Over the past three months sports cards -especially basketball- have exploded in value for key players. With Panini a leader in the sports card industry we sat down with Vice President of marketing Jason Howarth to talk about the present state of the industry and where things may be heading.
DeFY: Hey Jason, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk cards. I know you recently launched a line of sneaker cards but I understand you’ve also done cards with actual pieces from a sneaker in the cards too?
Jason: We have a product called Noir, Noir basketball. We started it out on the basketball side of it where we would start getting game worn sneakers from basketball players and cutting them up and putting them into cards. During the rookie photoshoot we’d get the sneakers that the players wore during the photoshoot, cut them up, put them in the cards and then we also integrated that into the football side of the business with cleats. Obviously basketball and sneakers…their color ways are so much more dynamic than cleats, but still very cool on the football side to get that added into the cards. You know, I was just looking over into your point, you know we just launched our first sneaker cards on BlockChain and its gone really well. I think the top selling one to date has been Ja Morant from a BlockChain prospective and you know the BlockChain is purely digital so there’s no physical card tied to it, its just a camera image, wrap a BlockChain representation of what is presented in the physical products. So on the Noir side. our Noir basketball product, I did a little digging to see, we had a 37 card sneaker spotlight set from the 2018-19 season including Kobe, Luca, Tre Young…that complete set sold for twenty thousand dollars on eBay. An autographed card with Kobe Bryant’s sneaker from the 2018-19 season sold on eBay for fourteen thousand dollars.
We also have an unsigned version for Lebron James with a piece of his sneaker in our 2019-2020 NOIR basketball this year actually so it really just came out and that sold for just under five thousand dollars.
DeFY: Thats crazy! Now as far as BlockChain I thought it was really interesting because I know for myself growing up with physical cards -and during an era where the cards were for the most part produced in very high numbers where the idea of limited edition is 1 of 10,000- the idea of owning an ultra limited digital card is really foreign. These days I see kids still going back and picking up cards from decades past but for the most part they are into digital, whether that be video games, movie rentals or even ordering food. Is it true that in regards to BlockChain that the card can actually connect you to the athlete where you could get VIP experiences and other benefits?
Jason: There are a couple of things. I think we grew up in the same years of collecting cards where you know there really wasn’t such thing as rare. We all thought that Bo Jackson rookie card was going to be worth so much money when we got older but they just overproduced all those cards back in those days.
DeFY: 100 percent
Jason: So where now we’re very focused on scarcity and rarities so there are you know, numbers that are 1 of 1 where there will only be one card of that ever produced. There are also some numbered to 25 or 99 so there’s a whole bunch of variations in terms of scarcity and obviously that reflects differently in terms of the value of the product and the brand. We have brands that start like Prizm -which is the hottest product in the market right now- our NBA Prizm, our NFL Prizm our MLB associated Prizm all this product is just on fire right now. We are actually getting ready to launch a new series of BlockChain Prizm cards with 300 cards across all sports but in this case similar to what we did with BlockChain when we first launched BlockChain there will be a physical card tied to it as well so you’ll get a physical Prizm card and a BlockChain variation of that card. Whats cool about that is how we launched that to collectors that collectors could understand it was the physical component. People understand the value of a physical card so they get a sense of what that was and certainly saw the value there and we saw our premium uptake in terms of the fact that there is a BlockChain component tied to it. Now you know ten years from now that BlockChain card is going to be worth a bunch more money because the digital process is tied to a smart contract but the flexibility that the consumer/collector has is that if they want to hold on to that BlockChain because they are not really sure about it just yet, they can hold on to it or they can sell it and keep the physical card or keep the physical card and sell the BlockChain card so there’s a couple different ways of doing it. As it relates to kids its interesting because what we’ve seen is clearly kids are very digital focused, spending a lot of time on phones or tablets, video games and I know my own son is constantly playing video games all night long with his friends -which is great during this COVID time; that you can just be in your room and still interact with people like its normal. Right?
DeFY: Thats true.
Jason: Whats interesting is that we’ve seen kids jump back into it from a physical perspective as well. I think the kids will have a better understanding of BlockChain and realize the value of the digital asset long term than dudes that are maybe 50 or 60 years old lol
DeFY: Haha, true indeed.
