Collector Nation - CEO of ONIT Athlete on the Future of College Sports Cards | Live at The National

Episode Date: August 4, 2026

College sports cards are entering one of the most exciting periods the hobby has ever seen—and Evan Parker believes we’re just getting started. Recorded live from the VIP Lounge at The National Sp...orts Collectors Convention, Ryan Alford and Brian Ludden sit down with the CEO of Onit and co-founder of Mantle to discuss how NIL has transformed the trading card industry and why college athletes are becoming one of the hobby’s biggest opportunities. Evan shares how Onit is building officially licensed college trading cards that feature entire teams—not just future professional stars—while creating meaningful collectibles for athletes who may never receive another licensed card. The conversation also explores the importance of collector community, what Evan learned from helping build Mantle, and why expanding into women’s sports and other underserved markets could help bring a new generation of collectors into the hobby. The group also discusses what makes a premium trading card, why Onit remains committed to licensed, on-card autographs, and how collector feedback continues to shape the company’s products. Whether you’re prospecting tomorrow’s biggest stars, collecting your alma mater, or simply curious where the hobby is headed next, this episode offers an inside look at one of the fastest-growing segments in sports cards. Topics Covered • The future of college sports cards and NIL • Building Onit into a premium licensed trading card brand • Why collector community matters more than ever • What Evan learned from creating Mantle • On-card autographs vs. sticker autos • Growing the hobby through women’s sports and new collectors • Trends from The National Sports Collectors Convention • What’s next for Onit and the college card market Connect with Ryan Alford & Today’s Guest Ryan Alford https://www.ryanalford.com/ Evan Parker https://www.linkedin.com/in/evaneparker Onit Athlete https://onitathlete.com/ The National Sports Collectors Convention https://nsccshow.com/ Collector Nation https://thecollectornation.com/ If you enjoyed this episode, please follow Collector Nation on your favorite podcast platform, leave a five-star rating and review, and share this episode with a fellow collector. Your support helps us continue bringing you conversations with the people shaping the future of sports cards and collectibles.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Fandum doesn't start. And when someone's on an NFL team, that fandom starts in college. I think there's a lot of prospecting going on. If you think about college sports, especially football, it's massive. The collectability plus the investment side is there. And it's a delicate balance. And if you're somebody who wants to collect the best players, you want them for their entirety of their career. And that's only possible because what we're able to do now in the NIL space.
Starting point is 00:00:23 Welcome to the Collector Nation podcast here on the Collector Nation Network. Whether you're chasing grails or calling bluffs, you take you inside a hobby. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. On today's episode of Collector Nation, we have Evan Parker. He's the new CEO of On It. He's got big plans, big things in mind. We've got new football coming out, new chromium coming out, all things on it. Today on Collector Nation.
Starting point is 00:00:58 What's up, guys? I'm Ryan Alford. I'm the host of Collector Nation. My co-host, Brian Ludden, who's, he wears a lot of hats, CEO of Ludex. And we're, hey, honored. One of my favorite new products, I call it new, because I've been preaching about it for a couple of years now. But he is the new CEO of Onet, Evan Parker. What's up, Evan?
Starting point is 00:01:19 Thanks for having. Appreciate it. Hey, we're at the national, baby. We're at the national. What's going on? I mean, it's pretty amazing. Like, this is, I mean, this crowd is insane now. but think about the trade nights.
Starting point is 00:01:34 I mean, I don't know. This is like unwrappable stuff. This is just the VIPs now. It's like the biggest trade night. I don't even know where they're going to go. I'd love to just have like a camera on every table just to see the deals going down because you just know, interesting things are popping up that you, you know,
Starting point is 00:01:49 you'll never see trade there. They're not going to hit the comps. Just little things happen on every one of these tables. I think if you need like, if someone was like, tell me about the hobby. Just come to trade, one of these trades. night for like 30 minutes. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:03 And you'd understand what the buzz is about and why it's on the news. I'm telling you, I want like next year, David Marino is listening. I want like the world poker, you know, sort of like the cameras under the table so you can just see what's going on what people have in their pockets. Yes. That's awesome. Evan, I know you want to touch briefly your experience. Mantle, we're going to get to On it. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:28 But maybe what you've been building with Mantle. and then we'll talk all about on it. Yeah, so, you know, Mantle's a social network for collectors. We've been around since 2023. Built it with Alexis O'Hanian, who built Reddit and Brent Montgomery, who is the creator of Pond Stars and also the King of Collectible Show on Netflix with Ken Golden. And the goal was to try to bring the community together because there aren't card shows like The National every single day.
