Digital Social Hour - The $1,000,000 Jersey SCAM You Won't Believe! 😱 | Geoff Wilson DSH #597

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

😱 You won't believe this $1,000,000 Jersey SCAM! Join Sean Kelly on the Digital Social Hour as he dives into the wild world of sports cards and collectibles with Geoff Wilson. Discover the jaw-dropping story behind a million-dollar jersey scam, fake Pokemon cards, and the intense world of internet detectives. Tune in now for an episode packed with valuable insights, industry secrets, and mind-blowing stories!   Geoff Wilson, owner of one of the largest sports card shops in the world, shares his journey, the future of sports cards, and how Fanatics is shaking up the industry. From rookie card investments to the latest trends in live selling, this episode is a must-watch for collectors and entrepreneurs alike.   Don't miss out! Join the conversation and watch now. 📺 Hit that subscribe button and stay tuned for more eye-opening stories on the Digital Social Hour with Sean Kelly! 🚀 #DigitalSocialHour #SeanKelly #Podcast #JerseyScam #SportsCards #GeoffWilson #Collectibles #Investing #Fanatics #Pokemon #Entrepreneurship   #PokemonCards #CardCollectibles #ToppsNews #InnovativeCardDesigns #DigitalSocialHour   CHAPTERS: 00:00 - Intro 00:40 - Geoff Wilson Opens the Largest Sports Card Shop in the World 04:47 - $1,000,000 Jersey Scam 06:56 - Logan Paul’s Fake Pokémon Box Scandal 12:15 - Importance of Timing in Business 15:01 - First Win in Business Journey 17:14 - Business Exits and Success Stories 20:06 - Starting a Business at a Young Age 21:13 - Benefits of Sports Cards for Kids 23:40 - Volatility of the Sports Card Market 27:38 - Victor Wembanyama's Impact 30:53 - Card Grading Explained 32:45 - Cracking Cards from Cases 34:35 - PSA Acquires SGC 37:10 - Reuben Visits Cards HQ 42:31 - Why Atlanta for Sports Cards 44:19 - Live Selling Strategies 46:18 - Where to Find Geoff Wilson   APPLY TO BE ON THE PODCAST: https://www.digitalsocialhour.com/application BUSINESS INQUIRIES/SPONSORS: [e-mail]   GUEST: Geoff Wilson https://www.instagram.com/itsgeoffwilson https://geoffwilson.com/ https://www.instagram.com/sportscardinvestor https://www.instagram.com/cardshqshop   SPONSORS: Deposyt Payment Processing: https://www.deposyt.com/seankelly   LISTEN ON: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/digital-social-hour/id1676846015 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5Jn7LXarRlI8Hc0GtTn759 Sean Kelly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmikekelly/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And it wasn't real. It was stuffed with G.I. Joe cards of all things. G.I. Joe cards. Those internet detectives, man. Internet detectives are intense. They are intense. Yeah. They are intense. Wherever you guys are watching this show, I would truly appreciate it if you follow or subscribe.

It helps a lot with the algorithm. It helps us get bigger and better guests, and it helps us grow the team. Truly means a lot. Thank you guys for supporting, and here's the episode. All right, guys, we are talking sports cards today. We got Jeff Wilson here. Just opened up a card store in Atlanta. Congrats,ats man thanks sean excited to be here man good to talk to you today yeah you went all in how many square feet yeah we did go all in yeah we opened up what we believe is the

largest sports card shop or trading card shop in the world we got sports cards we've also got like pokemon and trading card games 14 000 square feet is the total space it's a monster it's a double mansion we've got a studio in there as well. We've got some office space shipping, that kind of thing. But then, you know, the actual retail stores, the vast majority of it. And so, yeah, it's, it's a huge shop. It's, it's unlike what anyone else has seen before. That's cool. What gave you that conviction to dive headfirst into that? I'm super confident where the sports card and collectibles industry is going. So, you know, we got fanatics involved in the industry in

a big way a couple of years ago, they bought tops, right? So you had, you used to have, you know, kind of three major players in sports cards. You had tops, which is a name probably people recognize from their childhood. They've been, you know, tops has been making cards for over 70 years. You had Panini, um, which was a big name over in Europe because they used to do all the sticker albums for the world cup, but they came into the U.S. and actually took over all the football cards and all the basketball cards about 15 years ago. And then you had Upper Deck, which was a name that also a lot of people remember from their childhood. But right now, all Upper Deck does is hockey cards and non-sports cards. So you have those three companies. Well, the whole thing got major, major shakeup a couple of years ago because Fanatics, the big multi-billion dollar apparel

company, they got involved and they ended up getting all three major US sports leagues, baseball, football, and basketball, to agree to move their licenses to create trading cards exclusive to Fanatics for the next 20 years. And that exclusivity starts actually, it's all starting to kick in over like the next 24 months. And then once they got that secured, then Topps, Panini and Upper Deck were all, or not Upper Deck as much because they're hockey, but Topps and Panini were both like, oh crap, they're losing their licenses. They're not even gonna be able to create cards anymore in a few years.

