1542 - Hobby Dinner Convo: Diversity and Inclusivity

Foreign. Doctor James Beckett Sports Card Insights. Thanks Sponsors Topps, Panini, Upper Deck Heritage Auctions, Huggins and Scott Auctions, Mike Stadium Sports Cards, burbank sports cards comc.com and Beckett Media Beckett Grading Beckett Authentication. This is the not so great audio from my hobby dinner conversation at the Waters Creek show. But hopefully you will enjoy this and suffer through the bad audio for some great content with some great guests. So here it is. Do we really expect more African Americans given people enter the hobby because they collected? They were a kid and I don't know that that will receive. So why aren't we like as a manufacturer when I was doing marketing, we would do a lot of sampling to inner cities, boys and girls clubs, things along those lines to try to plant seeds of collecting. But yeah, it works best. A dad, an uncle, a mom, an aunt teaches you and walks you through it. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. And we need to plant those trees today. Yeah. And make it welcoming to all ethnicities and types of people. To me that's part of the 10x. Yeah, but you're still working off the not the sins of 20 or 30 years ago in a different culture. Well, I do see a definite increase in female collectors and girls and things like that. Yeah, Nashville, it's better than it was 10 years ago, but it's still not great. There's got to be a way to help cultivate the love of collecting in communities. The growth of that at the Dallas Card show is exponential. I see maybe 10 to 15% of the people walking around are people of color. 10 to 15%? Yes. You must have been in a different room today. That's not necessarily black, African American, but there's a lot of people different than when most of us started. It's not just for white suburban kids anymore. It is definitely much more mixed than it was. And there are a lot of people of color that I see every show here. I monitor mentally what's going on. Like you, I pay attention to these things. I spent many years setting up the college fairs trying to recruit kids to go to colleges. With the exception of the Dallas City College Fair when Mr. Vino Pierso was the superintendent. Is there is usually a paucity of Hispanic people going to college fairs. We have less of that problem than I had trying to just meet Hispanic people at the college fairs. There was always a paucity because their culture wasn't as much college oriented. The cultures you're referring to haven't been as much collector oriented you come from the city, you don't have a lot of room to store stuff. Are you going to spend money on cards? Those have been some of the issues in the past. When I walk around the show, I see much more than I did when Kyle started the show in this location eight years ago. So do we think the hobby is the meritocracy that you can get ahead regardless of your ethnicity? If you start with 500 bucks and you're scrappy and shrewd and all that, Absolutely. There's guys and gals that do it, so that should be encouraging. If you're a woman, same thing. You can get ahead as a woman. They're not saying, I'm not going to deal with you. They're saying, show me what you got. The Hispanic one is an interesting one to me too. Yes, obviously most communities are somewhat impoverished. I went to Mexico City with my family three weeks ago. I went to some of the baseball games down there and I brought like 100 cards. And we're handing them out. It was like we were handing out fifty dollar bills because a lot of times they just don't have access to them in the first place. And they were blown away by what they were getting. I'll never forget there was this chef I gave some cards to five times more. He tracked me in my seat one time. It's like, I need two more. I was like, yes. So I honestly believe we could be with the globalization of the hobby if TOPs and fanatics can figure that out with some of the things they're doing with the FIFA license. Now. Stickers have always been collected in Central America and South America, but what cards started going there? Two of the 10x women, three of the 10x is Hispanic, four, five is Asia, six is Africa. You get to the 10x by being inclusive. And I don't think anybody at the table, really, anybody at the show, hopefully is against that. No, I don't think that anyway, because somebody walks up and says, I want to buy your card. You're not saying, I don't like your looks where you came from. I don't know if you saw Derek Lively of the Mavericks every Dallas card show. He's huge in collecting Pokemon and he trades actively with all the kids at the show. I think Michael Rubin or one of the head honchos at TOPS at their industry summit said up to 30 or 40% of active athletes and now collecting cards in basketball. That's a significant number of people in color. I know last year when he was with the cuts hobby friend most. Spencer Thompson delivered a $40,000 case to Marcus, so he's a collector. If you go to Fanatics Fest, there's a lot of people of color who are collectors. Fanatics Fest is something special. I'm blown away by what that event is because it's so experiential rather than transactional. If you want plant seeds, do it through experience. Socioeconomical is going to play into that. With prices of cards going up like they are. If I'm middle lower class, I have not as much of a shot to go buy that or to get involved in that. That's hurdle's getting higher. So marketing, what do you go after? Where do you plant the seeds? I got my start with an 85 tops pack. It was 15 cents, 20 cents. Whatever they were then, there's a hard entry level now to get into car less than you think. One thing Fanatics has done