Starting point is 00:02:55 And so how do you find other people who like the same things that you like, find trade partners, find the best cards and the best cards, collectibles out there. And so we've been doing that for about, you know, three years now. Platform continues to grow. The space continues to change. So we're always trying to figure out what collectors are looking for and how we give them the best experience when they're not able to be at a card shop or a card show. When building, you know, watching Mantle come to life, is there something that surprised to you about the community or anything that like, because it's pretty coming in when you're building a community. There's a lot of like-minded people
Starting point is 00:03:25 doing things. What's maybe like biggest one or two takeaways having built it that, maybe you didn't expect. Well, I think the community is so vast and everybody collects in their own way. So, you know, the things that you'd be connected to with other people, like you might like one thing somebody likes, but then you don't like the rest of their PC and you like something somebody else likes. And so there's always ways to connect with each other. But there's not a great way to show that now, at least, you know, publicly in the same way
Starting point is 00:03:54 that I think will be as Mantle and other platforms grow. Lodex does a good job of connecting, you know, from the day. data standpoint. And I just think that the hobby is still a little bit behind. It's so much in person, but you're not in person all the time. So I think that that was a little bit surprising to me. And then, you know, it's global. It's amazing how big this is getting. If you go to shows in Asia, if you go, even Latin America, card shops are popping up. It's just such a global thing. And as sports become more global, I think we're going to start seeing the national will have things like this in other countries in ways that we have to see enough for them. And you guys are,
Starting point is 00:04:30 You guys are here with the present, presence with Onet. And it's, it was like a fire drill. You probably had like a month to prepare for it. Yeah, not much time. I saw the booth in the other room.
Starting point is 00:04:45 Yeah, it's great. You know, so On It is all officially licensed cards for the college space. So we work with Texas and Alabama and Georgia and UCLA, USC, Michigan, Ohio State. Like all the big schools, Illinois. You know, we've got deals with. We create cards.
Starting point is 00:05:00 for as many of their sports as we can. Football, basketball, baseball, softball, women's basketball, gymnastics, volleyball, hockey, wrestling. So we're doing as many of these sports as we can. And our goal is not just to go out and find the one best player and do a card with him. So Fernando Mendoza, first pick in the draft,
Starting point is 00:05:18 Heisman winner, was in our product last year. But so was the entire Indiana football team. So you get the quarterback, you get his autograph. It's all officially licensed. It's all on-card auto. But you're also able to get the receiversie through to the offensive line that block for them. And so for us, it's a way that we can create cards for true fans on the universities.
Starting point is 00:05:38 The money goes back to the university. The money goes back to the athlete. So it helps from an NIL standpoint. The schools that are doing this are able to recruit because they've got assets that they're able to offer to these players and get them to be on the teams. And then, you know, for some of these athletes, it's the only card they're ever going to get, right? Because, you know, you walk around here.
