Bring a Trailer Started as a Craigslist Blog. It Created an Industry

What started as a blog throwing up Craigslist listings you might text your buddies morphed into an auction Goliath featuring everything from low-mileage A80 Supras to million dollar hypercars including Ferrari LaFerraris and of course Bugattis. The site is Bring a Trailer, and it changed how enthusiasts gawk at, vet, and buy collectors cars.

On the latest episode of The Drivecast, Howard Swig, who is now the President of Bring a Trailer, sat down exclusively with The Drive for a candid discussion about how the company fundamentally operates, how it redefined the online auction industry, how it’s contending with a wave of new competition, and how it’s all about the comments section.

The growth stages have been real for Bring a Trailer. The outfit didn’t just change how enthusiasts and collectors buy cars, it created an entire industry. Competitors have come and gone, though, one has stuck around and become a challenger in the marketplace. But Bring a Trailer’s secret sauce isn’t just one thing. And if it were, it would probably be the comments section.

But like everything there’s controversies and questions. People suspect there’s money laundering going on with Bring a Trailer as the throughput, a listing made it onto the site with AI-derived photos, and that’s before addressing shill bidding, comment moderation, and crazy outlier auction prices that make you scratch your head. Today Swig broke it all down in a candid conversation with Editor-In-Chief Kyle Cheromcha and Director of Content and Product Joel Feder.

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Full Transcript

Kyle: Okay, let’s go. So Joel, you ever sold a car on Bring a Trailer?

Joel: You know what? I can actually say I have. There aren’t that many

Kyle: Wait! Really?

Joel: I know, I know, I know. Yep. I know. There aren’t that many times we do this and you’re like, “So Joel?” And I’m like, “Yes.” I did sell. I sold my E34 M5 on Bring a Trailer. It was terribly sad on my life story. Remember that whole I used to be cool? And I actually in a previous life wrote it up for work. I sold the car and that was never part of the plan, but as I was selling it, I realized I’m a long time caller or longtime lurker, never a caller. And I had never realized how it actually works when you sell a car and Bring a Trailer. And job first, Kyle, you know me. And so I was like, I should write this up and the whole behind the velvet rope thing. And so I wrote this whole story of here’s what it’s like to sell a car and Bring a Trailer.

Joel: It was an interesting and cool experience. It was definitely in the modern era with the auctions. It was in 2016 and that car has now been resold three times on Bring a Trailer and I always get flagged in the comments.

Kyle: It’s a frequent flyer. I love that. I love that.

Joel: Somebody eventually crashed it at the front end and that’s a forever unclean. I’m done. I won’t touch it again. So it’s dead to me.

Kyle: Well, it had a good run.

Joel: It had a good run. But that brings us to today’s guest, the man in charge of literally something that upended the entire sales car collector industry, Howard Swig, who’s the president of Bring a Trailer these days. Howard, welcome.

Howard: Thanks for having me guys. Joel, you said 2016. I mean, that was early, early days. So you were obviously an early adopter and in the mix early on. Those were prehistoric times as far as I’m concerned compared to what we’re doing now.

Joel: It was long before the Bugatti Veyron sales and LaFerrari sales era, I will admit, but I got fair value, fair money. There was good action on it and it went for frankly what the market value was. Full transparency for anyone that never read that story in a previous life. I did get a favor from Randy, the founder of Bring a Trailer through a friend via Sam Smith. I was under a time crunch and there was already a waiting queue of a couple weeks to sell a car on Bring a Trailer once you submit it. And I was moving across the country and I needed it gone now. And so I did have Sam Smith reach out to Randy, connect us, and I got special treatment in the form of connections got me on the site quick, but I didn’t get any discounts. I didn’t get any special treatment other than it just got on the site quick. And I disclosed that in my story so everyone does know. Anyway.

Howard: You know what that probably meant? Seeing as we were a skeleton staff, Randy said, “Howard, this guy Joel’s M5 needs to go today, so write it up and do it this afternoon.” And I probably did. Sorry to interrupt you.

Joel: That was 100% running into Memorial Day weekend. So sorry, Howard.

Kyle: It’s amazing how times change.

Joel: I want to start off running through the background of Bring a Trailer. It was founded back in 2007 and I remember these days. It was a simple blog that was basically sharing cool classified listings of Craigslist cars, like stuff you would text your friend and they actually needed to be possibly picked up on a trailer, the whole point of that. And now we’re a business that it was acquired by Hearst. You guys are doing billions of dollars of sales. You got lot Ferraris on there. What’s the biggest factor of how this whole thing evolved? How did we get here, right?

Howard: Yeah, for sure. As you pointed out, it started early days as a pretty simple WordPress blog and online newsletter that was kind of right in the middle of what I’d call the kind of golden era of eBay and Craigslist when there was a ton of real gems out there and guys like Randy wanted to share their passion with the world and was and is still addicted to hunting around the internet and fi

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