in recent years has been really good for the card stores is many of their products. They now offer the retail that you get at the Walmarts and the targets and targets also expanding their card sales. But there's a lot of stuff where it's a 20, 25 price point to get a box. Seven, eight packs, you'll probably get some decent cards. I'm not going to say great cards. You have that outside child a great card. But they understand. Even the card stores are getting the reason. People complain about what Fanatics does, but they've done a boatload of positive things for the hobby too. Upper deck, opening day baseball, when you would have the opening day product, $1.99, $2.99 a pack. And it might be less appealing to the person that's interested in selling cards for money. But in terms of making it accessible as a real strategy, you hit it with the accessibility. There's so many different facets to it. Whether it's socioeconom, whether it's demographic in terms of gender or race, whether it's price points. There's not just one simple thing that goes into accessibility. It has to be near them. They have to be able to afford it. What is the most accessible product in history? It's panini stickers. Panini soccer stickers. The penetration of that ethnicity, international everywhere. Nothing comes close to that. It's very cheap. There's this free trading ethic. Full books. I think I've got books for about six or seven different years as a kid. And yeah, that 99 cent pack for the stickers. One of the entry points that's cheaper are brakes that's a positive to me. I think the pick, your teams are the greatest thing. You're not getting cars you don't want. But what's your price to get into it? Even let's say I like Tampa Bay football. This Baker, you know I'm an OU guy, right? So if you're opening up exquisite, whatever the big product pops Chrome right now, I guess I can't afford that. And I make decent money. It depends. So what I'm saying is how do you get those kids to plant those seeds now if they can't afford them? It breaks a great point, but unless you're breaking Donrus, how am I getting into it? Well, we don't have anyone under 18. We don't allow it. I don't think most people do that. For our distribution strategy at Upper Deck, we called it the staircase method. Let's start off with the lower tiered products. And victory was a 99 cent product. We kept around forever. First one out of the gate, at least you can get some stuff. We had to beg people to take the product, then MVP and then Upper Deck. And you would work your way up to these super premium types of products and preferably have those hit later in the calendar than competing with these smaller releases. Because once Upper Deck came out, the sales for Victory and MVP just died. But I think that was a good strategy. Upper Deck last week released SPX 150 bucks a box. 20 boxes in a case. Can a kid afford 150 much for a box? I think they can. But if you get a break, if you get a random team break, it's only 85. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so now if you can't afford 150, you can afford 85. And it's a random team break, so you're not necessarily going to get what you want. The interesting thing is when you do the math, 32, 85 is less than 20 times 150. So participating in a break is a better deal than buying the box. I think it goes the other way for the high price products, but on the cheaper products or the reasonable products. And SPX used to be a premium brand. You're only getting 14 cards, but still not how many cards you get. But to have that value proposition is better. And so in that sense, breaking has made it more accessible and made it relational. And that's the secret of your business. It's a weird science. If we buy the cases at a high price and fractionalize it, box prices go up because we're taking it all. But we're making it affordable because we're fractionalizing it. So it's good and then it's bad. Good for the guys that buy singles. Cause we're getting singles out of the market. Bad. If you like buying boxes, which I do. So that's bad. What's bad is. But at the same time, like the local car channel, Next Wave is done. Can get one box or one case. And the breaker is on the 49th case of National Treasures. My local guy, I can't even go get a box from a card shop that's been there for 20 years. The breakers on his 100th case and the coffee to replace it some almost impossible because like you said, that first box is 100. Then because you bought it all up, it's 500. No, but again, it's rational, but it's Pavlovian. They're encouraging collectors. If you want that product, you better get it day one. Then if you want to get it. A lot of it's fomo. Yeah, you've got to get it graded immediately, even speedy grading, so that you can get it out there. Because the initial singles prices are going to be big and then they're going to go down, whereas the price of unopened is going up. And my brake price starts out low because I got it at the lowest price. When I go rebuy it, it doubles the wax. Today, the unopened, he sold out this morning of Bowman Blasters at 35 a box. He brought in a case, put it in at 40, they were gone with an app at 40. And people were happy to pay it because it meant that's a product with momentum. The buyer psychology is, hey, it used to be 35, now it's 40. It's going to be 45 tomorrow. I got to get it now. But then it get to price resistance and then that's tricky because if it starts cratering. But by then most of it's out there and most of it's open. There was a vendor at Dallas Card Show New Jersey last month who told his son, go ahead and buy all the Topps Chrome hangers you see over there at $35 per. And we're gonna stash them until they're 50. The