The first clue is in the photo. A boy on the floor, model cars within reach, already absorbed in a world small enough to fit in his hands and big enough to last a lifetime. Christian Braun likes to point to that picture, included in a post about the dream of building the longest Hot Wheels track ever, as proof that the fascination started early.

But the photo, like most origin stories, only tells part of the truth.

Christian did not begin as a model car collector at all.

When he was six, his older brother made a declaration that would shape both of their lives. “You get the toy soldiers, I get the cars,” he said. So they specialized. Christian turned toward Timpo Toys soldiers. His brother claimed the cars. It sounds simple enough, but in retrospect it feels like the beginning of a system. Divide the territory, go deep, learn everything.

Christian stayed with figures for years. His brother became the one immersed in model cars, eventually writing books on the subject. Christian helped with one of the early guides, a Siku model car catalog published in the 1980s, and watched what happened when the tidy certainty of print met the messy reality of collectors. The moment the book came out, corrections started arriving. Another color. Another wheel variation. Another overlooked detail. His brother hated that feeling — the sense that a printed guide was already incomplete the moment it entered the world. Christian, though, seems to have drawn a different lesson from it. The problem was not that documentation was impossible. The problem was that it needed a form flexible enough to keep growing.

That idea would become one of the driving forces of his life.

Christian was born in Germany and first came to the United States as a toddler, when his father worked at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. He later returned as a student on exchange at NYU, then again for work with General Electric in venture capital, after earning a master’s degree from London Business School. But long before any of that, he was already learning the rhythms of collecting: the hunt, the eye, the feel for hidden value, the instinct to rescue what others overlooked.

As a teenager, he hitchhiked into economically struggling areas looking for old toy shops, bicycle shops, and forgotten basements where unsold inventory had been left untouched for decades. He found treasures in the kinds of places most people would pass without a second glance. In Vienna, he once walked into a shop so full of old stock that he spent every penny he had and barely knew how he would get home. Near where he lived, there was an elderly woman in a bicycle shop who kept remarkable old toys in the basement but would only make one trip downstairs on any given day. She was too tired for more. If she brought up the right item, you bought it. If she did not, you left and came back another time. In another town, two unmarried sisters ran a toy shop with big anonymous brown boxes stacked behind the counter. Christian never knew what was in them. The arrangement they arrived at was pure collector theater. He could point to one box, they would bring it down, and if he bought something from it, he earned the right to open another. No second chances. No reopening old boxes. Luck, money, and instinct decided everything.

These were not just fond memories. They were part of his education.

He bought mostly figures, but if there were cars, he bought those too and gave them to his brother. Then he made lists and sold pieces to collectors he knew. The money financed his studies. He became, in his words, a dealer to his brother, supplying models while also feeling that his brother’s collection was somehow partly his own. It was next door to his room. He lived alongside it. He collected through proximity, through knowledge, through movement. He learned how value worked, but he also learned something more important. Objects carried stories, and too often those stories were one generation away from disappearing.

That tension — between the market value of collectibles and their historical value — runs through everything Christian does. He understands both. He knows collections can represent serious money. He has built systems that help collectors inventory what they own, estimate value, track duplicates, sell or trade items, and, crucially, leave behind a usable record for the family members who inherit those collections. He knows the familiar story. A collector dies, a spouse or child has no idea what is valuable, and a lifetime of careful acquisition is sold off for pennies through an estate auction or cleared out by people who do not know what they are handling. He has seen it happen often enough to want a better outcome.

But money alone does not explain him.

If you want to understand Christian, the clearest place to look is still not a display shelf. It is a dead website.

Years ago, he used to visit a Matchbox web directory with 32 linked collector sites. All of them are now gone. eBay remained. Almost everything else had vanished. And with those vanished websites went photos, research, production notes, histories, variations, catalogs, arguments, discoveries, and the accumulated labor of collectors who had spent decades building knowledge. A printed book, even an out-of-date one, can still be found. A dead website takes its contents to its digital grave.

That realization sharpened what had already been forming in Christian’s mind. Documentation had to be living. It had to be flexible. It had to keep expanding. And if nobody built a place for that to happen, the hobby would keep losing its memory.

That belief sits at the heart of hobbydb.com, the platform Christian started building after earlier efforts that included collectible forums, catalog experiments, and a first-generation database engine that did not work well enough. He sold off forum properties to raise funds, rebuilt the system from scratch, and pushed toward something much more ambitious than a site for model cars. The goal was not simply to catalog one hobby. It was to create a structure capable of documenting any collectible seriously enough that real collectors would trust it.

That meant understanding that different collecting worlds speak different languages. A diecast collector cares about one set of attributes. A pin collector cares about another. Comic books, cereal prizes, porcelain signs, Starbucks mugs, ancient coins, action figures, posters, banana labels, airline sickness bags, and tiny cream-top lids from Swiss cafés all come with their own quirks, standards, and obsessive subcultures. Christian delights in that sprawl. He once described hobbyDB as documenting “mankind’s lesser achievements,” which sounds funny until you hear the affection in it. History tends to preserve the wars, the politicians, the official record. Christian is drawn to everything else — the things people made, bought, played with, saved, loved, misplaced, traded, researched, and passed down.

That is why “Collector of Collectors,” the phrase he uses in his signature, feels exactly right. 

Christian is interested in objects, yes, but even more in the people who care enough to document them. The volunteer who adds 10,000 obscure models to the database. The enthusiast who uploads 70,000 photos from a vanished site. The girlfriend who calls after a collector dies because he made her promise the data should not disappear with him. The curator who knows one brand, one era, one category more deeply than anyone else. These are the people Christian sees as essential. In his mind, they are not background figures. They are the keepers of continuity.

This is the content that Karl Schnelle curates

He still loves the objects themselves, especially older ones. Vintage toys move him more than most contemporary collectibles. He likes the sense that they were made to be played with, not preserved in mint condition for future adults to debate over. He still lights up over the physical beauty of early Hot Wheels, the elegance of a good slot car, the oddity of a copied casting copied from another copied casting. He still finds pleasure in the rabbit holes. But what makes him compelling is that he widened that private fascination into public usefulness.

He is not merely building a database. He is trying to save a world that has always been more fragile than it looked.

And he knows he cannot do it alone.

Christian’s ask is straightforward: join in. Add what you know. Document what you collect. Help preserve the corners of hobby culture that would otherwise go dark. He wants hobbyDB to grow into a volunteer-driven effort of extraordinary scale, with 100,000 people contributing over time. Right now, there are only a few thousand, and not all are active. He needs the Porsche poster expert, the BMW person, the Shelby obsessive, the collector who knows one forgotten diecast brand better than anyone else, the person with the photo archive, the person with the catalogs, the person with the patience to fill in the gaps.

For Christian, this is not just data entry. It is an act of preservation.

The boy in the photo started near toy cars, even if they were not yet his to collect. The man he became is still chasing that same feeling of the thrill of discovery, the pleasure of connection, the sense that a small object can open onto a much larger history. Only now he is asking others to help build that history with him.

There is room for 100,000 curators.

He would like you to be one of them. You can reach him at christian@hobbydb.com for more information.