we are back another episode of the staging area with dc sports eighty seven and tory tory before i was kinda sitting down at my desk and i was thinking about this i i feel like we should talk about a couple things that maybe we weren't planning to number one i literally was not planning to send anything to consignment this week and i just came back from the post office and sent a a big old box over to dc sports eighty seven and i this is what's interesting about it where you don't prepare for a box to be shipped out to be consigned with companies like dc sports eighty seven but something happens where a card pops up that you weren't expecting and then all of a sudden like you're making these decisions and my wife asked me she's like what's the box and i said honey that's me being responsible so i was thinking about all that and in light of us chatting and that's just it's interesting because you're constantly getting new cards because other cards are popping up and collectors are having to make decisions yeah for sure it it would be wonderful if we lived in a world where we all just had endless card budgets and we could just buy buy buy buy buy and just hoard into our pc all day long or speculate on guys but unfortunately not the world we live in and yeah it's interesting because we'll have the same conversations with people all the time where you and i have talked before where it's like here's the pc pile and here's the i'm gonna hold it for a while pile and here's the i wanna sell it and it's funny because you can do all that and be the most organized person with your collection in the world then all of a sudden that one pc card hits ebay and it's like well these cards come from the pc pile to the sell pile today because you're like trading up so yeah it's funny it's like musical chairs with cards and money all day long when you're in this space long enough but yeah it's it's the battle we have to wage inside our heads but hey good for you and i'm sure your wife is equally proud of you for being the type to say i'm just gonna move these cards into another card not say i'm gonna you know move the mortgage money into this pc card so it's the right way to do it you know and then on top of that it's like you make these decisions on what cards go and there's attachment and all these things but then when you start to see like comps of cards that are similar adjacent you look at those comps you're like well that's like three times what i'm valuing this card at it to me it makes the decision making a little more easier yeah sometimes the market almost forces you it's like you'll see these guys who you know they held on to whatever i don't know there's some pmg of their favorite player they've held on to since like ninety seven or ninety eight and they're like it's pc for life and then they look and they realize that it's now worth eight grand or something and it's like well you know everything has a number in this world so the true that is very much true in the hobby as well we're gonna talk about kind of your experience at the super bowl there's a whole lot that we can get into and i'm really excited we have not spoken about it so i wanted to reserve that for this episode but we were chatting before i hit record and we were talking about just like dc sports eighty seven growth like decisions you're making and it just like hit me regarding like the volume game and decisions you have to make when you have a certain volume and i asked you and i you you were like let this would be fun to just talk about on the podcast this is what we're doing and this is what i love about content sometimes it's like we're not planning for this but let's talk about it i asked you based on the decisions psa has made based on the volume and trying to manage the volume that's incoming you know i think back at the decisions they made during the pandemic and and shutting down and then the decisions now where you're increasing prices and like all of these decisions that these companies make ultimately kind of help manage the companies manage their process make things more streamlined less delay less and i was just thinking about what you're doing because i just sent a box and i was like told you i like i pay for the premium service all day every day because five dollars a card i'd rather pay five dollars a card have that those cards listed in a business day and sell within a week so i can get my cat like so it made sense to me but i i wanted to like kinda get your perspective on like those types of decisions especially because one was such a big talking point a few weeks ago about psa and i figured you probably could shed some light on just how you think about like the volume and management and decisions at dc sports eighty seven yeah for sure no and it's interesting i'm glad we waited to hit record to talk about this because it is like such a big hobby conversation because you know i heard ryan ho from psa talking about this on another podcast and how it's like he even came out and said you know we want fewer cards to grade right now and so it's it's funny because that's so like counterintuitive in the business world it's like we have a business you know they're the leader in the space or the you know they're the name in grading and so you assume they just want everything they can get their hands on so i do respect them coming out and saying like look we're getting underwater here we're getting behind we're doing a disservice to collectors what it really reminds me of are like a couple decisions we've made in the past so like for one we used to be we did only a fifty cent listing fee and we would go through all the cards everybody sent in and if we thought a card wouldn't sell for at least five dollars we would ship it back to them because we were so worried about like we don't want you to net too little on your submission and but the overhead and the time we had