Starting point is 00:05:55 You meet a lot of people who played sports in high school and college. You don't meet many who made it for the pros. You meet even. fewer whoever had a tops or Bowman card. But if you're somebody who has an on a card, that might be the only card you'll ever get. And I know I wish I had cards for when I was growing up and how cool it be to have something like that to hold on to? So I feel like it's a responsibility for us to create the highest quality cards we can,
Starting point is 00:06:17 knowing that it might be the only one somebody ever has. And I think that's interesting because the fringe players, non-NFL players, these guys are still unbelievable athletes at that level. And I would think they're excited. the excitement of like coming in say you're going to get a card yeah it's just and it's also builds a brand you know totally they get a card they get paid for the card they get paid if they sign autographs and so you know in this world that now college athletes are able to monetize their name their image their likeness this is another way of you know they'll go get the deal with the
Starting point is 00:06:49 local sandwich shop or the you know Toyota dealership but this is another way that they can kind of be involved in a way that their friends and their family people from their hometowns can can can support them and can collect them. It just didn't exist. In 2021, it was impossible. You know, so this business could not have existed even, even five, six years ago. And now we've got a thriving, a thriving business that's only going to grow. It's been interesting watching, you know, on its growth.
Starting point is 00:07:20 We carried it. I have a store to South Carolina. It's called Collector Station. We carried on a product. I've talked about it a lot on the podcast. I love the fact that you guys take care of the athletes. It's long overdue that they get revenue, I believe. It still needs to be cleaned up a little bit.
Starting point is 00:07:37 It does. But you guys are finding this balance between collecting and investing a little, because the cards look, I think, biggest thing that happens in our store, someone opens it, there's the quality that you guys have leaned into some of the best attributes of some of the best cards while also having all the players on the team. So the collectibility,
Starting point is 00:08:02 Plus the investment side is, I think, there. And it's a delicate balance, right, doing both of those things. Yeah, so we've got two basic skews types of products and types of collectors. We create a team set that's more base cards. It's got parallels. It's got autos, but it's more base heavy. And that's where if you're a fan of the school, you went there. You're like, all right, you know, whatever.
Starting point is 00:08:24 I went to Illinois. I want the Illinois basketball team. And that's what you would end up focusing on. But if you're looking for prospects, you want something that, If looks and feels, it has the quality of anything you'd get at a Topps, Panini, Bowman. So, you know, those cards, we have these mixed sets that have players from multiple schools. And then you're able to go out and get for our baseball set. We had 13 guys who were drafted in the first round for the MLB draft, including Rock Chilowski from UCLA, who was the first pick in the draft.
Starting point is 00:08:51 And you're able to get his autograph on an officially licensed card, on card autograph, with parallels and inserts that look as good as anything else that any of these card guys, you know, the collectors here of experience. And that's important for us. We don't want to create anything that feels like a souvenir or like a giveaway that you get. Like we want this to be something that's going to be part of people's PCs. And I believe, I know I'm biased here, but I believe that if you're thinking about like down the line, Rock Chalosk, let's just assume he goes off and has an incredible career and he makes it to the Hall of Fame. He's in Cooperstown. He's going to have his, you know, his rookie year card.
Starting point is 00:09:25 He'll have his first Bowman. He'll have plenty of cards in his top set. But he's also going to have his on-it card that is going to look as good. is any of those other ones. And if you're somebody who wants to collect the best players, you want them for their entirety of their career. You want them when they did the big things, when they won big awards, when they did have amazing plays. And so that's only possible because what we're able to do now in the NIL space. Yeah. And I love you guys just launched your first Chrome product, right? Chrome product. Beautiful. Ion technology, holograms,
Starting point is 00:09:55 like all the bells and whistles, everything everybody expects and experiences from the biggest and the best in the space. Like, you know, we, we, we never want anybody to walk into a card shop. Somebody comes to your shop and then they see, you know, tops chrome and they see whatever Bowman's got out there, sorry, whatever, Panini or whomever. I don't want them looking at the honest stuff and saying, okay, well, this is less then. Like, it's got to be in the same category. Otherwise, what are we doing? What's the biggest challenge than you, that you're either experiencing now or the headwinds? What do you think? Yeah, I mean, the college space is complicated. We work with 80 schools.
Starting point is 00:10:29 That means we've got 80 different relationships. Every school handles things differently. Some schools you're going through this department. Some schools that. Some schools have these rights. Some schools have those rights. Some schools want to work with you. Create content, do all this crazy stuff.