Jason: So it will be interesting to see how it all plays out but we felt it was really important for us to get into the BlockChain environment, build the BlockChain environment so that it fit our category and what our category needs were and how we went about doing it, we made a couple of different steps along the way that really played out well to get collectors engaged. First off, every BlockChain card is tied to a US Dollar value so you are not worried about what is BitCoin worth today OMG is it worth less than the cards I bought? We wanted to eliminate the volatility of crypto currency in our BlockChain launch. We have a private BlockChain in a private BlockChain market but it’s still open to go into the wild world of BlockChain and the collectors have the ability to do that. People can collect and trade and sell their BlockChain assets on our private platform. Its really about how do you incorporate BlockChain into the category and make it relevant for your category.
DeFY: You know, back in the day there was an abundance of counterfeit cards many of which still circulate on the secondary market today. Is there any word that a hacker or tech savvy individual could replicate this?
Jason: Thats a really good question, I think thats the one thing we really liked about BlockChain that, as people try to incorporate BlockChain into their space and into their category and even talking to our league partners one of the things we thought was really valuable about BlockChain is that it gave us another secondary level of authentication to confirm the authenticity of a card -more so in the case of the physical card-. Where people could potentially try to counterfeit cards and all those other things on the physical side of it, now if you have a physical card thats tied to a BlockChain, that creates another level of security and authentication and from a BlockChain perspective thats purely digital its tied to a smart contract so you can see the first owner and then the second owner and so on and so forth so it builds a smart contract on top of a smart contract so you know that that one of one Ja Morant is owned by XYZ and he sold it to ABC and then you decided to sell it to me. You can see that whole pattern in terms of ownership.
DeFY: Interesting.
Jason: So i think the whole idea of BlockChain is that you can’t counterfeit it and it creates a pattern of ownership that you can see throughout time.
DeFY: About four years ago – I hadn’t stepped foot inside a card shop in I dunno how long- I walked into a a local shop and I expected to see some vintage stuff from the 80’s and 90’s and they had nothing. They did have a few cards from the 1950’s but not much and when I asked the owner to give me an update as to the best new stuff to buy they said Panini was the best and he broke down the range of product. With that said I was surprised to see how many brands and subsidiary brands had completely disappeared from the market or that were no longer manufacturing cards. Now I know you guys have been around for a long time but there was a period of time where there seemed to be so many brands and you guys were primarily involved with soccer cards right?
Jason: Yep, still are.
DeFY: Well then it seemed like everyone else just disappeared. I mean you had Topps, UpperDeck, Donruss, Bowman, Fleer, Skybox etc. all these names and now it’s just down to you guys and Upper Deck and Topps for the most part and I don’t even know, does Upper Deck even make cards anymore?
Jason: They do, NHL cards
DeFY: Wild. Now in the past few months since the Pandemic there has been this huge explosion -especially in regards to basketball cards- on the secondary market. Some people are pointing to the Jordan documentary, some are saying well, with all the stress in the world right now many of us are looking to our past for times where we felt more settled, happier and care free; better days and so sports card collecting sort of fills that void and connects many of us to those better times. My question is, where do you see the sports card industry going from here because I see renewed interest, a different view on the cards as sort of art of the time period instead of this worthless cardboard thats taking up space. I’ve watched as guys that collect sneakers now also turn their focus to sports cards and they are re-discovering how fun that is. With that said do you think that this renewed interest will sustain its momentum or do you think we’ll see this for maybe a year or two and then watch as things kind of level out?
Jason: It’s definitely growing and heres a couple of different things. From a historic prospective Panini has been around for more than 50 years -it started in 1961- predominantly on the soccer side in Europe, our headquarters is in Italy and then in 1970 we partnered with the FIFA World Cup and produced that product every four years since. In 2014 -in addition to the sticker collection for FIFA World Cup- we introduced trading cards for the very first time tied to FIFA. Panini came into the US market in 2009 and became the exclusive trading card partner of the NBA -they kicked Topps and UpperDeck out of basketball when they took over that exclusive-. When Panini came into the US market they bought Donruss trading cards -Donruss is actually one of our brands-. Donruss is still one of the brands that dips into basketball and football and in fact our football product will be releasing at the end of July. Whats interesting is that we own a couple of different brands and in the case of the NBA we’ll produce 32 different products like Contenders, Prizm and Donruss and they all range in prices. So they might start at a 1.99 a pack and be available at Walmart and Target to five thousand dollars, steel briefcase have diamonds embedded in the card, pieces of platinum embedded in the card and there are ten cards in the case, autographs you name it just total next level to what you and I grew up with.
DeFY: Yea, thats pretty next level haha!
