Collector Nation - Why Pristine Auction Is Betting Big on Live Selling | Jared Kavlie

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

Pristine Auction founder and CEO Jared Kavlie joins Ryan Alford live from The National to talk about the rapid evolution of auctions, live selling, and where he sees opportunity in today’s collectibles market. Jared explains why live selling has already grown to roughly half of Pristine Auction’s sales, shares the story behind a Michael Jordan signed rookie that sold in the $40Ks, and breaks down why signed vintage cards and game-used jerseys continue to catch his attention. They also discuss Pokémon, Trade Night at The National, Pristine’s original Days of Thunder car, faster auction formats, and what’s next for Pristine Auction as the hobby continues to evolve. Topics Covered Michael Jordan signed rookie Growth of live selling Signed vintage cards Game-used jerseys Pokémon and TCG The original Days of Thunder car Trade Night at The National 10-second auctions Pristine Auction’s selling model What’s next for Pristine Auction 🔗 Links Mentioned in This Episode Collector Nation Website: https://thecollectornation.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecollectornation TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thecollectornation YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thecollectornation Collector Station Website: https://thecollectorstation.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecollectorstation Ryan Alford Website: https://www.ryanalford.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford Jared Kavlie / Pristine Auction Website: https://www.pristineauction.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pristineauction TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@pristineauction ⭐ If you enjoyed this episode, follow Collector Nation, leave a 5-star review, and share it with another collector.

I had a few of my personal ones that I had to let go, including on Michael Jordan signed rookie. What did that card end up going for? It was in the 40s. But his rookie signature, you're not getting any more of those. So Days of Thunder 2 just got announced, so perfect timing. Perfect timing. And yeah, we're going to auction that thing. I'm Ryan Alford.

And I'm Bella Schaefer. And this is Collector Nation. In the hobby, just for you all in one place. All the videos, all the podcasts, all the reels, all those drops you want right here, right now. We're back here, the Collector Nation interview series here at the National. Had the pleasure of interviewing this gentleman a few months ago, doing big things in the hobby and just a nice guy. I like you, Jared. I like you, Ryan.

Fristine Oxen, founder and CEO, Jared Cavill. What's up, brother? Yeah, thanks for having me. We're at the National. Hey, we're at the National. It's a fire hose. Always love being here. So, yeah, here we are.

Dude, four hours the other night, I was at a... admiring from afar the stamina and just how cool it was that you were sitting over there flipping for four hours literally doing your auctions talk about that and how you fit was it as exhausting as it looked yeah i'm feeling it now you know i'm not not 20 anymore um but yeah no that's a blast it's one of my favorite things to do they can't get me off that stage so yeah we had the live elite back there uh and well every day we're we're back there matt's here another one of our hosts running shows as well but that is awesome. I do love the fact of how engaged you are in the content as the founder and see

flipping through it. I mean, how many cards did you get through? It was a four-hour show, and we go quick. So I was probably pushing a thousand cards, I would bet. No, for the day. That's not true. I do about a hundred an hour, but it's quick, real quick. It is, and it's one of the more innovative things that you've brought into separating

what Pristine does from the other ones. Talk about exactly what that is, that whole experience. talked about on the show, but for people here and hearing it again, kind of that process, how it's different, how fast it is, how low the values are, I couldn't believe it. Talk a little bit about that, Jared. Yeah, I mean, over the years, I feel like our auctions have gotten faster. We were, one of the things we did early in our business was do the daily auction. So every 24 hours, an entire auction, usually about 1,000 items every single day.

And like we talked about on the show last time, I called the drive-through mentality. to wait. You know, they want to, the bids happen at the end anyways. So let's just put them up for a day. Let's put them up for, in the live auction. Let's put them up for 10 seconds sometimes. And you got to grab it or you lose it. Now or never. So what's your thoughts about the growth of the hobby? You know, we're talking about the crowd size, the number of people, you know, like how does pristine view that? I mean, obviously it's great for business knowing the hobby. You know, you're the center of it. One of the technology leaders on the auction side. Like, talk to me about what this means, the diversity and all that, like how you guys view the hobby through the lens

of the national? Man, we can, I think it's, we can all agree it is alive and well. You know, I think that's, that's really what comes to mind. And it's just fun to see the passion. I mean, trade nights, we were just talking about one of my favorite places to be. Obviously, the floor is hopping probably three or four deep. Like, if you want to buy a card, you better buy it because it's not going to be there for long. But, yeah, it's awesome. It's awesome to see the buzz. It's awesome to see the excitement. And it's my favorite time of the evening. you know are we personally collecting while we're here like or is it all like this you know everything that i pick up is i pick up because i want it but then i have to let it go so uh the live elite for example

