what's going on everybody welcome back to an episode of stacking slabs your hobby content alternative hopefully you're off to a good start this week hopefully you're checking out the rest of the content we have to offer here on the stacking slabs network there was a double dip of hobby jobs some conversations that i just had to get out the door we've got a whole lot coming with the football card podcast book to last wnba card podcast will be back flagship all the things having so much fun putting together this content for all of you and i wanna do something a little bit different today i am attending my first fanatics fest as a matter of fact by the time you hear this i will be either on the way or touched down in new york i've been having a lot of conversations ahead of fanatics fest to try to solidify the in person connection that we all desire being online i can't wait to meet many different collectors and business builders and so i spend a lot of time thinking about making sure that my time is valuable when i am out in the market that i don't waste my time and so i think prepping before shows is really really important and there's a lot of shows going on right now in the summertime obviously the nationals on the other side of this but i wanna talk about fanatics fest and i'll say this from the jump if you came here looking for the standard fanatics fest preview episode this is not going to be that i'm not going to run through every athlete appearance or autograph opportunity or panel or booth you need to go run to before the doors open there are going to be plenty of people doing that and honestly most of that content has a shelf life for a very very short time what i want to do instead is use fanatics fest as a lens lens because i think fanatics fest is not just an event but i think it is a signal i think it is a case study i think it is a physical manifestation of where collecting is going of how fandom now works and how attention gets converted into commerce in the world we all live in online and if you care about sports cards which i think you all do memorabilia modern fandom brand building kind of where this space is going i think this episode will be for you and the event itself is worth studying at a much deeper level so the angle i wanna bring to this conversation is i'm going into fanatics fest as an observer i'm going there for relationships i am going there to try to understand how pieces of this industry fit together what works together what doesn't i'm going in there thinking about hobby jobs i'm thinking about operator role business mechanics and what all that means for the collector who might just think they're showing up for a fun weekend and the idea i want to put out right on the table right at the beginning of this episode is that fanatics fest is a top of the funnel event for fanatics and i don't say that as an insult that's not me trying to be edgy or get shares that is just the cleanest way i can describe what the event appears to be when you actually study how fanatics talks about itself how it structures the event and how the business is set up so we'll start with fanatics itself fanatics now describes itself as a global sports platform not a merch company not a card company not a sports book a sports platform and when they describe that platform they include commerce collectibles gaming fanatics fest markets advertising credit cards studios they say that together those businesses create an integrated platform for more than one million fans globally and i think that matters because the moment you stop thinking about fanatics as the guy who sells jerseys and now owns tops and start thinking about fanatics as a platform that wants to sit across every part of the fan journey the event starts to look very different now fanatics fest from my observations is not just a convention it has become a physical layer inside a much larger much larger ecosystem it becomes a place where fans can buy merch discover cards meet with people in the hobby see athletes create content redeem loyalty currency maybe watch live breaks watch a podcast i know i'd like to get there for the mind the game tyrese haliburton lebron james conversation i hope i get in town for that and i think these are the exact categories and touch points fanatics has published across its event app loyalty and business pages and if that sounds familiar it should because that is the attention economy attention becomes the scarce thing platforms compete to capture it then they convert it into outcomes which can be purchase behavior loyalty content partner value future engagement academic and policy reach search on the intention economy describes attention as a scarce rival and monetized often through platform structures that connect users on one side and advertisers and partners on the other fanatics advertising now says in plain language that it wants brands to engage fans at every touch point across content commerce and culture that is the same playbook i think one of the most revealing details in all of this is not that not on the fanatics fest homepage it's in the executive bios lance fensterman who runs fanatics events says his team is focused on elevating the collector experience while introducing new fans to the myriad of offerings under the fanatics umbrella scott fisher the head of strategy for fanatics events says his role is to make sure fanatics fest delivers outsized impact and measurable value for the fanatics ecosystem that is incredibly revealing language it tells you the event is not being judged on only vibes it is being judged on strategic value to the full machine and once you know that the whole show starts to make sense the inaugural inaugural fan fanatics fest in twenty twenty four was announced as a three day event at the nexus of sports fandom culture and collecting it had a four hundred thousand square foot pool floor partner activations from major league and brands live podcast product drops fanatics live breaks retail superstore tops exclusive fanatics sports book a trading pit collecting one zero one for beginners fanatics did start with did not start with a quiet collector meetup they started with a spectacle designed to collapse multiple fan behaviors into one experience then the audience showed up more than seventy thousand people attended in twenty twenty four and more than a hundred and twenty five thousand in twenty twenty five the show sold out on saturday in twenty twenty five and the twenty twenty six event expanded to four days to tie itself to the fifa world cup final with fifa specific programming and what fanatics called the festival's largest branded activation that is not the growth curve of a niche side product project that is the growth curve of something fanatics