Starting point is 00:10:42 Some others are just like, give us the check, get out of here. We're not interested in anything more. So that's always a complicated factor. And the collegiate space is changing so much. You never know when the government's going to get involved and change things. Just in the last five years, there have been, 400 different ways that this industry is gone. And so we're always trying to keep up.
Starting point is 00:11:01 So I think it's that. And then we have to introduce ourselves to collectives. You know, I think everybody knows that, you know, the Topps name has been around forever. Leaf has been around, you know, you see on the boards here, 1948 Leaf cards and stuff like that. Panini's been around for a long time,
Starting point is 00:11:17 upper deck, around for a long time. We launched in 2022. And I think for people to be willing to put their money down and buy one of our cards, working to trade night and trade a card that they know what it is because it's something that they've, you know, they've been collecting that their dad may have collected versus ours that we're sort of introducing ourselves to them. There's a lot of work that we have to do to make sure that people understand who we are, understand what our brand is about and know our name.
Starting point is 00:11:41 And when I read the news about that, I just thought it was just such a smart move. I mean, fandom doesn't start at, and when someone's on an NFL team. Like, that fandom starts, like, college. I mean, we go to college, football games now it's insane. Massive. Yeah. And if you pool all the colleges together, it's like the second biggest sport for college football in the country. So we're not talking about something small. It looks a lot smaller because everything is disparate, right? All the different conferences, different TV channels. But if you think about college sports, especially football, it's massive. The other thing that we're doing, it's not just football. So like, you know,
Starting point is 00:12:17 I have a daughter. She's probably not going to end up making it to the NFL, which I'm hoping she ends up playing sports. And if she plays volleyball, if she's a gymnast, if she plays, you know, I was talking to, you know, Bella on your team run before she's a gymnast, and she likes our gymnastics cards. And so to make sure that that there's representation that, you know, the sports world, the fandom of the sports world is massive and it's not just men, but the cards are pretty much other than WMBA, you're not really finding many things that are not men. And I think that for this to continue to grow, for the hobby to be 10x, which I know is, you know, the talking point that everyone, likes to say it's not going to happen just because of a bunch of dudes that played football and
Starting point is 00:12:57 baseball. It's going to be a lot of women getting into the hobby and they need to find things that they want to collect that they relate to. And if we're able to do that through softball cards or through soccer or whatever it is, I think that that can do a lot to help this industry continue to grow. Yeah. The representation takes an interesting because we, you know, you went there like women's sports are becoming like, oh, F you're going to get that softball. Like the fans, the ratings were supposedly surprisingly good. We're not talking about football good, but like, sure, pretty damn hot.
Starting point is 00:13:26 Right. And so it's, there is money and revenue being generated. And there's a lot of, you know, female athletes out there. So, I mean, it's a segment that's underserved. And, you know, part of the gymnastics. I do have like a lot of one-on-ones that are sitting. They're not for sale, by the way. But Bella gets to keep those.
Starting point is 00:13:49 She's in charge of both. But it is an interesting, you know, like finding that balance of serving those audiences that, you know, a product that's premium that there's demand for. Totally. There's many women around as there are men, right? Yeah. So why are we just focusing on half the population? It doesn't make sense to me. And at the college space, there's a lot of women who are playing these sports and they're doing really big things.
Starting point is 00:14:13 And you think about the Olympics coming out to L.A. in 2028, gymnastics, you know, Olympic sport, right? soft, all these women who are in college now are the next Olympians like Jordan Childs won a goal with the U.S. women's gymnastics team and she's in our UCLA product. And so, you know, you're able to get her autograph. You're able to get her in her in her UCLA outfit where she's won a national championship for. Like, that's the kind of thing that I think that as more people start realizing, it's not just baseball, basketball, football, hockey, and soccer that people play that people love. I think it'll only lead to this industry continuing to grow. But do you think about it? Like, we all want to grow the hobby, right?
Starting point is 00:14:50 Yeah, we have to be. It's good for business. You want the big brands to come here? You need to be open. And we can double this room. Right. If that happens. Yeah. I mean, we're sitting right in front of the Walmart booth.