And so then they were able to buy tops for kind of pennies on the dollar. So now we got fanatics involved in a massive way, injecting tons of money. They're getting athletes involved in it. There's a lot of stuff that's changing in the sports card world in a really good way. And I'm just super optimistic that, it had its moment during the pandemic where like it peaked out and a lot of people probably

watching kind of, you know, we're got back into it a little bit or whatever, but I think, you know, it's come down a little bit since then, but I think the next five to 10 years are really, really bright. That's exciting, man. I wonder what their new cards will look like. Yeah. They're, they're really investing a lot in all that stuff. So they've been doing a lot of innovative things like, for example, in Major League Baseball, whenever a rookie for the very first time gets called up to the majors and is playing his first game, starting this past year, they put a special patch on his jersey that says Major League Baseball debut. And after the game's over, they take the patch off of the jersey and they put it straight into a card. And it's a special one-of-one, super collectible card.

They also take the base from the player's first hit. And they actually remove the base from the game as soon as the player gets his first hit. And then they chop the base up into 100 pieces and then make 100 cards with a piece of the base from the player's first hit in it. That's cool. So they're doing really cool kind of card design stuff that's taking really unique memorabilia from game use stuff and from big moments and then bringing it into cards. Yeah, I know some cards have the jersey, right?

Yeah, the jersey patches. Yeah, we've had those for a while. And so, yeah, jerseys that players have worn in games and they're trying to lean into that too like you know try to get jerseys from big moments so if if uh if a guy hits a home run in the world series you know they're trying to acquire either the jersey or the bat or the batting gloves or some piece of that so that they can then you know put that into cards uh and then know, and then that becomes something big that collectors want to chase after. Speaking of Jersey, I was on your YouTube. One of your most viewed videos was a million dollar Jersey scam. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. There was that. That was that was a big deal. There was a Ryan Reynolds here from it mobile with the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint Mobile, unlimited, premium wireless. How did it get 30, 30, how did it get 30, how did it get 20, 20, 20, how did it get 20, 20, how did it get 15, 15, 15, 15, just 15 bucks a month? So, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

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kind of using his notoriety a little bit and was scamming people apparently for years. Apparently, he was a big scammer and was setting up all these kind of intricate scams. And this one blew up in his face. He got caught basically completely inventing. He was claiming he bought a jersey and was claiming the jersey was used in some really important games, which it wasn't. But he was inventing a whole storyline. He was Photoshopping photos of, photos of Michael Jordan in certain games. He was Photoshopping the jersey that he bought to make it look like Michael Jordan was wearing that jersey to try to convince people, like, look, he was wearing it in this game. And you could see all this stuff.

And yeah, he got busted. There are a lot of scams, like sports cards, sports memorabilia. There is a lot of scams. You have to watch for that stuff. And yeah, he got busted. There are a lot of scams, like sports cards, sports memorabilia. There is a lot of scams. You have to watch for that stuff. There's been some notorious scammers over the years. I remember that Logan Paul thing that happened with the Pokemon cards, the fake box. That's right. He spent, what, $3 million on a case of Pokemon cards that he thought was the only case of first edition Pokemon cards in existence.

And it turns out the case was fake. And it was it was he did a whole video about buying the case. The only reason why we know it's fake is he did a whole video about buying the case and how happy he was. It was like a celebratory video. He puts it out on social. Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest? We'll click the application link below in the description of this

video. We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to about business and life. Click the application link below. And here's the episode, guys. And YouTube and then some Pokemon collectors who really know their stuff who have been doing it for 20 years. They start looking at this, you you know just while he's holding it up and stuff and they start freeze framing it and examining it and they can tell by looking at the video they're like something doesn't look right there like they you know so then they started like screenshotting it and doing all this kind of analysis of like what the cases actually look like 20 years ago versus what he was holding and they noticed differences for example like what the cases actually look like 20 years ago versus what he was holding. And they noticed differences, for example, like in the tape on the cases and that kind of stuff. And so then

they like all this, they started posting about, you know, they didn't think it was real. And so then he actually opened it and it wasn't real. It was stuff with GI Joe cards of all things, GI Joe cards. Yeah. Those internet detectives, man. Internet detectives are intense. They are intense. I respect their passion. I'm always amazed when they bust some type of crime. I'm always amazed how much time that took and how much care and passion they put into it. Because I, like myself,

I couldn't ever see myself spending days trying to detective my way into something else that was happening. But some people love it, man. They're good at it. It's crazy. Dude, there's whole Reddit forums on people solving unsolved murders. Yeah. And these internet detectives just group up and solve murders.

I mean, it's great for them. That's awesome. That's good. When it's used that way, I love it. Yeah, when it's used for good, I love it. Yeah, when it's cancel culture. Yeah, you get some of that too. You get some of that too yeah it's part of the game though do you dabble in pokemon do you collect any pokemon um not a lot my kids are into it i

respect pokemon so we sell a lot of pokemon one of the maybe more surprising things at the new card shop cards hq we opened is about a third a little bit over a third of our sales have been pokemon and trading card games. Yeah. Which is a lot because we're, I'm known as sports card investors. So I, you know, I've got a huge audience in the sports card world. So I knew that people would come to the shop for sports cards because I, you know, people know me for that. They know I'm opening up the shop. I did a bunch of videos about it, but you know but people in the pokemon world don't really know me and so i'm like you know i don't know how much we'll do in terms of pokemon

sales so i've been super impressed uh pokemon is is huge but also we've got disney lorcana which is disney's new trading card game they just came out with that this last year uh magic of the gathering's been really big for us yugiohi-Oh! There's also Star Wars cards, and Star Wars just came out with its own trading card game as well. We carry Marvel cards. So there's a lot of different types of non-sports cards and games and everything, and it's been a strong mix of ourselves. Yeah. Wow, I didn't know all these companies were getting into trading cards, man. It's a huge business.