believes can become a franchise now here's the question that interests me the most do attendees realize this is top of the funnel even for fanatics my guess isn't fully i think they feel it more than they name it they feel the energy the abundance the celebrity and density they feel polished activations they feel the sense that everything is connected but i do not think most people are walking in and saying i'm entering a live acquisition environment for vertically integrated sports platform they're walking in and saying this is gonna be awesome and that emotional layer is exactly what makes this model work that that is an inference but it is one strongly supported by how fanatics has wired this event look at the mechanics this year fanatics app is the hub the app is where your tickets live the app is how you manage your schedule and maps the app is where you check fan cash it's also how you participate in fanatics quest where you scan qr codes across the florida unlock badges and claim rewards and if you transfer tickets the recipient is tied to a fanatics one account you might ask why does this matter i think it matters because it means the event is not just a crowd it is an account linked crowd it is a crowd moving through branded checkpoints loyalty mechanics and app behaviors it is a crowd whose experience is organized through fanatics' own digital layer again i'm being careful here i'm not making claims about internal analytics that fanatics has not published but i am saying the architecture is plainly designed to make the live experience more measurable more repeatable and more transferable to the rest of the ecosystem you got fandance fandance one describes fandance as the currency of sport across fandance businesses and redeemable for apparel tickets live card breaks fandance collect purchases bonus bets casino credits and more inside fanatics fest fan cash can now be earned and redeemed with participating dealers brands retail locations and concession concessions that is not a throwaway feature that is unified economic loop running through the entire platform and then there is the collector conversion layer the card combine teaches buying trading grading and protecting cards the collector experience page pushes tops drops live breaking rare memorabilia trade night big grading brands and instant rips experience that place a complimentary pack directly into your collection in the app through fanatics collect this is a very intentional answer to a big question how do we make collecting legible to the sports fan who is curious but not yet committed collect's reporting from twenty twenty five may be the most important line of this whole conversation they said fanatics told them that around thirty to forty percent of the twenty twenty four attendees were hardcore collectors and the rest were either lapsed collectors or people who did not care about trading cards at all that's everything that tells you fanatics fest is not mainly a servicing event it is a conversion event i think this is why i think fanatics fest is such a clean microcosm of the online world from a collecting perspective online the game is simple capture attention create a moment lower the barrier to action make the action feel social turn the action into identity and turn the identity into repeat behavior fanatics live makes the logic explicit the company says it wants to marry content community and commerce and it says commerce is the byproduct of highly entertaining program nick bell's role atop fanatics collect is explicitly centered on live content based commerce and building commerce around content and personalities that is not the old hobby model that is the creator era platform era and social era commerce and now fanatics fest takes that same logic and brings it into a building in a big building instead of scrolling a feed you have the javits center instead of thumbnails you have branded activations instead of creator intro clip you have a live panel or athlete walk through instead of a link in bio you have a qr code an app hub a fan cache redemption point a tops drop a live break a photo op upgrade instead of online social proof you have lines crowds scarcity cameras and giant screens that is why this event matters it is the internet but embodied now i do not want to make this sound like this is all downside because that would be lazy there are real benefits for collectors here fanatics has brought enormous institutional energy into this space the hobby has major league licenses acquired tops rebranded pwcc into fanatics collect launched fanatics live and keeps trying to embed player moments and league authenticated storytelling directly into the product mlb debut patches are a big example of it you've got the crazy sales of those wrestlemania patches and i think it can be good for collectors more people in the funnel can mean more demand more cultural relevance more liquidity more product awareness more merchandising creativity and more reasons for leagues and athletes to care about cards if if collecting becomes easier to understand for the sports fan that expands the pool of future hobby participants i think that is something most of us can agree we want to have happen and frankly a lot for a lot of years the hobby was not especially good at welcoming people fanatics is trying to solve that even if they are solving it in a very corporate way but here's the trade when the hobby gets rebuilt around attention the collector no longer lives only in a market of objects the collector also lives in a market of moments and moments are different moments are louder moments travel faster moments reward spectacle moments tend to flatten context a giant athlete walk through clip can produce more energy than a great quiet conversation around vintage scarcity a stage celebrity table moment may outperform an honest hobby lesson a flashy patch or exclusive on-site drop may get more traffic than a card with deeper historical meaning that doesn't make the flashy thing fake it just means the center of gravity changes collect's twenty twenty five reporting captures this tension very well they praised the event's improvements but dealers also said stages and activations could act like magnets that pulled people away from dealer rows and some athlete visits to tables felt inorganic or staged that is the tension in one sentence fanatics fest can create incredible access and createable distractions both at the very same time there is also the concentration issue fanatics is not only making cards it's selling merch running events operating a loyalty system building a marketplace doing live commerce running sportsbooks launching prediction market all the things that they're doing and you think about that and i think that's just a lot and