Starting point is 00:15:02 I don't know the data. Brian, you might. But my guess is that the vast majority of people who are shopping at Walmart are women, right? And Walmart's getting into the hobby. It means that they're number one customer, probably a mom. 67% female. Yeah. Is that what it is?
Starting point is 00:15:17 So, right. So, 67%, these guys are the point, yeah, that's a great, I mean, I guess the business podcaster would know that. Right, like, so 67%, it's a lot of people that we're talking about here. Let's create products that they're going to relate to, that they're going to be excited about, that they're going to want their kids to collect. Exactly. So, I mean, a bigger hobby is better. Yeah, it's for everyone in it, including the collectors. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:41 Hey, even bigger activation. So, you know, you get, you know, the Walmart slide in the middle of the math. So let's talk about the national and like what do you collect how many nationals have been to and the migration from what was until what is. So this is my fourth I think, fourth to fifth. Every year. I mean this yesterday, Wednesday, biggest Wednesday I've experienced in my time doing it. I've been in this room a lot. Brian, you and I sat here last year.
Starting point is 00:16:11 I think this is the busiest I've ever seen it during the day. So, you know, it's pretty impressive. I know there's a lot of talking. about Fanatics Fest versus National. Like, I don't see these things in competition. There's more than enough collectors to go around and make many, many shows vibrant. Not just this weekend, but every weekend
Starting point is 00:16:27 across the country, across the year. So I love seeing the growth. I love seeing a lot of new brands down there. My favorite thing to do, though, is to walk along and look at some of these guys who are selling things that you just don't find. You know, like, I would love to be able to get a 55 Sandy Kofax.
Starting point is 00:16:45 I don't know that this is the weekend that I'm going to do it, but I know it's down there. But I'm not stopping to look at many of them because it's a card that you can find. But I see things, autographs and documents and photos and things like that that you just never see anywhere else. And so for me,
Starting point is 00:17:00 this weekend is usually about just trying to find as many things as I've never seen in my life. And then usually I get a little week by the time that I'm getting ready to head out of here and I end up buying one or two things that have nothing to do with my PC. I've never thought about it before. I know nothing about comps
Starting point is 00:17:15 and I'm not, and I'm just saying, I've never seen that before. It's in my price range. I have to have it. Talk to me about, it seems, as listening to you talk, Evan, and connecting the community and the audience,
Starting point is 00:17:29 you sit in two interesting seats. How can you leverage what you're learning on mantle to enable maybe what's happening with on it? It seems like you've got a pulse there, maybe that you can tap into. I mean, look, three years of living and breathing, social network that everybody every single post is about parts and especially in the early days i read 100% of our posts you know i was the guy who was the you know cue seeing making sure
Starting point is 00:17:57 nobody said anything that they weren't supposed to before we had moderation built in um so i have a pretty good sense of what people are looking for what people like what they don't like what they're going to complain about you know and and the types of themes that come across through that that that people are interested in but i also know that that collectors are are looking for community, right? Everybody here's trading, but, you know, like the transaction is part of it, but they're also talking to each other. I see that people are like, hey, here's my Instagram, find me later, we'll do other things. So that I find as important. And the collegiate space is community by itself, right? You're connected to people by either where you went or who you're a fan of.
Starting point is 00:18:37 You know, if you go to a college football game in the south, you know, you go see South Carolina or Clemson, you walk, like that is community. And I think what we're building, with on its birds are our true community because players you know they move around or they'll go pro but it's not like the pros where you kind of feel like you're renting them if they go to your college there's somebody that you're going to be connected to potentially and follow their pro career follow them forever and i think that that community stuff i've gotten a chance to really understand in my time on the mantle side of the business can you and i personally drive to clompson and talk to dabos we need to get clemson back under the umbrella i don't
Starting point is 00:19:22 From when I can tell, nobody can talk to Davosweeney about a damn thing. He hasn't seemed to be listening to anybody these days. So I'm just waiting. I don't know. Maybe his wife. Yeah. I feel like Davos got another year or two with some bad performance. And then we'll deal with the next football coach.