People don't realize. So I got back into it in 2019. Actually I was, um, I was at the time I I've done a bunch of, uh, like started a bunch of companies over the years, 15 different companies. And I was, uh, back in like 2018, I was looking at doing a company in the sports gambling space. The legislation had just changed, you know, where states could begin to, you know, legalize sports gambling. And so I knew that it was going to, of course, spread across the country, you know, no surprise there, you're

going to have gambling go everywhere. And so I knew it was going to be a, I figured there was a lot of opportunity there with whatever it might be content apps, you know, whatever, whatever, whatever might be developing. So I was looking at the sports gambling space and I'm like, man, this space is very sophisticated already. There's lots of obviously big players, big money, also a lot of regulation. And so I wasn't quite seeing what the right niche would be to hop into it in. Then meanwhile, my son, my son starts to get into football cards. I'm opening up football cards with him. I did it big as a kid, but I had totally lost touch with it for all of these years. I start getting back into it again. And the more I kind of

get into cards, the more I'm like, man, this whole entire industry is huge, massive, multi, multi, multi-billion dollar industry, but it is so sleepy. Like everything about it in 2019, like, you know, there was, there was no good, no good apps or technology to be able to track cards, to be able to price cards out. There was very little quality content about what was going on in the industry. The whole thing was just like sleepy. And so I'm like, you know what? I'm going to launch into this space.

I'm going to create content. I'm going to build apps. Maybe eventually I'll open up a retail store, which obviously has now happened. But I saw a lot of opportunity for disruption. Today, the space is evolving a lot. You know, finally now, especially with Fanatics coming in and the infusion of capital

and you're getting other big companies coming in and infuse capital, you're seeing more technological advancement. You're seeing better content. You're seeing the industry is becoming a lot better, but it is still, people still don't realize how big it is. I mean, we're talking billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars.

Dang. Oh, it's a huge industry, both sports cards as well as Pokemon and trading card games. They are many, many billions of dollars. Nobody knows the exact number because it's hard to add it all up. But somebody did a study on it a couple of years ago and said the sports card industry was $ billion and the uh and the you know trading card pokemon trading card game industry was like 15 billion and that was a few years ago and i've actually think we've i think we would have seen the numbers go up since then yeah that's cool to see you have that foresight so early on and you've done that prior to cards right with your other

company with a lot of other companies it you know a lot about business is right place, right time. You know, it's it, timing makes a big difference. And if you get on the front end of a curve, uh, you, and if you can obviously play your cards, right, but you can, you know, kind of ride that curve. And that's what happened with me with sports cards. I don't always get it right. I've had plenty along the way. I've had some along the way where I've been on the wrong side of something. I created a, I launched a, uh, really extensive video game um online video game virtual world like this is 15 years ago on all it was all built on flash which back then you may not even know i don't even know so that was the technology that was an adobe technology that a lot of websites interactive websites were using back in like the mid to late 2000s. But then Apple came out with the iPhone and the iPad,

and they did not support flash. And Apple said, we will never support flash. They didn't like something, you know, bits about how the technology was developed. And we launched the game right after like we had been working on it for two years, we invested a million dollars into building this game. It was it was an amazing game. we launched it right after the iphone came out and right as like the ipad was coming out and that changed the landscape of what gaming was so significantly that our we totally missed like we it was horrible market timing was the opposite there Had we built the whole game for iOS and launched it on the first version of the iPad and the iPhone or something like that, it actually may have gone on to become uber successful. But in that case, I missed the curve. I was on the downside of one curve instead of on the upside of the other curve.

Whereas with sports cards, I happened to get in there right at, you know, when the upside was starting. Sometimes you're a little too early. Yeah, you can be. You can be too early. I mean, there's, yeah, the timing of everything is, it makes such a big difference in business success.

And that's why I was, you know, as an entrepreneur, I always believe like you got to take multiple at-bats. Yeah. Because it's, you know, you got to be able to go from, well, there's a famous quote, I think it's what Winston Churchill who said, like, um, you know, uh, success is going from failure to failure without being discouraged. Right. And entrepreneurship's like that. Like

you're, you're, you're, no one's going to bat a thousand, you know, most people don't even bat 500, you know, you're, you're, you're going to, you know, one out of every three or something's going to work out for you hopefully. And so you got to know that and be able to be flexible enough to do something and say, okay, that's not where I'm going to try the next thing. And you do enough things like that. And eventually you'll, you'll get one where it's like, I'm on the right path. I did it at the right time. I hit the market at the right moment. I'm on the right path and you ride the growth curve. I love that. So how old were you when you hit the first win in business? Um, I started, so I started, I was starting businesses actually back in high school. Like I'm also a big believer. I started a computer shop, like a little computer repair shop back in high school. That was my first real business. Um, and of course before that I was like trading and flipping, uh, baseball cards. So that's kind of, you know, the sports card thing is kind of full circle for me. But I'm a big believer in younger kids starting businesses, high school, college, and right out of college,

I think are the best time possible to start a business because you got nothing to lose. Like you got nothing to lose. Like you don't have a mortgage payment. You probably don't have a car payment. You don't have kids. You don't have a wife to support. You got nothing to lose. And you can afford to live cheaply. Like you don't care coming right out of college. You don't care if you need to crash on a friend's couch and eat ramen noodles for dinner seven days a week.