it's a lot from a collector perspective like where do we sit in this pecking order where do we sit are we getting attention so i think about fanatics fest fest and hell i'm i have all these thoughts about fanatics fest without even attending yet but i think i'm thinking about the national too and i'm thinking about these two shows coexisting i know it has been a lot for me as a business owner operator to plan and prepare to get organized around these two events and i'm not even selling cards i'm just meeting with people and i'm creating content so i think about the national and i think where does this leave the national i think from an attendee perspective the clean cleanest framing is that these are now two different flagship products for two different parts of the hobby cycle the national is still the hobby's dense center of gravity it has history back to the nineteen eighties it is still fundamentally a trade show built around the hobby depth fanatics fest i think is different it's more about experiences it's more about moments and more about fan engagement so i don't think the right question is which one wins i think the better question is what job does each event do for the industry and my answer would be this the national is still the inventory engine the liquidity engine the trust engine the ritual engine and fanatics fest is the attention engine the conversion engine the partner engine and the amplification engine and right now the hobby probably needs both if fanatics fest keeps growing it will pressure the national to modernize presentation improve polish and think more intentionally about onboarding the next collector if the national stays strong it will pressure fanatics fest to keep respecting the collector and not reduce the hobby to vibes lines and exclusives that tension i think is healthy the danger would be one event trying to become the other if fanatics fest fully abandons depth for spectacle it becomes a sports culture expo with cards as a decoration if the national chases spectacle instead of leaning into its unmatched breadth history and transaction power it weakens the very thing that makes it essential because i'm going in as observe of an as an observer here's what i'll be trying to study i want to know where the lines are and why it's the longest wait attached to celebrity access exclusive product brand activation or actually collector education because that tells you what is winning attention i want to see whether the collector area feels integrated or tucked away i want to watch how many people are learning the hobby versus transacting in the hobby hobby the card combine might be one clue collecting one zero one is the original event the reported mix of twenty twenty four attendees being mostly nonhorab core collectors is another if you're trying to understand where the hobby is going you have to study the new entrant not just the existing power buyer i want to pay attention to where the real relationship value is not just who gets the biggest stage not just who has the flashy setup i'm looking for translators the people who can move between fan culture and collector culture the people who can explain products without sounding like they're running a funnel the operators who understand community the hobby companies that can actually build trust with a newcomer those roles matter more and more in a world where collecting is becoming more entertainment adjacent this is partly my interpretation but it follows directly from how fanatics has structured both its events and platform and yes i'm going in with hobby jobs top of mind not because i think a booth equals a career but because events like this reveal labor demand if you know how to look fanatics already reveal labor demand if you know how to look fanatics already recruits across corporate commerce betting gaming and collectibles the company has more than twenty two thousand employees and its platform now includes events studios advertising loyalty marketplace and content production so when you walk into a show like this you're not just seeing vendor vendors you are seeing the visible layer of partnership teams event operations merch planners content producers commerce creator commerce operators marketplace signals authenticators sponsorship sales team a lot of hobby jobs now live adjacent to traditional collecting so what does this all mean for the existing collector i think it means you need to become more self aware because the old hobby muscle of just walk the room and buy what you like is not enough in a modern environment designed to shape your attention at every turn now you need to ask better questions what is the event trying to make me feel what is it trying to make me do what part of this is for my enjoyment and what part of it is for my conversion where am i genuinely discovering some something meaningful and where am i just getting swept away into the crowd's energy how much of my collecting tastes is still mine those are not anti fanatics questions they're pro collector questions and honestly they're pro human in any environment shaped by the attention economy because attention is not neutral anymore that's the larger point the collecting world used to be fragmented more local more dealer dependent more publication dependent and slower now it is faster more centralized more visual and more content driven more app driven more personality driven more moments driven fanatics did not create all of that but fanatics may be the company best positioned to operationalize it at scale so if you want a sentence premise for this entire episode i think that would be something like fanatics fest is not just a sport fan festival it is a live demonstration of how modern attention gets captured organized and turned into hobby growth platform value and future spending and that is why i care about it not because it's loud or flashy or the guest list is insane but because if you want to understand where the hobby is going you have to understand the incentives of the company shaping the stage and whether you're an existing collector creator dealer grader marketplace operator or someone thinking about hobby jobs the question remains the same when all of these systems come together in one building what are they building you into that's what i'll be watching and honestly that's the conversation i think that is worth having on day one i really appreciate you listening and supporting and telling a damn friend about stacking slabs hopefully for anyone attending fanatics fest or just watching from afar it gives you some sort of lens to think about as this show is going on appreciate all of your support appreciate you tuning in each and every week really appreciate all of it you all take care happy collecting talk to you soon