to spend to go through every submission because what you would have is you'd have these guys send us a box of ten thousand cards knowing that we would literally filter through all the cards pull out what was five dollars or more ship them the rest back so all they were paying was you know the twenty or thirty bucks shipping to get the box back to them we did all the work for them and as we grew and grew that became completely impossible to do and so that was when we changed from a fifty cent listing fee to a ninety nine cent a card listing fee for just our standard bulk service and we said we're not going through cards anymore like you send us what you want listed and it was the same kind of thing it's it's that was almost our parallel to the psa move it's like we're gonna charge a little more okay forty nine cents more wasn't a big deal but the big thing was we're not gonna go through your card so look if you send us a bunch of junk and we list it and it doesn't sell you lose the card you still pay us the ninety nine cent listing fee we just kinda move on and we had to deter that like just influx and flood of junk stuff you know you mentioned doing premium so what services we offer what the wait time is and what the price is is obviously the most close you know model similarity to psa and so when we introduced premium it was okay what makes sense to charge people where we're not being you know so high priced that it's pricing people out of doing it but it's okay for five dollars a card there's enough additional like income and offsetting the cost of expediting that stuff to us that it makes sense but to the customer you know for most guys they're probably saying fifty to a hundred dollar card is like the cheapest they would use that with because they can kinda say okay an extra ten percent have it up next day and to your point if it gets here on monday it goes live on tuesday the auction ends on sunday you're getting paid on monday it's weak you know delivery to money in your bank account's a week and that was a real value to people and so we started offering that when we did that we moved our two day express back to a three day express we don't charge for it but just to create some cushion and so we play a lot of those similar games and it's just really hard i think the biggest difference in us and psa is obviously they have to have graders they have to have experts in cards trained on their process and their grading standards and all that you know for us our tech and our processes in house are mostly built where anybody we hire who's had some experience with us in the card world can just kinda do it and so it's a lot easier for us to scale and we can scale faster which is where we can go get more office space we can go hire more people but yeah it's it's interesting you can totally relate to the stress of it you know we've all got businesses we're in in one way or another and you kinda juggle time and money and customer feedback and what you can do operationally so yeah very much resonates with us and that's probably a longer answer than most people care for us to put back the curtain on but that's got yeah it's where we ended up and to answer the question that we waited to answer that's where we're at so maybe one more on this because i'm curious because we're in this moment too where there's like businesses are making these decisions based on scaling and growth and part of what happens through this is communication like businesses are communicating to their customers yeah as much as they can about why these decisions have been made when you made the decision either on premium or from you know fifty or forty nine cents to ninety nine cents i'm assuming like it was just a combination of like conversations conversations you've had internally like mhmm tension all these things like when you make a decision like that obviously when it's regardless of the cents and dollars of it or dollars and cents of it your your there's sensitivity around that because you're having to communicate about your customers spending more than they're used to like how do you think about that sort of communication and just like making sure that you're mindful that it lands in a way that whether you know the customer likes it or not they can at least understand why the decisions are being made like how do you think about that yeah two big things you know number one it's does this make sense for the customer and so like in the example of us not going through cards you know we don't have a minimum value anymore but if anybody ever reaches out and says like hey what should i send you guys or they ask if we'll go through their cards and we say no we explain we still strongly encourage send cards five dollars and up because when you look at and we'll tell people this every day when you look at the fee you pay us in a percentage and then the listing fee like here's the value you need to target so that you're not giving your cards away for pennies on the dollar that's not good business for us or them and so a lot of it is trying to really illustrate to them and highlight those reasons that the decisions we make are so our business can run efficiently but the services we do provide are at the ideal value and not just something that's a negative to us or negative to the customer we don't either happen we wanna find the things that are mutual benefit so so that's one big one and then the other is just really you know you'll always hear about people when you talk about shopping for something you're gonna go buy something or you're gonna hire somebody to do something for you and you hear like the what's the price what's the speed what's the quality and it's always you know people will give you those you can pick two kind of thing you know for us it's you're always moving from one bucket to the other and so it's being sure that we can find the best balance of all of them