next time I was in the card shop, the very next week, I said, how much are your hanger packs? And he said, 65. So did the guy sell at 50 or did he hang in there? Either way, he's in at 35. Between in school, who have this master figured how to play the game because if you get out too early, that's bad. If you hang on too long, I mean it just is not gonna go up forever. Get his allocation matter for hobby shops. If you have an allocation, that's a good thing. Yeah, if you don't have an allocation, that's a bad thing. But it's not a death sentence. But you're at a disadvantage. Upper deck was a decade ahead of their with epap direct to consumer anywhere in the world. That's what breaking is too a convenience. You live in an on demand convenience. If I want something, I buy it on Amazon right now, I'll have it tomorrow. And that was the goal. Not everyone has access to a hobby shop. So you provide a great service to allow people to experience the hobby. And then hobby shops aren't open from 8 o' clock at night till late in the morning. There is a wild amount of activity on epac. I want to talk to people in the chat here about my cards, whatnot, go to bed at night and I just sit on whatnot and the next thing I know there's 10 packages at the house and I'm like, why did I buy any of this? I didn't mean to hit the button. Why did I buy any of it? It's my kid. It was a PSA 8 slab for three bucks. Why did I buy it? I don't know. Let me say something controversial. I think on demand is a problem. It's not un American, but I mean it's against the hobby that we all grew up in where you have a blind box that you buy a pack and a sense of wonderment in opening the pack. So to order exactly what you want. The reason why the panini stickers are never valuable because you were able to trade them in and get the ones you needed. And so it wasn't a blind box. It was. But then you could swap them out. And it's part of the reason why Star company has perceived that that was direct to consumer. It wasn't. But you knew exactly what you're getting. It was deterministic. And the charm of the hobby is buying a pack and opening it and not knowing what you're going to get. And I don't mean opening up a Star basketball and hoping all 11 cards are in that pack. It's eliminate the magic. There was a direct to consumer option to get the cards you need. In fact, doing Some research about 52 tops in the early days. And Sam Rose, not Al Rosie, but Sam card collectors company Richard Gelman. You could just order the Cards you needed and it was for pennies back in the 50s, was it way, way more than it would have been. So to go ahead and buy something. Larry Fritch had a catalog in the late 60s where you order the cards you need. And if that was the way most people did it, why would you go to a convention you just order. Stu used to sell factory sealed complete sets. I'm not in favor of that either. That's not collecting. Is that more investing? Buy the whole set at one time. Catalog the first attempt to be direct to consumer with a whole set. And I don't think that's good yet. On the other hand, one of my great nephews, each year I buy for him the top set. I've been able to get him the last three sets between 20 and 25 dollars each. And I think he's opened all of them just to enjoy looking at the card. So not everybody invests. He doesn't have a lot of money. So for him getting the cards at that price, he was paying the price. He's enjoying the cards at a very reasonable price point that Uncle Rich is taking care of him for. So is it better to give him an unopened box for $100 or $60 or whatever it is, give an equivalent unopened to have that experience. Or hey, here's the complete set. You're an instant collector. You have every card in that set. And with Topps, they're not even in numerical order, which buggles my mind the way the sheep. I know they're not doing it on purpose. Path of least resistance. You don't have to do any work to get them. But if you want them in order giving you a set. Enjoy. That's right. Now you have to touch it. It's like a coloring book you got. Your nephew is getting a set every year. That sounds good, but where do you go from there? Do you put it on the shelf or do you get on? He's actually come to my house a couple times and. And he'll go through my stock before I sell out again. He just picks cards and Uncle Rich gives them to him. And his stepbrother came with him one time and I had bought at a trade night a TSA 4:53 top stealth cranle. That looked really nice. And the kid is like 12 years old, new PSA and the because the cart was so attractive, he says, I watch this, I go, all right, you're going home. But it was a nice looking floor. Mike Baker probably would have put in. That's what I was going to say better NBA in. The kid knows about Mike Baby Bakery. But still, the fact that he knew about PSA and he's not really an active collector told me something. His eyes lit up when he saw psa. It's funny. Yes, there's brand awareness in the States, in Asia. PSA is a prostate exam. That's the first thing that people come up with when you say psa. So it takes a while to get that brand awareness. I teach high school marching band every fall and every year, one of the T shirts that I bust out for band camp is a PSA T shirt. And out of the 60 kids in the marching band, one kid, usually a different kid every year, is like, they grade my Pokemon cards. My license plate frame is psa, but it's the airline. They had a great slogan, which I try to adopt to ours, and it says, psa, catch our smile. Because every time I see someone, especially at the national, when you get your cards back, well, that enjoyment, it's like a secondary pack. Opening experience. Is doing all right.