The mints behind our shelves: who we buy from and why it matters
Every coin and foil in our shop starts at a mint, and each mint has its own character. Knowing who struck a piece tells you a lot about it before you ever pick it up. Here is a guide to the mints we buy from, and what we look to each of them for.
The Royal Australian Mint in Canberra makes Australia's circulating currency, and for collectors it is the home of Australian legal tender commemoratives. This is where the coloured $2 coins that get people checking their change come from, along with collector issues celebrating Australian life, from our wildlife to the Australian Women's Weekly Birthday Cake Book series that stirred up every Australian who ever pointed at the swimming pool cake. We are an official stockist.
The Perth Mint has been striking precious metal in Western Australia since 1899, and it remains one of the most respected names in gold and silver anywhere in the world. When collectors want weight in the hand, bullion heritage and Australian themes done in precious metal, Perth is usually where we point them.
The New Zealand Mint, including its Agoro range, is the pop culture specialist of the group. A private mint in Auckland issuing legal tender for Niue, it holds licences most collectors would not expect to see on a coin: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, DC, The Transformers, Dune and Stranger Things among them. The blind box foils and shaped coins we write about often come from here. If a mint can be playful, this is the one, and the quality of the colour and relief work backs the fun up.
The Royal Mint in the United Kingdom has been striking coins for over 1,100 years, which is a sentence worth reading twice. Britannia and the great British commemoratives carry a weight of history no other mint on this list can match.
NZ Post rounds out the list with New Zealand issues, and we also range pieces from other world mints when something is too good to pass by.
A word on why the sourcing matters. Mint Coin Shop is operated by newsXpress, an Australian owned company serving collectors since 2001, and we are official stockists of the Royal Australian Mint, The Perth Mint and the New Zealand Mint. Everything we sell comes through authorised channels, which means what is in the box is what the mint struck. In a collecting world where fakes are a genuine problem, buying from an authorised stockist is the simplest protection there is.
Browse by mint at mintcoinshop.com.au and you will see the character of each come through.