it's it's no good to our customers if we can crank our speed through the roof and hey every card that shows up today is listed tomorrow i'd love to do that but if quality was gonna suffer and communication was gonna suffer and everything else was gonna suffer then that's not worth doing and that's not sustainable either so for us when we communicate these and we'll send like a bulk email to all our customers explaining changes and giving a date it's be sure we give enough notice be sure we explain the why be sure we highlight why we're doing something so if it's a hey you might not be able to send in a two day express anymore but we're introducing a new service we call premium and it does cost you five dollars but here's how you can have something listed next day just being sure you're always offering an option that covers every you know situation a collector's gonna find themselves in it's worked out really well for us so far and you know we've got plenty of people who will go out there and sort mail today and you're gonna have one box of two thousand cards for their bulk submission they don't care about waiting three days because lower dollar one that's their kind of mid end stuff that they send twenty cards in express have them up later this week and one that's their you know absolute bangers that are coming in going up premium tomorrow because they want them in a hurry and so being sure there's something that caters to each end of the whole you know spectrum of the market is what's really worked for us i love that little impromptu chat but getting educated on your mindset mentality last time we spoke you were about ready a day away from getting on a plane heading on over to the super bowl i saw some photos i've not texted you not asked you questions but i wanna spend some time trying to you know understand everything that happened in the experience from setup to location to yeah who you were with and most specifically like the cards and the sales and let's just start there i wanna give you the runway to talk about your super bowl week yeah so i'll set the stage and then we can get in whatever you know hobby stuff we want so obviously this was with ebay live so it was a really cool setup i went up on the thursday before the super bowl they basically had a pop up that was in downtown san francisco right on the corner of like market and powell street just a couple of blocks actually from a new card vault by brady so that was kinda cool got to see one of those which i had not seen before and it was cool it's basically ebay had like a main stage setup where there was always a athlete up there kind of along with whoever was streaming and then for the there were three seller booths and we were one of them each day and it was just a place to really highlight your stores they had our our brand and logo on it it had a whole setup where we put all the cards we were gonna be auctioning over these few days obviously with the super bowl we were leaning into football so we were doing all more you know mid and high end football singles but it was really cool it was open to the public so people were just walking in off the streets of san francisco there were ebay people there ebay sellers there you know we gave away a bunch of like our little custom branded like dc sports eighty seven card stands to people we saw people who said hey i bought from you off ebay people who had sold with us on ebay so it was it's always cool when you get to do the the in person piece of it and then from there we had our you know our main stage time that we went up and we were with shiloh sanders for ours but we saw gronk was there jerry rice they had all kinds of people there so it was a really cool mix of just everyday people coming in off the street and kinda getting some exposure to ebay sellers and card collecting and memorabilia at the same time as you had you know the athletes that were the big draw you know jerry rice was like passing the football back and forth with people in the crowd and stuff so really really cool setup lot of fun and obviously cool to play off the buzz of the game and you know downtown san francisco was absolutely packed california traffic do not recommend but the city itself and the ebay event was awesome i love that the interesting part about all of this and i'm thinking about it as you're talking through it i'm like is would this would something like this even be possible without a product like ebay live to be real time and to for these cards to be sold and for that to be kind of like the engine for all of this do you do you do you feel like from an infrastructure perspective like the live selling component of ebay was kind of the catalyst for all for events like this to happen at the super bowl and then also like future events like this yeah for sure because you know obviously if you're gonna go you're gonna have all these people travel you're gonna bring these celebrities and athletes in you're gonna have a lot of sellers there like you need to be able to maximize the reach of that i mean i just that's common sense you wanna get to as many people as possible and so while it was super cool to just have it be a pop up and hey if you happen to be in san francisco for the game or you were a local who lives there it's cool that you can pop in but it was nice i mean there were people selling things to people who just walked in off the street but it was nice at the same time you had you know four concurrent livestreams you had three sellers from their studios plus a main stage stream so there was just a lot more reach and and people who were local found out about it it was nice for us because we could market what we're gonna be selling in advance and kinda give that opportunity to people who were located anywhere so definitely you know anything that you're streaming online these days is great because you're you know the number of viewers