Like you're willing to do it at age 20. You're not going to be willing to do that at age 35. You're just not. Like you don't want to do that anymore. Like once you've had a little bit of success and you've had a little bit of money and you've had a little bit of income and you start to build up, you know, things in your life that you, you know, that are financial restrictions, like I got to support family or I got to pay for a house or whatever, then your ability to do that kind of stuff goes to zero. Like you got at that point, it's much harder.

It's much harder for someone to hop out of a corporate career at age 35 and say, I'm going to take the entrepreneurial leap and give up my steady paycheck and my 401K and my healthcare benefits that are supporting my family and go do the entrepreneurial thing. That is super hard. But if you started at age 15 or age 20 or age 23, it's much easier to do. So yeah, I started my first one in high school. I started, I started in college. I started a digital agency. So doing like digital marketing and web development,

software development, and that actually is still going to this day. So that's been kind of my core business that I've had the whole way through. Um, and, uh, but then, but then I also on the side have just done a number of like different startup type projects. A lot of them, like tech-based like software as a service apps, you know, that kind of thing. Nice. Any exits so far? I've had, I've had a couple of exits. Yeah. Um, my wife actually started a company called social news desk back in, uh, around 2010 that I worked on with her. She was from the news industry and that was right. So this is another great beyond the beginning of the growth curve example. She was working in newsrooms at the time, television newsrooms, and she saw that

Facebook, which had just started to emerge, and Twitter, which was just launching around then, she looked at these things and she said, I think these will have a profound impact on journalism. I think social media will change the way that news is kind of distributed and disseminated. She saw that back in 2009. Nobody else at that point was really thinking that way because at that point, it was all just like I'm sharing photos with my friends, right? It wasn't like I'm trying to get news and information and share information through this. And so she said, I know the TV stations are going to be interested in what do we do on social media, but none of them are going to know what to do on social media so she built a sas product and so i i helped her build it and my my agency built it for her she built a sas product called social news desk which was a social media management system specifically

designed for television newsrooms um it became the de facto standard in the industry she scaled to having like 90 95 percent of the of the newsrooms in the u. She scaled to having like 90, 95% of the, of the newsrooms in the U S using her product to manage all their social media over the, over the course of like her first four or five years in business. Um, and she, she was bought eight figure exit, um, by a, um, fortune 500 company back in 2014. Shout out to your wife, man. Yeah, I know. So we've got it. We've got a little bit of an entrepreneurial family going on. So, cool. Yeah. So that was a really fun one. Nice. How'd you two meet? We met in college. We met at the University of Florida. So I'm a big Gator fan. We met, actually, back then I was in the TV thing program at University of Florida and she was in the TV

program. She went on and actually did it. Nice. I didn't, but we met there. Yeah. Cool. So you both graduated? Both graduated from UF. Nice. I extended my graduation a little bit. I started, you know, since I had started my agency in college, I ended up working on that full time my last few years of college. So I went down to just like three credit hours or six credit hours, you know, a semester. But I did eventually graduate.

I knew my parents would, would be probably pretty upset with me if I didn't actually get a degree. Yeah. Florida's a big party school, right? Must've been distracting. Florida's less of a party school today. It's got in Florida, it's become an extremely good academic school. Back then it was a big party school. So yes, yes. Now today it's like everyone there is much smarter today. Um, so it's, I think it's, I wouldn't, from what I understand, it's a little less party, more serious today, but back then it was definitely more party. I love that. It's cool to see you find that success at a young age. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, and the thing about that is like, you're also going to make a lot of mistakes. Like I made a lot of mistakes too, like starting my

agency, like we did all kinds of stuff wrong, but that's part of the entrepreneurial process. Anytime you start a new company, if you haven't done it before, no matter what age you are, the first time you do it, you're going to make all kinds of mistakes and dumb things. And I did all of that. And we had all these moments where we were struggling to make payroll and all this stuff. But you're going to – like dealing with that like when you're like 20 or like 22 is so much better than dealing with that when you're 40 and you're like actually worried that your whole entire savings and livelihood is on the line right because when you're 20 or 22 if the thing doesn't work out and you run into some catastrophic problem and the whole business shuts down or whatever even if you get into debt right or whatever like you got plenty of time to work

that out and work through that and move past that and get on to the next thing and build your career and pay the money back and yeah you'll be okay But you know, later in life, maybe not so much. Yeah. Cause you have the option of going back to live with your parents and friends and family. Absolutely. That's why, that's why, yeah, that's, that's why I'm huge on like young people. If they have that entrepreneurial itch at all, and obviously not everybody does, not for everybody, but if, if, if a young kid's got that hustle and drive and like that entrepreneurial itch, that's a great time to start a business. It's another reason why I'm a big believer in cards because cards actually for kids are actually a great way for them to start to learn some of those entrepreneurial skills. Right. Because you know, if you're, if you're a 10 year

old, a 12 year old, a 14 year old, and you're buying and selling and trading cards with your friends, or you go to a card show and you're interacting with dealers and you're trying to do deals and you're trying to, you know, can you flip a card? Can you go to a card show and could you buy a card off somebody for 60 bucks and then go flip it to somebody else for a hundred bucks at the same card show? I see kids do this all the time. I met one kid who he was probably, I think he was 13. He, over the course of six months, he went to, he went to like several different card shows. He started with a hundred bucks at the first card show and he had a $3,600 card. And he said, I got this $3,600 card for a hundred dollars.