had a few of my personal ones that uh i had to let go and is very sad for me but including on michael jordan signed rookie that we did last night which by the time you see this you missed it so you got to be at the next live elite to see stuff like that what did that card end up going for i'd have to pull it up. It was in the 40s. Okay. Yeah, it was in the 40s. That was in the 40s. It could have been, I believe it's a six-figure card. So I think there was great value on that card. But it's a wild card. It was a signed rookie sticker with his vintage signature. It was actually like a rookie era signature. You just don't see them. So recently some with his modern signature, which if he changes his attitude and

wants to sign like crazy, there's going to be a lot of those. I don't think that's going to happen, but it's possible. But his rookie signature, you're not getting any more of those. What's your perspective on, it's from the hobby? Like, I mean, everything's up right now. But the modern versus vintage, you know, maybe both personally and, you know, what you're auctioning. What are you seeing maybe trend-wise? Like, it seems like more and more people are coming around to the fact of the vintage. Only so much of it.

Only going to be around. There's stuff like you just mentioned with the autograph that is a certain era. Talk to me about that perspective. Yeah, I mean, everything's on fire. I don't think there's any opportunity to go get something that no one's looking at. But I'm a big autograph collector. That's how I got into the hobby. So my eyes are on the signed vintage cards.

I love those. It seems like people are catching on. The prices I'm seeing on the floor are much higher than they have been in the past. But the idea there was back in the day, it was taboo to sign cards, felt like they were ruining the cards. And until pretty recently, that was the thing. So very rare, especially some of the Hall of Famers who passed away several years ago. That's the stuff. And I think there's still value there.

So that's where I would be. Yeah. But, you know, I don't think that's a super secret at this point. No. You've embraced the live selling aspect of, you know, what's been happening with both your own company. You're out there. You're up here and like, you know, it's like a almost meta live experience at an experience, both and then online live. Talk to me about the growth of live selling, the impact on your business, and maybe where you see it going.

Yeah, what's wild is live selling in our business is a baby. I mean, it's been about a year, and it's already about half of our sales. So it's pretty incredible what it has done. Our tech team has been great and put it all together for us, and we've kind of had it in our back pocket, and for some reason, didn't feel like it was what we wanted to pursue. So you go back about a year and a half, and from my office, a couple hours a week, I would hop on from my office with an iPhone and offer a few things for auction. It was very clear people enjoyed it. And we've always been a lot about the community.

We got some great people that are our customers of ours. And so it was pretty obvious, pretty quick, that it's a great way to kind of get us all together and our customers enjoyed it. So we keep expanding it. So now there are times where we have multiple shows happening at the same time. We've got a Pokemon show every week. We get memorabilia we do every week.

So there's always something. I'm glad you brought up Pokemon and TCG. Rob Veris was on earlier. We were talking about that and how the growth is there as well. What's your perspective? I mean, how many Pikachu's are in the collection? How many out of graphs? This is a...

It's booming as well. Yeah, so this is a topic outside of my area of expertise. Yes, but it's clearly on fire. All of my kids cannot get enough Pokemon, so I'm learning a little bit that way. But, yeah, and I'm sure, you know, Rob Veras with the shop, you know, he, I'm sure Pokemon is a massive part of what they do now. And it's not going anywhere. You know, there's a lot more on the floor here at the national than I've ever seen. Yeah. So, yeah, it's getting integrated and people love it. No, no, yeah. I mean, no, yeah. I'm in the store now, I know all these characters.

I'm not exactly sure what you just said, but I know it was Pokemon related. Yeah, I was, we were just talking about, do you remember Pokemon Go? By chance? Yes. Okay, we were just talking with the team. I remember years ago when that was popular, I did a Disneyland trip with a family. If anyone went to Disneyland around the air of Pokemon Go, every person I saw had a charger in their pocket and their phone, literally, every single person. It was the craziest thing I've ever seen. Side note, but anyways. Did the Days of Thunder ever come about? We talked about that on the show a few months ago.

We do. I can show you some pictures. I actually, we literally Rob, our marketing director and myself, were just in North Carolina. Saw the car in the warehouse. Amazing. We're doing kind of little documentary on it, which will release pretty soon. but yeah we have the original days of thunder car they only produced a handful of them for the production of the show and uh days of thunder two just got announced so perfect timing perfect timing and yeah we're

gonna auction that thing so what are you gonna get that you throwing that bid down i i'm gonna i'll put some some money in there it would be i would be a buyer on that i think there's a lot of buyers on that so it might be it's a wild card i have no idea what that thing's gonna go for but it is the coolest thing we've ever been able to auction and i got some in-laws that uh It could sit at for a little while. All right, let's go. You know, my garage is full. Four boys, dude.

Four boys, you know. We still gotta get up to the motor speedway, man. We do, yes. That offer is still up. The Fiat experience at the NASCAR. Yeah, that's one of my favorite things to do. Do we see that auction coming this year or be next year? How soon?