and the people you can reach just skyrockets you know versus just making it pinch to that one corner of the city of san francisco for you know two days in february so yeah it was what what through the that this experience in i know you've been a part of just at the national other experiences like this but for this one particular like where you you work through these and you try to get everything set up and stuff goes as planned or maybe better than planned and some stuff maybe doesn't go as planned like how do you evaluate what what you experienced and maybe what went well and what didn't yeah i mean at at the end of the day you just have to go into it you know knowing what you wanna get out of it and so for us you know traditionally being such a big just core ebay seller where it's just hey we're just throwing thousands and thousands and thousands of auctions every day on on the platform we're just really here kinda handling the fulfillment working with our customers to do that it's so different when you go into live selling because you know for us for a lot of brands what live selling offers is it's about velocity it's about speed it's hey i can have a card in my hand today i can go live sell it now get it paid for now ship it five minutes from now like you just shrink that whole window down so much and for us because we do so much volume and we turn things over so quickly that's not as much what we're after right because we can already do that so for us it's just more of that platform for what we did well with we're like we sold a a fred warner one of one national treasures rookie auto for ten thousand dollars and it it's like a cool sale like that where it's like it's a one of one thing it doesn't really have a comp we marketed it in advance had it visible on course people start watching it knowing we were gonna sell it and then they pop in and bid and you get some great sales like that but for us a big part is really just there's our logo like it's downtown san francisco it's huge ebay logo it's the super bowl it's this cool pop up people are curious they pop in it's just getting to interact with people just face to face here's who we are here's what we do the reach of you know if i put an auction up right now and i end it you know sunday night on ebay at eight o'clock we're not there to talk to people in in a livestream somebody asks a question about the player we answer it like what do we think about the card we can give some feedback and so that back and forth is really important to us so for us these events are really about getting to engage with customers and just kinda leaning into the brand exposure of live selling because that is where so much of the market in cards and outside you know is going these days that's amazing i actually there that fred warner card popped up in some conversations that i was having this week so i didn't realize that it was a part of the activation that's amazing i wanna before we move off of this topic i wanna you said something there like you know brand exposure and yeah you know connecting with other brands you know as far as we've been having long as we've been having these conversations one thing that i've realized about you and dc sports eighty seven is that like that is a primary initiative it is a primary initiative to try to build and develop brand awareness and i've always like enjoyed hearing that from you as a career marketer who thinks that way when i kind of stepped into the hobby from like a business perspective one of my biggest observations was that a lot of operators and a lot of owners and a lot of the way things happen in this space was not there was no thoughtfulness around that it was mostly transactional let's let's get these in let's churn them let's move on to the next and it wasn't like this life cycle in this long term yep outlook i guess like when was the moment for you that you realized like focusing in on brand focusing in on brand awareness was the right move for the business that you were building yeah i i think we've always known it's just it's always a question of timing right like we're saying this with cards like you wish you could just buy buy buy and not sell well you know there's opportunity cost everything in the world and so for us our first handful of years the reason we didn't really lean into branding marketing partnerships podcasts sponsoring things all that was because we were just trying to build to be able to scale when the time came and you don't wanna put the cart before the horse too much and so once we really had a lot of our internal tech built out a lot of our stuff is all proprietary in house custom stuff we use and like once that was there and we knew that we had the foundation to keep up with the volume we were getting then there was that really hard pivot into all the other stuff and i think what you just said rings very true in that i think a lot of brands companies people whatever the term we wanna label all the entities out there in the world those would be relevant to you know they make the mistake of thinking you have to be all about transactional business or you have to all be about engagement and marketing and social media and all this stuff and like that is the least true thing in the world you know you can make the choice like we did that for a while you need to focus on other things to just get your business squared away before you get crazy with partnerships and marketing and all that but you know really for us that's just the way you grow and so you know the live selling model just to be completely honest and ebay knows this we've had this conversation with them like it does not fit our traditional model in the way we operate but at the same time when you look at just the macroeconomics of all marketplaces not just collectibles like live selling is accelerating so fast and growing so much it would be professionally irresponsible