Wow. And I said, how did you do that? And he goes, well, six months ago, I went to a card show for $100 and I bought a card for $100. And then I flipped that card at that same card show to a dealer for $130. Then I bought a $130 card. And at that same card show, I flipped it for $180. Then I bought a $180 card. And at the next card show I went to a week later, I flipped it 240 and this story continues on and on and through the course of him doing like 50 of these flips he eventually got his hundred dollar card to a card that was you know that was 30 x 40 x more valuable than that um so it you know the kid you can do that like in cards obviously it doesn't always work right and you can pick the wrong player you can pick the wrong card or whatever but the fact that he was

learning that skill and having that success at age like 12 or 13 yeah i'm like man this kid's going to be a sharp entrepreneur when he grows up whatever whatever line of work he goes into like he's going to be a shark right because he Because he's figuring this out now. So I love cards for that reason for kids, because I feel like it gives kids that. And not every kid has to go flip like that, but still just even the interacting with a dealer and getting the negotiation and all that kind of stuff. It's great life skills. That's impressive. How volatile is the pricing in the card market? I'm in the crypto space. So the past two years, I was actually down money, a lot of money, but this year it's finally doing better.

Oh yeah, you're feeling good now. You're popping champagne these days, right? Is cards that volatile or is it a bit more steady? It depends on the type of card. So the card market is, there's kind of almost different segments. So your ultra modern cards, your cards of the guys who are playing today,

your rookie quarterbacks, your rookies in baseball and basketball, the young players, that's extremely volatile. Those cards can go, they can quadruple in price over the course of a couple of weeks if the guy gets super hot and all of a sudden everyone's like,

oh, he's the next breakout superstar, or they can crater in price by 50%, 75% if the person has a disappointing season. It is a high-risk, high-reward game. I spent a lot of money this past offseason on Desmond Ritter, who was the quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons. I bought about $30,000 worth of Desmond Ritter, who was the quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons. I bought about $30,000 worth of Desmond Ritter cards. I thought Desmond Ritter was going to really have a good year for the Falcons and lead the Falcons to good things. And I thought that those $30,000 worth of cards could potentially become $60,000, $90,000, $100,000 by the end of the season. It played out the way that I thought it would unfortunately played out the exact opposite. Desmond Ritter had a horrible

season. The Falcons had a bad season. They didn't make the playoffs. And now they have just shipped Desmond Ritter off to Arizona where he will be the backup quarterback for the Cardinals in Arizona. So as a result of this, if I were to go sell those cards today, I probably would get three grand, five grand. They dropped that much. That's the risk you take with ultra modern. Now the story could also go the exact opposite direction. I bought Shea Gilgis Alexander cards back about three, four years ago when nobody really knew who Shea Gilgis-Alexander was. He was the guy that I looked at advanced metrics. He was a basketball player who I thought, you know, could go on and potentially have a really good career. His cards are amongst the hottest cards right now in the NBA market. He's, you know, on track to potentially win the MVP award this

year. His cards are up 20, 30 X where they were three years ago. So that's, that's one that I want on, but it's, it's, it's, um, it's high risk, high reward, and it is volatile with the guys playing today with those, with those modern guys. Yeah. But then you got vintage, right? Then you got guys, you got, you got, you know, Michael Jordan, rookie cards, you got Mickey Mantle, rookie cards, you got Babe Ruth, rookie cards. If you want to go back in time, you've more established guys who are playing in the NBA today, like Steph Curry's cards, are going to see less volatility than will a second-year player, right? So if you're buying

those types of cards, they tend to be less volatile, more, you know, little movement up or down, but not the crazy swings that you see, you know, with the ultra-model stuff. That makes sense. Yeah. Similar to like altcoins and crypto and you got Bitcoin and Ethereum, not over time. Those are probably like the legacy cards like Jordan. Yes. I think it's a, yeah, fair comparison. You might even say, frankly, like, you know the the legacy cards like a 52 mantle or an 86 jordan is almost probably more like like us dollar like it's like it's not even crypto it's like more of just a stable long-term appreciation you know interest known you know known kind of appreciation type thing whereas when you get into you know when you get into like a

lebron james that might be more like your bitcoin okay there could still some volatility because he's current you know currently playing and has ups and downs swings and whatever and then you get into your brand new rookie and that's your all coin right you have no idea where it's going to go it could 100x and it could become absolutely worthless that's that's all your rookie cards victor women die are you get any of those yeah victor webb and yama yeah um his cards have been super hot right now super hot so i have a couple i don't have any real big ones um but his cards have he's he's you know kind of taking the nba by storm and and uh his cards are some of the hottest right now uh people are paying big money big money

one of his he's had 12 cards so far over the last um over the last uh his cards started coming out about six months six eight months ago and he's had 12 cards sell for over thirty thousand dollars damn yeah so far and and his biggest cards haven't even come out yet so uh some of the sets that will like contain kind of his his most prominent cards come out later this year so you know he'll there's there's big money being put into victor webb and yama cards that's cool do the players get a cut of any other sales uh so not directly no previously not at all uh now with fanatics getting involved one of the things that they did which enabled them to get involved to get all these licenses is they told the sports leagues that they would cut them in on the ownership.

