Always love to hear stories of how other people got into the hobby, so I’ll start with mine….
For starters, I was basically forced into it as soon as I was born. I was born in Scranton, PA and a little known fact (aside from it being home of The Office) is that it’s actually sort of the home of sports cards as well. If you look at any vintage pack/box of Topps cards you’ll see “made in Duryea, PA” on almost all of them.
My dad and my uncle (his brother) grew up working in these factories who made cards for Topps/Fleer, and was actually where my dad met my mother too. In some way, I’m only here today because of sports cards.
Being single-digits old and so close to this stuff I naturally grew an obsession with ripping cards. Basically instead of being an iPad kid like today I was a “rip cards kid”
Around 4th grade, newly addicted to Pokemon, I just had so many loose cards that my parents forced me to do something with the junk ones/base cards, etc. Naturally, my friend and I (now co-founder) being in catholic school created what we called “Popemon”
So we took pictures of saints/religious figures on old Pokémon cards and we sold them at in the lunchroom for anywhere from $5-20 each, always doing limited print runs to maintain the hype, until eventually we were about to drop the 1/1 Jesus card (not a joke).
We marketed it for about a week, generating a ton of hype through all the grades, and silently taking offers until a 2nd grader came to us with a fresh $100 bill for it. We took it.
Next day, we get called over the loudspeaker into the Principals office… Apparently this kids wanted it so bad he stole the money from his mother’s wallet to pay us. They banned our operation from the lunchroom and forced us to donate everything we made or we’d be in serious trouble.
Those were the first cards I ever sold and now it’s part of what we’re building the future of.
What’s your story?