of me to not say hey we gotta go try this out we gotta learn what works we gotta find the right ways to do it and so you know our first livestream i made a ton of mistakes like we didn't put the listings up until the day of well now i know i put them up a week or ten days in advance so they can collect watchers on ebay people know what we're gonna be selling so there's awareness around the items i used to just kinda go on there our first time and had all the items ready to sell that was it now we send an email out that highlights the big items explains what we're gonna be selling what are the times what's selling on what what day we used to think well we'll just take a bunch of items and we'll just kinda go and see what happens i've learned that the mid to like low high end is really the sweet spot for live because it's stuff that's accessible and affordable by the broadest number of people so if you have eight hundred concurrent viewers in a room don't price seven hundred fifty of them out and i think we've learned that with some of the peak peak high end stuff we're just gonna trust ebay corpse it's such an effective selling platform and so all the while to say we're learning as we do this you know we're a huge brand and i had a lot i needed to learn day one it's the same with everything else you know we've got partnerships a lot of great breakers now the content stuff you and i are doing together and others have done with us so it's just all about priority and and i think for us as we got the foundation laid and the right team in place here it just opened so much kind of margin on the edges of the business and we chose to invest that time in growing the brand because that's what makes people hear about us that's what makes them reach out and you know every customer of every breaker we work with is not already our customer but if that breaker trusts us that's another way to like get some immediate credibility out there in the marketplace so yeah it's it's been a journey and i'm not naturally maybe as much as you a content social media understanding people in the marketing side of things i'm very much a black and white numbers guy but it's been it's been a great learning experience for me the whole team here and our business as we've really leaned into it over the last year or two love the adaptability tory awesome good self awareness last one what was more exciting the the live selling event or the actual super bowl game oh the live selling event i i didn't even go to the game and i caught so much grief for this when i got back but i had zero interest in staying for the game i just look if this was a world series going on i would have been at every game that was there but yeah there were so many people there i didn't wanna be traveling back when the entire world was trying to leave san francisco or san jose or santa clara or wherever they went so no it was a it it was it was a really great experience at live event it was cool to get to see so many people we've never met before other people in the space and collectibles that we know and kinda build some relationships there and then obviously the whole ebay crew who we you know work with daily but don't get to see in person nearly enough so that was the highlight as far as the actual game i got home enjoyed my weekend with the family didn't even have it on the tv just kinda you know but hey i think we i think we both said seahawks so i do think we both i said patriots oh never mind you were right if i remember right though you might have given like i kinda think you might be right but to take the opposite opinion i'll say patriot so i think you get half credit still i i appreciate it i'm the i'm the king at splitting the baby any way i can so right right well that's awesome i wanted to hit maybe some i was digging through some data and i wanted to dig into some like you know card related stuff that was happening through dc sports eighty seven in relation to the kinda super bowl and first looking at just drake may who obviously you know didn't play great this playoffs didn't play great man that is like are you a patriots fan now that's that's the kindest narrative i've heard yet maybe like first let's just before i dig into the data let's just hit that from your perspective is there another example of someone who was that you can think of that was from a card perspective that was writing so hot all season and then once the playoffs came it just kind of the perception changed so dramatically can like it to me this is like a a big one because it was like he was almost mvp and then there was doubt once playoffs happened yeah i mean not not really like i feel like there was doubt but because they were still winning through those first few rounds it didn't really hit yet i still feel like he's an odd one because don't be right he was atrocious in the super bowl but at the same time like how many times did i see the seahawks defensive line just bulldoze the patriots o line and it's like okay did he make some bad throws some bad choices that interception at the end was atrocious but they were already gonna lose so i think people see the ascent still coming here and hey if they add you know stability to the offensive line and all that we're kind of crossing sports and cards here but like i the the future is still super bright for drake may but definitely it was one of those like his stuff shot up so fast back half of the regular season but then the playoffs were kinda underwhelming so i i don't really remember another one from like a playoff run where this happened and i don't wanna put him in there with the you know likes of other falls from grace we've seen because his his market's still you know far from dead so no not another one does not come to mind unless you've got one i'm not thinking of in the last i i don't i i i don't but i was looking at just some performance data through dc