Starting point is 00:19:40 I think something that I would, I love the data. I love data and, you know, Luddux at the end is a data company. Training the honor cards. We're going to want those on our site. And then watching the prices of those cards, you know, as a team like Illinois now is ranked, you know, in basketball and football, they rank pretty high. Yeah. And see how the prices, the index, right? Create an Illinois index and the state index.
Starting point is 00:20:06 Yeah. And even like an alumni index would be really interesting because I think about all these guys that go pro and knowing how, how does their performance in the pro game relate to their college cards? Are the people who are buying on its cards fans of these guys because of where they went? they hold on to it stays in their PC, or are they prospecting? And it's no different than buying a Bowman first. And you're seeing that fluctuation based on how people are doing. I think there's a lot of prospecting going on. And it'd be really cool to be able to see, if I'm Davo,
Starting point is 00:20:36 I want to be able to go and go to the Loddx platform and say to a recruit, like look, our cards are moving. But people, you go to, you go to Clemson. And like that actually is another way to recruit is another thing to say. You're going to make money from these cards. But also people want to. them like we have a fan base this is going to only carry you into your your career are you going to sell them in uh in the stadiums which you guys have a license to do that we we work with uh some some some
Starting point is 00:21:01 companies that sell in stadium and so that you know every one of these stadiums has a you know a merchandise partner that that kind of controls that space um but we've been fortunate to be able to work with a lot of them so some of our cards are sold in stadiums you can buy our cards at campus bookstores and things like that hobby shops across the country breakers across the country, but even, you know, Walmart carries our cards and Best Buy carries our cars, and we're working on opening up as many doors to be kind of. Talk to me, you know, about the movement that is no sticker autos. If, so, uh, can we, can we, uh, keep, are you, as a CEO, will you promise to continue on it, it's on card only, right? And it's, I, I will say on the record.
Starting point is 00:21:46 And you put it, you know, all across the internet if you want, right. It lives forever. Yeah. there. The no sticker autos redates me. That's what these guys were doing before I was ever part of the company. I can tell you that I, as long as I am here, there will not be a sticker auto. And if you ever do merch, can it be game worn only? I don't need like a, you know, a t-shirt that somebody put on for two seconds at an autograph signing. Like we want it to be stuff that's authentic. And for us,
Starting point is 00:22:14 like, you know, you can get a bunch of sticker autos and you see companies they'll release them years later. They're not still working with the player anymore. The player never touched the card. The sticker looks like, you know, get peeled off. Like, I want everything that we do. And that's what the company has always done. That the player held that card.
Starting point is 00:22:31 They signed that card. It's really important to us. It's always going to be licensed and it's always going to be on-card. Boom. There we go. We got it on record. And it's important. Look, that's the biggest selling point.
Starting point is 00:22:40 I tell people, there's on-card autos. And, you know, it's a big selling point for me. As I talk to people, I can, I can point to our competition and say, like, look, they're doing good stuff, but it's not licensed. So they're doing good stuff. But look, it's a sticker auto and the sticker is crooked. And like the player never touched the card. You know, at the end of the day, we're all using a lot of the same athletes, the same sports.
Starting point is 00:23:01 The designs are all different, but they're all like the, you know, the size of the card is the size of the card. The medium is the medium. There's only so much you can do, right? So for us, we have to differentiate ourselves. I want to make sure our stuff is the highest of quality, that it's on card, that it's licensed, that it feels like when somebody opens a pack that they're not, You might get disappointed if you didn't get your hit, the thing that you were looking for. But I never want anybody to look at the cards and say, these aren't even worth, even if I got the hit, this isn't worth my money.
