooling with a cowl hood.

From there it grew into pieces like the ERROR404 x LOT57 RYOHE Skyline R34 "GIFTED" and the YM Model x LOT57 Supra JZA80. It used to be one brand teaming with one factory. Being a shop that collaborates directly with these makers to create something brand new is what sets apart what I can bring you.

The One That's Not For Sale

People ask me my favorite car, so here it is: my chameleon R34. It shifts color with the light, it's a gorgeous resin piece, and the plate reads 399 of 399, the very last one off the production run.

If somebody offered me a million dollars for it, I'd say no. R34s are my thing, everyone who knows LOT57 knows that. One of my buddies is even importing two real R34s from Japan next year, a real-life replica of this exact car, dual clutch and all. I can't wait.