sports eighty seven some some volume data so i i did a filter from the january thirtieth to february seventh the day before the super bowl there had been five hundred and seventy drake may cards sold through dc sports eighty seven and then from the super bowl to yesterday there were six hundred and ninety one cards that have sold through dc sports a seven so i thought that was interesting and this is kind of one of those narratives people pull in the hobby is that like once the dust settles whether win or lose like people are ready to get rid of cards and i found it interesting that more cards sold after he lost through dc sports eighty seven than before yeah i it gets so weird with like qbs in the playoffs particularly the super bowl because i think we see this a lot where it's sometimes i don't even know how to interpret the data and i wish i had some great insightful answer for you here because for every person out there who is selling off hype leading up to the game there's gonna be that person who holds for too long and then kinda feels like oh i gotta sell now after the game you know i i think when you look at a lot of the sales trends and like values like everything in the hobby is just hype these days right not a hundred percent i get it when when records are broken and when guys run incredible runs like at drake may's regular season run they're gonna go up but i would always trust the pre super bowl hype over trusting the even if he would've won right overselling after the games i think after the game it's kinda like we all exhale football season's over it just you know i think we saw this with jalen hurts a few years ago you see it with other quarterbacks so it doesn't shock me that more cards got moved after but i think you're seeing a mix of hey i was holding drake may and i'm still gonna get more than i'm into it for you're gonna have a lot of those guys you're gonna have a lot of people who are hey it's now the first second week of february and spring training is two weeks out for baseball and i wanna get those funds to pivot into something else because guys are kinda shifting sports this time of year so yeah just just a lot of different reasons it's it it's kinda hard to track but an interesting metric to look at for sure either way i'm gonna throw up one example which is the twenty twenty four absolute drake may kaboom horizontal psa ten so there's three hundred and forty copies of this card in a psa ten and a copy sold on super bowl sunday or excuse me a copy sold through dc sports eighty seven for four thousand one hundred and seventy one dollars the card peaked on january twenty fifth before the super bowl at sixty three hundred dollars the last sale the last time i checked card ladder was on february fifteenth and it sold for thirty four hundred dollars so we're we're going from sixty three hundred you see sports eighty seven sales in the middle on the super bowl at forty one and now we're down to thirty four like that's it's wild but i think kinda goes along what you were just saying but like what kind of comments or commentary do you have off of like a drake may kaboom yeah same thing i mean obviously you know we start looking at kabooms and downtowns and things like we know the numbers are gonna be big but i think this is the narrative we're just talking about it's the hype paired with performance is number one hype is number two and then once things kind of subside that's where you see the drop and so i look at these sales and i go okay the peak was january twenty fifth two weeks before the super bowl you know they were winning winning we hadn't gotten to the game yet there's hype leading up to the game on super bowl sunday okay it comes down a little bit maybe that's worries about whether they're gonna win maybe that's performance maybe that's everybody flooding the market with these i i don't know and then obviously you know there's gonna be a bit of a drop after the game they lost he played terrible football hype's over because the season's over but i absolutely would would predict that if we look at the last sale since four days before recording this about you know a week ish before this will be released at thirty four eighty i bet if we come back in five or six months as we're hitting summer and the season's ramping back up you'll see that thing right back at five or six grand because the patriots would have made some moves to improve the team we all wanna buy young qbs going into the season he still had a phenomenal year runner-up for the mvp and it's just gonna trend right back up and some of this is just the ebb and flow of hype in the hobby i don't wanna spend a ton of time on it but we'll we gotta shout out sam darnold although he didn't look like a super bowl winning quarterback he did in fact win super bowl so the card here that i've showed is the twenty eighteen contender sam darnold cracked ice rookie ticket bgs nine five which was an all time high sale on super bowl sunday at through dc sports eighty seven sold for three thousand five hundred and fifty four dollars now i i talked about the drake may metrics the week before the super bowl eight or so days to after now sam darnell's numbers are are much smaller so fifty five cards played before and then since then eighty one cards and i think this again validates the hype to me where it's like there's no no matter if you want like there's no hype around sam darnold because people are looking at the super bowl and be like well it was the dark side it was the defense so yeah i don't know like what based on what you said about drake may like what's your assessment about like sam darnold cards and the performance that we might or might not see on the other side yeah same thing it's it's all the same components they're just so different with him we're talking about a guy who was drafted eight years ago there's not a lot of hype we're looking at this