Hopefully soon, especially because the buzz is with Days of Thunder, with the second one being announced. So, yeah, I think as soon as they're done with the production of the stuff we're going to put out, which is going to be awesome. Richard Petty sat in front of the car, talked about it, because it belongs to the Petty family right now. So that's actually another cool part about the car, just kind of how it came to be. And I don't believe there's ever been one offered.

Again, there's only a handful that exists. I don't even know if they all exist anymore. No. But, yeah, it's a cool piece. That's what I love about you guys. You know, you're willing to just anything. Like, it has nostalgia. has, and that's what, you know, that's kind of leading to a question of, we have all of these things that are

becoming collectibles, the nostalgia. What is it about this industry and even just maybe people in general that they love to collect? And it's, there's no limit to what that might be. Yeah. I think there is a, a collectible bug in everybody. And everybody kind of finds their niche of things they want to collect. When we're kids, we're collecting rocks. There's something we collect. And, you know, for most people, I mean, it's really most people's story that they collected baseball cards at some point. Now, some of us never grew up and still love it and can't get away from it. And it's an incredible hobby. You know, it's a great distraction from life sometimes, an incredible hobby.

But, yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think a bug of collecting is really kind of in all of us. And we just kind of choose our path. How about on the merchandising side, Jersey's autographs? I know you mentioned you're big in autographs, but have you seen an increase in interest in, like, you know, game warren or even just, you know, autograph jerseys, memorabilia, that sort of thing. Yeah, I mean, that still is where my heart is, because I grew up collecting, running around getting autographs. So that's still where my heart is.

I love the autograph side of the hobby. I think, a hot take, one of the biggest opportunities I believe is in game-use jerseys. So I've been grabbing a bunch of them because I can't believe sometimes how cheaply you can get some superstar game-use jerseys, especially photo match, like NBA certificate. I mean, you know, no question about it. And so I've been picking up some pretty good ones and kind of hoarding them. We had Barry Miesel on from My Gray. We talked about that very thing.

Heather, some ridiculous stuff. He had some very stories. You talked about that. And there's headroom, I think, for that whole segment as sort of, you know, the whole industry is starting to creep up. Yeah, and like anything, obviously, if you have a jersey that's game used for a specific milestone, you're going to really pay for it. And maybe you should. I mean, that stuff is pretty incredible. but the stuff that's a little lower end.

I mean, I just picked up a Yokets jersey. You know exactly his stats. He had a monster game with the jersey. It wasn't a milestone, but a huge game. And I can't believe what I got it for. I was about to ask your personal favorite in the collection. You know, any favorites stand out? Yeah, we'll have to have you out of the office at some point here.

But my favorite is displayed in the office, and it's an Iron Man, a full-size Iron Man from Side Show, signed by Robert Downey Jr. and inscribed, which is something that's named. nearly impossible to get. But the wife got me the full-size Iron Man as a birthday gift. And then Robert Danny Jr. did like a charity signing, like the first and maybe only signing he'll ever do. And so I sent the chess plate away and had him sign it. And that's got to be probably my favorite piece. I love that. I love that. That's one of one. No live auction on that one. Not yet. Not yet. Started at 50 cents. That'll last for about half a second. You know, so we're at the National here. They do a fantastic job. It's booming. There's so many people.

so many things going on. And less to critique and maybe more, what would you like to see as the national moves along? Any, you know, technology or space or any ideas or things that you see as someone, you know, here experiencing it on all levels as a natural-born collector

and as a company, but, you know, anything that you'd like to see or the growth here? Yeah, I mean, nothing comes immediately to mind. You know, my favorite part, like we kind of talked about, is trade night and they've done a phenomenal job you know we're actually one of the one of the major sponsors here for that reason is like this is what i what i love the most and they've done a fantastic job expanding this and embracing it it was a little bit taboo a few years ago yeah and you know hey let's just embrace this and i think it's it's the right move and i love what i see with it and uh that's where

i love spending my time so i'm doing the late nights um i'll be up here tonight buying so i'll be out there shopping it might just be expansion never thought i'd say that yeah i know i mean you When you look at this place, you're like, man, there's no way we fill this place up. But there are lines waiting outside, hoping to get in. So, yeah, we can knock out some walls here, I think. That's what I'd do next, I think. What's the rest of this year look like? Obviously, we talked Days of Thunder.

That'd be huge. Anything else the rest of the year, as far as the roadmap for pristine, whether it's technology, rollouts, or new integration, whatever it might be from the business standpoint. Yeah, we always got a few things in our back pocket. You know, my, that's what I'm trying to break here. I'm trying to get the breaking news here. Yeah, but, you know, as an entrepreneur and kind of the idea guy in the business, so you're always like five steps ahead of your tech team, right? So that's always, can be a pain point in a business, but, and not all ideas are good.