So the sports leagues now actually own a portion of the venture with Fan general the league and i believe the players association i believe they all benefit to a degree because they get some of the upside you know from the profitability yeah i think that's a smart move because you see more and more players kind of talking about cards at the moment on their podcasts and stuff well now you also have nil so college cards has that that's completely changed in the last couple of years since nil has come along there never used to be college cards like you couldn't you know players who were currently playing in college could not get compensated they couldn't get any compensation whatsoever so they couldn't you know they couldn't themselves sign any type of card deal or sign autographs for money or anything like that well that changed now a couple years ago so now actually what you're seeing is a

whole lot of college players are signing card deals and, and fanatics and tops are signing them, panini signing them. And so like they'll, they'll now have cards that, you know, that will be part of these sets and they'll be signing them and getting income from them. Some of those cards have done super well. Caitlin Clark, the women's basketball player for the university of Iowa, Iowa, her cards have gone bonkers. She's got several cards that have sold for the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah. She set the all-time record. She had a card that sold for, I believe it was over $80,000 recently. And that was the all-time record for a women's basketball card. And it was like one of

her one-of-ones, like very special you know one of a kind cards um so you know but she's definitely getting compensation in fact she just signed a exclusive trading card deal with panini where she will now only be like on panini cards for the next few years and that deal is paying her out one she's getting paid out a million dollars her first year for signing the deal so she's getting direct compensation of a million bucks for giving up her, essentially her trading card rights to one company. And that's unheard of for a female basketball player.

That's a big time deal. Yeah, big time deal. Big time deal. That is cool. I want to get into the grading side of things. This is a fun topic. I feel like it's kind of subjective. Are they using AI at any point in the grading process now?

Not much. They have intentions to. There's been experiments with it. There is one grading company that's a smaller one that's like totally AI-based. They're called Tag. Okay. And so they're kind of making some waves

because they've got like, you know, computer programs that do all the gradings. But the big grading companies are not doing much with it. It's more of a, they're experimenting, but they haven't really implemented it into the process very heavily. It's difficult. Like the technology, I don't know that the technology is fully there. Um, it's, it's a difficult mission because every single card, um, looks different and it's there, there's some innate knowledge that you have to have over, like, if you're trying to judge

how well centered a card is, which is one of the things they do with grading, you have to understand what actual good centering of that particular card would be. Some cards, it's very obvious. Some cards have like a border around them. So it's very easy to look at the card and go,

oh yeah, that's well centered or no, that's not centered. Because you look at the border and you could say, oh, the border shifted to the left or shifted to the right. But then there's plenty of other cards that don't have a border. So the way that like, the only way to know

is this centered or not is to be able to know what to look for with that particular set. And so there's all of this kind of institutional knowledge that's hard for any type of computer vision or AI to understand because the logical look at it that an AI program might have doesn't take into account the institutional knowledge. So there'd have to be some way for that institutional knowledge to get documented and fed into the algorithm. And I'm sure over time that stuff will probably happen. Yeah. But right now it's not there. Yeah. They need to figure out something. Cause I feel like just with human, you could show the same card to five different guys and they'll have different

grades. Right. And it happens. And there's a whole thing with, with grading because the grade of a card has such an impact on the price. Typically on average, if you get it, uh, like with PSA, which is the largest grading company for cards, if you get it uh like it with psa which is the largest grading company for cards if you get a 10 a perfect 10 typically that card is going to sell for three to four times more than the exact same card that gets a nine wow that's typically the difference with some cards the difference is even more extreme with for example michael jordan rookie a 10 sells for 10 times more than a nine. So the difference can be extreme.

So yes, you better believe that people who have nines, they're like, I really wanted that to be a 10 because there's such a money difference. So there's this whole thing in grading where people crack cards out. So they'll send their cards out. They'll get graded. It comes back. It will come back, let's say, a nine. They'll literally get a pair of pliers, crack open the case.

They'll take the card out, and they'll send it right back to the grading company again. Damn. And grade it again, right? And the grading company maybe comes back a nine. They crack it out again. They send it back in again. It comes back. This time it's a 10.

And they're like, well, that was totally worth it. Why was it a 10 that time? Well, because there was a different grader that looked at it, right? It's a 10. And they're like, well, that was totally worth it. Why was it a 10 that time? Well, because there was a different grader that looked at it, right? You know, it's just a different grader. And it's human. So they have standards which they follow, which give them, you know, but like your assessment of it, everybody's assessment of it is slightly different. It is subjective.