card and people are going oh game manager cracked ice yay like that's just the way we're gonna look at sam darnold look at the defense carried him and and there's not the excitement so you know i think a lot of people moved his cards leading up to the game and right after obviously not in the volume the the market cap of sam darnold is not the market cap of drake may because it was a lot of eyes on him and you might not get that in the future i'm not gonna say sam darnold isn't good i mean you know do i think that game was won by the defense yes but you know he he worked for them this year so he's just an unexciting guy i'm not sure there's much more to to label him than that but yeah i i don't wanna you know try to extract all kinds of great thoughts and commentary from this one i think that's about all it boils down to amazing well the super bowl is behind us and before we completely move out of this episode there are a couple things that i wanted to dig in with you obviously there i mean you have to be living under a rock to not hear about just the pikachu illustrator sale and all that came from it and i you know you see so many cards sell all the time and we just talked about that darnold right i know it's a darnold and obviously hard to compare with the pikachu but it was an all time high i'm i'm just curious like when you see these bigger sales especially like multimillion dollar sales what's your perspective on like what that does for the hobby because you hear so many narratives from so many accounts and so many companies about what this means like what's your perspective yeah i mean you know it's it's kind of one of those like there's no such thing as bad pressed i don't think that's true we could you know talk about guys' markets falling off a cliff we could talk about some players who have made some bad choices and disappeared that press was bad but you know at the same time for the hobby like zooming out like macro view of everything i do think it's good do i kinda roll my eyes sometimes at a you know whatever it was you know seventeen million dollar illustrator sale or something like yes i do but at the same time if it's eyes on the hobby that weren't there before and it's events and sales taking place that are going to be broadcast and marketed and published in mainstream media outlets i'm all for it because i i just think that is more attention on it it's awareness around the hobby growing it's awareness that these ultra rare premium high end collectibles are fetching insane prices these days and whether you wanna say the specific sales are justified or not right or not you like the marketplace that sold them or not i'm for more people being aware of what's happening in the trading card and collectible space and so even if there's things about it i question at times or or just aren't you know the things i'm interested in i'm never gonna not be interested in more publicity for the hobby and so to me it's as simple as that and and being a fan of it when people talk about this market and they talk about and compare and contrast it with maybe twenty twenty one the one thing that i keep coming back to as i'm investigating is that right now one of the reasons why i think the market is performing so well is because there's more infrastructure in place there's more places to buy sell trade there's more funding services there's more consignment shops like dc sports eighty seven there's more technology like cardlider where we can see transparent pricing do when you think about like the growth and just zooming out and looking at like this whole ecosystem do you view dc sports eighty seven as like a structural piece in helping kinda elevate this market or sustain this market to where it's at yeah yeah i mean i think it goes just to this the point of like a healthy market is transacting often and transacting effectively and so we have to look at the marketplaces like ebay and like all the others out there and we have to look at the sellers like ourselves and we're a big part of that because if you want more people to come into the hobby you need cars to be available cars need to be trading hands we need that because that business is healthy because as we grow and we can put money back in collectors' pockets that's money that is then spent other places and you kind of need that cyclical kind of action happening in the whole ecosystem of the hobby for things to keep humming along and so i think it's very much healthy you know obviously i think the the current trends up and we can be bullish about the market and stuff is a lot more real than it was in twenty one or a few years ago at covid time just because then it was so indexed on some of the wrong things you know i i know we see these ultra rare collectibles hitting record numbers i think that's a lot more understandable than like a base prism basketball card of a rookie i've never heard of in a psa ten doing two hundred and ninety dollars we all lived through that like that didn't make sense at least this stuff can look at it and i can go okay there's a market for this kind of thing and it's so rare and exclusive that it makes more sense to me but yeah i mean we you know it's it's our job if we're gonna be out here saying we're doing a positive service for collectors to be sure that we're doing it in a way that's healthy for both them and the hobby no doubt alright before we get out of here one of the things that are on my is on my mind that i have not dug in but i'd love your perspective is just releases and the consistency in calendar and we obviously are in this period of transition what what consistency is what i want this is what i want tori i think the way i view it especially in us talking and learning about kind of how you think about things i think like consistent releases like obviously like that is fuel for demand that's fuel for breakers that's fuel for singles that's