We ought to also digest some of them. But, yeah, there's a few things in our back pocket that are a little further in the future. Right now, our focus is the live. You know, like I said, it's such a baby, and there's so much opportunity there. So, and it's a lot of fun. Like, you know, they can't rip me off that stage. So I love running the shows even. So I think that's where it focuses in the immediate future.

But, you know, often the question is, what's the five-year plan? And my answer is usually like, well, I'm kind of working on five days rather than five years. We move so fast and pivot so fast. And it's fun, you know, the business is fun. And we're always doing new things. So stay on your toes. Through a marketing perspective, you guys are crushing it. Like, saw the sidewalk.

Believe me, I've been seeing everything. And its impressions build. It takes seven pressures to do a decision. Well, I've gotten hit about 75 times by first. Whether little subtle things as the marketer first and a hobby guy second, it has not been lost on me. Where does that ingenuity come from? Yeah, I mean, as a team, you know, for marketing.

In my mind's always marketing for better for worse. Poor Rob, like, has to listen to me way too often. But, you know, I kind of, in the business I started, My wife and I started on Craigslist posting little ads wherever we could, you know, kind of the guerrilla marketing, just whatever we could to not take out a big, big loan, you know, and get people to hear about the business. So I love those ideas like, you know, a lot of you have seen the logos on the sidewalks like Ryan just mentioned. I love that kind of stuff.

I geek out over that. Yeah, not lost on me. Kudos to the entire team on that. Talk as we kind of start to close out a little bit here. Talk to me about the experience. that people can expect within the app, the site, maybe some of the nuts and bolts of the best way to sort of navigate pristine auction, you know, within, you know, all of your channels. Yeah, definitely download the app. You know, you certainly can operate our website on the web,

but we've built, our team has built a phenomenal app. That's the best way to get communicated with and to interact with the site. But man, like, the best way to tell you, we have so much stuff going on that it's almost hard to just quickly talk about it, but something is happening all the time and something is ending all the time. So, you know, again, the drive-through mentality, we want something now. I don't want to wait for the auction to end in a month. Those auctions are great, by the way. We actually have an elite auction that does end every month. But while you're shopping there, there's something happening all the time on our website, including 10-second live auctions, literally right now, I believe. What time is it? I think right now.

12-0-5. Yeah, so 10 o'clock at home. So I believe we're live. So yeah. Thank you, man or rookie, starting for a dollar today. Not at 10 a.m. Those usually happen in the Live Elite. We usually, right now we do those about every two weeks, but that's something we'll probably expand on. I'm hoping to do those weekly because, yeah, those are the most fun thing we do, in my humble opinion.

Talk about what if people were to want to submit cards to you. You have one of the best deals going in the business, I think. Maybe mention that, you know, that process, you know, anything else you want to share there. Yeah, yeah. So our team, our entire sales team is here on our main booth on the main floor. So definitely come by and see us if you have cards to submit. You know, I always say you're either a buyer or a seller with us, hopefully both. But what we do is at it as a show special, we'll put you immediately onto our top sales tier for selling with us. And essentially you pay five bucks a card is all. And then zero percent fee. So are we getting off today? Are they getting sold today? Are they coming from future auctions? Almost. Not quite that fast. But yeah, we will take them back with us. But we are. extremely fast. We pay out extremely fast. They're going to be up. Yeah, that's something we've always really

worked hard at as being the fastest in order in terms of getting it from our operation to sold for you and then getting you paid. So we actually pay out every single day on ACH. So get set up on ACH every single day you'll get a payout and we'll just keep rolling. Five dollars a card.

Five bucks a card. I mean, tremendous value. Let me just tell you. That is unheard of. I love what you're doing, Jared. Drop all the places that people can learn more, follow you guys on social, all of those things. Yeah, at pristine auction on all the social media channels. Make sure while you're here, come down to the booth and see us. We're giving out $20 gift cards to everybody who comes by to see us. We got t-shirts. We had hats. Sorry, they're gone. You might see people wearing

them, but those are gone. But yeah, we got a lot going on at the booth. Live auction's happening right here on the floor. All the things. Doing it all. Jared, love what you're doing. Can't wait to continue our relationship and partnership and can't wait to get on the motor speedway with you. Let's do it. I can't either. Can't wait for your bid on that day's a thunder car too. I don't know if it's going to be enough, but we'll be out there.

We appreciate everyone. Thecollect your nation.com, the highlight clips, the full episode. You'll see that links to all of pristine auctions, helping change the game here as the hobby continues to evolve. We'll see next time on Collector Nation. Thanks for tuning in to the show. to follow us on your go-to podcast platform and catch the full video episode over on YouTube, visit us at collectornation.com, and follow Ryan on Instagram at Ryan Alford.

Now get out there and collect yours.