Starting point is 00:23:27 And that happens a lot with some of our competitors. I'm excited to see the growth because the one thing about business that I love is like the blank canvas. Yeah. Right. And you've been in this. You are integrated into this industry, because the knowledge you have right in for our mantle. but I'm really interested to see like what do you create you know like now you can be creative and stick to the brand and build your brand from zero you know or you know continue building yeah I mean
Starting point is 00:23:58 we get to look at everything now and I think when I join our football cards that are coming out had already been designed a lot of the stuff you know that's out now is was baked it takes a long time right like it can take us six months for when we start on something to when it's in Ryan's shop and even longer from when it's in Ryan shop to when it's on your platform, right? Like, you know, that's kind of the life cycle of these things. It takes a long time. We're out there right now. Our football cards, our first set of football stuff comes out on August 21st,
Starting point is 00:24:28 and we're starting to get autographs back from the athletes now or cutting cards or packing cards. We're getting ready. But for me to actually, like, put my thumb tramp on a design or say, like, I want us to try this. We're talking about, you know, next spring. And so, you know, I get to, I've been fortunate. that way that I've been able to open a lot of the cards, spend a lot of time with the team, really figure out what works, what doesn't. So that by the time I get to say, we should try this.
Starting point is 00:24:53 I'm not doing it just because I'm a hobbyist and this is the way I want to collect, but it's based on data that we have. It's based on things that we've seen, customers that we've talked to. That's the important thing. I collect weird stuff. Like, you know, I don't have a lot of liquid. You know, it's old Dodgers stuff, but I collect sports broadcasters and their autos. Like, you know, I'm not the one that should be out here deciding.
Starting point is 00:25:14 what things should look like because I'm not the one who's collecting a lot of the stuff that would be trading in this room. I have to do it based on the feedback that we get from the community and I have to do it based on the data that we have and from the team that we know, I'm really fortunate. We got a really good team, worked in the industry for a long time, knows this stuff backwards and forwards and just try to figure out how we can continue to innovate, continue to drive things forward to make sure that the way that the cards look today should be the worst our cards ever look for the rest of time, right? Like, and next year, I want to be able to say the same thing. If I'm sitting here, Brian, this is the worst our cards will ever look again. And if we can do that, then we're heading in the right direction. Any announcements you want to make? It is football season.
Starting point is 00:25:53 It's football season. We've got, I think, 32 schools that we're working with. August 21st, our stuff hits store shelves. So, you know, for college football fans, Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, UCLA, USC, Florida. you know, we're schools all across the country. So, you know, I hope that people come check it out last year. Fernando Mendoza, the Heisman winner, was in our product, autographs in our product.
Starting point is 00:26:20 And we have, you know, Jeremiah Smith and Bryce Underwood, some of the big John Mateer, some of the biggest names in college football, who are in our stuff, who have signed for us. So it'll be great. We've got a booth over here on this floor, booth 8000005. And so selling product out there. baseball, basketball, softball.
Starting point is 00:26:40 So I hope people come down and grab me if you see me. I'd love to talk to anybody and get your feedback on what we're doing and figure out how we can do better. You can find them on the Luddux interactive math. Yes. We owe a gratitude to Luddux and Brian for that. That is a wonderful tool thing in this entire building. Because you cannot find anything if you don't have the app. That's right.
Starting point is 00:27:03 That's right. Well, hey, man, I wish you the best of luck. I know you're going to do great. You have a good foundation to grow with. And I know you got the vision. And I'll always be a fan. Really appreciate it. Appreciate all the support over the years, Brian, of course, like everything that you've done for us.
Starting point is 00:27:22 And we've been able to do together over the years. So really, really excited about this new gig. Excited to see how the national goes for all of us. And I just feel like this hobby's got more momentum, more buzz than it's ever had before. And so we just got to keep doing big things and let it grow. Awesome. Ryan, we did it. Yeah, that's it.
Starting point is 00:27:42 Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Evan Parker, CEO of On It. Yes. Thank you guys. Thanks for tuning into the show. Be sure to follow us on your go-to podcast platform and catch the full video episode over on YouTube. Visit us at collectornation.com
Starting point is 00:27:58 and follow Ryan on Instagram at Ryan Alford. Now get out there and collect yours.

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