So it is frustrating for people. Like people get very frustrated when they think this card's definitely deserving of a 10 and then it comes back as a 9 and then you wonder if the greater just had a bad day that day like a lot of you know you see that all the time right and everyone's human so who knows yeah is psa still super backed up i remember when i sent my cards during the hype mania it took a year and a half get them back no they're pretty good now that was the case for a while that was the case for a long time uh but no they're they've staffed up like crazy over the last couple of years um you get your cards back on most orders now on almost every order even the cheapest ones you're typically getting your cards back within 60 days

oh nice um and a lot of times it's even faster than that now that's cool i saw you tweet out they bought a big competitor out sgc recently so now they own 80 of the market it's even faster than that now. That's cool. I saw you tweet out they bought a big competitor out, SGC. Yeah, recently. So now they own 80% of the market. It's a big deal. Yeah, SGC was number two. PSA was dominant number one, but SGC was number two, and they were gaining market share and PSA bottom.

And so now PSA owns number one and number two. I should say collectors, the parent company of PSA bottom. So now they own one and two. And three and four are kind of distant at this point. So yeah, they're pretty dominant. Do you think that's a good thing or bad? I think it all comes down to how they're going to continue to invest

and support collectors. So it's the same thing with like Fanatics owning, soon they're going to have exclusivity over baseball cards, football cards, and basketball cards. Is that a good thing or a bad thing that that exclusivity exists? It's like, you know, you could say,

well, that's kind of a monopoly, right? It comes down to how they are, frankly, it comes down to how they're behaving and how they're treating it. If collectors, now that they bought SGC, if they're going to use that as an opportunity to raise prices because they know they're the only game in town, slow down service because why be fast since they're the only game in town? If they start making moves now because it allows them to maximize their profitability, then obviously that's horrible for collectors. And that's an awful thing.

If they instead say, you know what? We bought them simply so we could invest even heavier and we're going to continue to do the right thing more and more so, then it could be great for collectors. So it just kind of comes down to how the company is going to choose to run things. I've got a positive impression of collectors.

I know their leadership. I think their leadership is good. I think they'll do things the right way. I have a positive impression of Fanatics and Tops. I know their leadership. I think their leadership is good. I think they'll do things the right way. So I don't mind that either company has exclusivity because I believe in their leadership.

But I also recognize it's scary that if their leadership know, if, if, if, if their leadership starts making decisions that people aren't comfortable with it, they don't like there's no other alternative. They have exclusivity. Yeah. It seems like fanatics has their, their hand in the mix, right? Ruben just stopped by your store last week. Yeah. So that's cool to see him getting feedback from store owners in the community. He's very involved. It's fantastic. I've gotten a really good impression of him. I've gotten to speak with him a few times. It was awesome to have him buy our store. He spent quite a bit of time there, going through the whole store and asked a zillion questions. It was interesting. I think he's one of the, $13 billion, something like that. Holy crap. Yeah, he's on up there. So to meet a guy of that caliber and then to actually have him come in and quiz you on business for an hour and a half, which was what it was.

He came in and toured the store, and he peppered me questions like about our numbers and about our business model and everything like that. It was interesting. I wasn't, I wasn't, I didn't, you know, I knew he was going to come do a tour and, oh, this is cool. And I like this and whatever. I didn't, I didn't know that he was going to be quite as inquisitive, you know, quite, but, but it was great. Like, and you can see like someone at that level who's at that level of success. How do they think, how do they operate? Well, even though he kind of presents, he kind of presents as like a cool guy, a social guy, and he has those things, but man, when it comes down to business, he knows his numbers. You better

know your numbers. He's going to ask you all about your numbers. He's a shark. He's a shark. Yeah. He's a hundred percent of shark. And that, I a shark he's a shark yeah he's 100 a shark and i mean that's why i got to where he is from his point of view it makes sense because you're probably gonna be one of his biggest clients right purchasing cards from fanatics so he wants to see what type of numbers you're gonna put up i think he was really curious for a couple of reasons first of all yes what we are going to be one of his biggest clients and so he's curious from that perspective but i think he was really curious about our business model because opening up one of the largest card shops in the world, he's thinking, how is this business model going to work? How is this going to operate?

What's going to be the business model here? And is this business model – could you replicate this in other cities? What's the plan? What's the expansion possibility? You know, one thing we really tried to do with Cards HQ was we built, because we built that big of a store, we're able to have a whole lot of ways that people can come in and kind of experience the store. We want the whole store to be an experience for people to come in, not just a transactional retail store. So we have, for example, like an area of the store where we have a big table that people can sit down and break their cards. And the whole thing is streaming live on YouTube. So you can actually pretend like you're a breaker. You can call your friends up

anywhere in the world and say, Hey, go on YouTube. I'm about to go on the set. There's, it's a whole set and I'm about to break my cards and you know, whatever. So it's like, we have experiences like that built into the store that nobody else has done before. And so he wanted to, you know, and so he wanted to see like, could this be replicated? Because this, in my opinion, you know, Fanatic's goal, and they've stated their goal publicly is to 10X the number of collectors. They want to 10X the industry. That's a lot of growth. How do you 10x the industry? Well, you clearly have to get 10x the number of people into cards. So that means you got to get a lot of everyday sports fans who maybe don't, you know, they maybe haven't really been into cards before. You got to get them curious about cards. You got to get them kind of into cards. In my opinion, what's the best way to do that? Well, it's to have a really cool store that provides an experience in an area that's local to them. So they can kind of come in and just kind of curiously say, what's this all about? And then when they're there, it's interactive and it's fun and it's cool and it's energetic and things are happening. And they hopefully come in and like what they see and kind of get hooked and then want to come back

and buy some boxes and buy some cards and that whole thing. Right. So I think I, so that's, that's kind of what I have thought would help 10 exit. And Ruben clearly thinks along the same lines. Like he clearly, he came into the store and one of his things was very much, it would really help the growth of the whole entire industry if there were stores like this one in other major metros. And so I think that's also part of the reason why he was drilling me down on my numbers, because he wanted to know, like, what's the business plan and how could this work in other metros? Nice. Yeah, because he's from Philly, right? He's from Philly. He's from Philly. He spends a lot of time in New York City.