fuel for consignments it it it like keeps everything rolling and obviously we're in the space period of transition and i wanna applaud us for not talking about topps chrome basketball in this episode maybe now we bring it up but i'm just curious like what are you seeing just in terms of like the releases obviously we're we're we're way like panini dumped all these football releases in the mix obviously in april the license is going to topps like what what are you seeing in at with topps with panini with anyone else in terms of like new cards coming in yeah it's it's tricky because obviously the releases themselves well to your point they affect us because a new product gets released a flood of people are gonna wanna sell those and be first to market with those cards so we see a ton of them but we're not a breaker we're not a hobby shop we're not a distributor you know we're not dealing with the wax itself and so i'm less directly affected by releases than most but just from you know zooming out and watching the hobby as a collector and someone in the space like it just feels so inconsistent because i will feel like and i don't even have examples for you because this is all just like commentary on this but it feels like we'll have nothing nothing and then we'll get flooded with stuff or we'll have two weeks with nothing and then three or four releases in the same week or we'll have you know a release that's tentatively scheduled for a certain date and then it gets pushed back by two weeks and then another one so now it's overlapping with another release and just in like the cadence of collectors being able to keep up with whether it's you're somebody who likes to take your favorite team in you know one of each break as a new product comes out or you like to buy a box of each and try something out or you're just chasing cards like it just feels like there's been a lot of weeks where it's very feast or famine instead of kind of this like very strategically planned out in advance like kind of yeah i don't you know rolled out calendar that kinda gets us something on a regular schedule that's predictable people know it's coming they can plan around it so that's why i kind of scoffed and laughed at your consistency comment but you know again i'm not in the world of producing cards and i'm not in the world of breaking or selling sealed products so that's why we don't get hit by it quite as much we're just here and ready when something does hit the shelves we know we're gonna see a ton of it we get it up quick but yeah i mean i don't know i don't know what you think or how that aligns or doesn't with your perceived consistency or lack thereof in the space i'll tell you what my mindset had been on because it's stuff i collect have been on twenty twenty five prism football when it dropped and trying to land cards that are coming out that i might not see again and all of a sudden i was in a side conversation and they were like oh i really like the new optic twenty twenty five optic looking design i was like twenty twenty five optic is out and that's like it's not a prism but it's a very notable brand and yep i thought you know i gave the benefit of the doubt it's like the dying days of the license with panini but like it's amazing how just and then i remember this with basketball and panini was just like stuff was dumped and then i know with pops it's like on the wrestling side it's like the dates keep getting pushed back on stuff and we're waiting for cards so those are like in my world what i collect what i've been hearing and but it's no different it feels like this is always a complaint we're always wanting we're always missing deadlines there's no consistency with calendar so maybe i'm just stewing in something that's always this way and hoping for the best down the road yeah it it could be and and honestly too like there's just so many releases now like i i i don't know this answer but i would be very curious to look at like if we just went year by year over like the last say ten to fifteen years you know back to maybe like twenty ten ish and looked at how many like unique baseball skus or football or whatever you wanna look at were released each year so it just feels like there's so many more because we went from having a handful of sets to get even more sets and i feel like things get produced more and more and then we've got blasters and mega boxes and first off the line and jumbo and hobby and retail boxes and it's like there's just so so much out there that maybe just the logistical side of the operation for these guys is just so overwhelming and then you're waiting for athletes to sign and i know you know topps is trying to ease off redemptions a bit and panini to your point is trying to get like that last gasp of life on their licensing era so yeah there's a lot going on that that you know factors in the market that i think could explain some of it but it certainly feels like we're just chasing our tails we're trying to understand when any product is gonna be available right now expect the unexpected that's the the motto that live by during the hobby tory always good chatting and talking about your mindset mentality on all things hobby related and all the happenings at d c sports eighty seven and hey go bears right don't don't tory is saying that because it looks like the bears are moving to indiana which tory is asking me if i'm gonna become a bears fan i had to see if i could bait you into a little more commentary before we stop the episode and it was successful so now i'm happy and i can walk away hey more more revenue to the state i live in so i i even that even though it's the bears i i cannot complain and it's weird there's a trivia question for you how many football stadiums does indiana have like i don't think anyone would in the nfl anyone would say two but looks like here we're here we are yeah right alright till next time