Both areas that could use a really good premier card shop yeah i don't know any big stores out there right uh manhattan in particular has very little in terms of kind of big premier card shops they've got a few that are more on the trading card game game uh side the sports card stuff there is limited there is a there is a small cards and coffee that's attached to bleaker trading but but it's there's nothing nothing big footprint at all zero big footprint now obviously it's very expensive there square footage all that kind of stuff you got to take all that into account uh but i think there's but it's also you got the tourism traffic and

i think it's i think there's opportunity for sure there. And in a lot of other major metros, it's a matter of who's going to do it. What's the business model? What's the business plan? Yeah. Yeah. What made you choose Atlanta first? Were you doing a lot of market research? No, I, so I've been, I'm based in Atlanta and, and so for me it was logical to start there. It was a big, it was a big enough Metro, uh, where I felt like the local community would support it. Um, you know, it's, it's Atlanta is a big city, like, and, and, and it's also a good city for, uh, tourism, uh, from around the South, you get a lot of people coming into Atlanta. So sports fans come into Atlanta often for Braves games. You know, the Atlanta Braves are actually almost more of a regional baseball team,

probably kind of like how the Dodgers are out in L.A. The Braves draw not just from Atlanta, but they draw from the whole region. You get, you know, Alabama doesn't have a baseball team. You get people coming in from Alabama. Tennessee doesn't have a baseball team. You get people coming in from Tennessee. You get people coming in from North and South Carolina, uh, for Braves games over the summer. They will constantly have people coming in every weekend, every, you know, from all these other surrounding

States that don't have teams. So it's very much a regional draw. So we intentionally put cards HQ right next to the brave stadium. So yeah, we're within a mile of the Braves Stadium. And we said, we want this positioned so that when people flow in for Braves games and they come in, we're right there. And so we hopefully will become part of that mix, part of that cycle for people. I love that, man. I can't wait to see what you do with the store.

Yeah, it's gonna be fun, man. We're just at the beginning of the journey. Cards HQ opened up February 1st. So it's new. Obviously, I've been in the industry, at the beginning of the journey. Cards HQ opened up February 1st, so it's new. Obviously, I've been in the industry, at it for a long time, for several years. But the retail store, the retail side of it is brand new. So I'm excited. I think there's a lot of possibilities.

I think the fact that we have as much space as we do gives us the ability to try and do a lot of different things. We're leaning heavily into live selling. We're going to lean heavily into e-commerce. Live selling is a whole, you could talk forever about that. That's a whole nother massive area of growth, particularly in cards and collectibles. But I think just in retail and US in general, it's live selling where people will go live on an app, you know, whatnot's a big app in this space, TikTok shopping, you know, TikTok now has TikTok shop. Fanatics has their own app called Fanatics Live. People will go live on these apps and they will sell, you know, sell things live and then people watching them on the app, you can go on the app and you can join any of these different live selling streams. Yeah. And there's people on like on whatnot app. You can go on the app and you can join any of these different live selling streams.

And there's people on like on Whatnot, which we use a lot. There's a lot of people doing cards, but there's also people doing selling sneakers. There's people selling handbags. There's people selling apparel. There's a bunch of different sellers. All of this is huge in China and in India. I mean, it is multitudes bigger in Asia than it is here in the US right

now, live selling. The US, we're just kind of scratching the surface. And I think live selling is going to continue to get more and more popular. So when we built this store out, we actually built six live selling studios right on the edge of the show floor. Wow. So if you're in the store, if you come in the store, while you're shopping for cards, you can look and you can see people doing the live selling and we put TVs up so you can actually walk up, you can walk right up to the studio and see what they're doing and watch the TV to see the feed and everything. And I, so we're leaning into things like that, which I think are going to be a bigger part of the future mix of the whole industry. Um, and so,

yeah, but it will be fun to see how it plays out. Like any other entrepreneurial venture, we're going to try to be agile and we're going to test things out and we're going to find out that certain things we're doing hopefully are working really well and other things may not be. And if they're not, we'll change them and, you know, see, see where the future takes us. I love it, man. Where can people find out more about you and the store and everything you got going on? Sure. Yeah. So I put my content out under sports card investor. Um, it's kind of my main channel. Um, that's on Instagram and YouTube sports card investor. Also, uh, it's Jeff Wilson is personal social, um, and the Jeff Wilson show on YouTube as well. And then the car

shop is cards HQ. So cards HQ shop, um, is where people can find that. Perfect. We'll link everything below. Thanks for coming on, man. Awesome. Sean. It's been a pleasure, man. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for watching, guys. See you tomorrow.