Jason: Now five years ago we knocked Topps out of the football game and now we are exclusive with the NFL and NFL players association so we have had five years to build up the football business exclusively and are taking the experience we learned ten years now with the exclusive for the NBA -with a whole generation of basketball fans growing up collecting Panini trading cards – and building off that. Now as far as growth in the category I think there are three things fueling it. Sure the documentary is great to look back at but I think one, basketball is a global game and so literally a month ago we launched our direct to consumer store in China in the middle of the COVID pandemic and we are seeing great growth there and the only problem we have faced there was that there was more demand than there was supply and thats whats happening across the board. So even product thats sold in Target and Walmart -which is made for mainstream consumers- is now being bought up because the value of that product is worth three times the value of what they bought it for. That and the things that are happening in the market like with the Prizm brand -the digital version doesn’t do the physical version justice- its metallic, holographic, its incredible; beautiful. So we got that going for us, and then this phenomenon that started about 6 or 7 years ago where kids are live streaming themselves opening our product like the product flawless that sells for 1500 dollars and comes in a steel briefcase -my wife would kill me if I spent 1500 dollars on a steel briefcase with ten cards-
so whats happened is case breaking comes into the market and they do these live streams and you can buy spots so in the case of the NBA there would be 30 spots available -and I’m from Boston so lets say I might get the Boston Celtics- you might get the New Orleans Pelicans or Memphis Grizzlies is a great example because typically you might be devastated like oh my God I can’t believe I got the Memphis Grizzlies but this year you are ecstatic because every Memphis Grizzlies card pulled goes to you so literally every Ja Morant card pulled goes to you because you have the Memphis Grizzlies
and so whats happened is much like the hobby stores this online community has been built much like the hobby store environment with people interacting in chat rooms and all these other things but now that amplifies during COVID because its a great way to socially distance but yet still interact with the community and so case breaking has been amplified because more people are sitting at home, interacting with people and watching boxes be opened with people pulling out these beautiful cards so we have all those things going for us.
I think also the uptick in people looking back at the thing they did as kids during this pandemic and thought hey this is really cool, I should see whats going on in this environment and thinking OMG this not the card collecting I grew up with as a kid so we’ve got that kind of resurgence to the market place .Truthfully the resurgence is something we’ve seen over the last three years continuing to pick up on the basketball and football side but last year you had rookies like Tre Young come into the market and people get totally amped up and you follow that up with guys like Zion, Ja Morant and Rui Hachimura and how the market place has really gone global which includes a global collecting community as opposed to just your local hobby store is just one element of it.
DeFY: Well, recently Topps did a collaboration 2020 project with influencers/artists like Don Crawley aka Don C, Ben Baller and Mister Cartoon to name a few and what they did was take iconic cards from Topps lineage and re-interpret them in an artistic way for 2020. Is there any possibility or plans to collaborate with other areas like music artists or brands like Supreme that maybe could feature New York skaters for example?
Jason: There are always things that we look at and explore, I mean like I said the incorporation of sneaker culture into our trading cards interlinked to basketball has been there the last four to five years and that continues to evolve. Starting out in just our physical product I remember the first time we put out sneaker cards we had the Shaq Reebok Pump and we had the basketball bubble from the pump and so you have Shaq and the Reebok Pump and then we moved that dynamic and like I had said the color ways are so amazing.
DeFY: Ok, so I have to ask what are some of your all time favorite cards in your collection and or favorites of all time and what are your favorite sneakers all time?
Jason: Oh boy, haha first on the card side I’m from Boston, so anything New England Patriots, Celtics, Redsox but more Celtics and Patriots. I love Ty Law so I try to collect as much Ty Law cards as I possibly can and always think back to the first Super Bowl of the dynasty where Ty Law picks off Kurt Warner and takes it back for a touch down. From a kid perspective its funny because even though I grew up in New England I loved watching Eric Dickerson play and so I remember as a kid wanting that 1983 Eric Dickerson rookie and opening up a box of cards with my friends at a pizza place and taking turns opening up packs and I finally got an Eric Dickerson rookie and my friends walked away with John Elway and Dan Marino and I was ecstatic because I got Eric Dickerson. Looking back I wish I would have pulled the John Elway or Dan Marino!
DeFY: Haha!
Jason: But I think of that and you know obviously every time I hear ‘Rated Rookie’ -which is a big card for our brand- I think of the Bo Jackson 1987 Donruss card with him in the royal blue Kansas City Royals jersey and the jersey matching the rated rookie logo
and those are the ones I go back to and I think they aren’t worth a lot but the moment thats tied to them as a kid collecting them are so special that those are the ones I really cherish- like man this is cool and from a sneaker perspective I tend to focus on the dudes that are part of our brand so I love Kobe sneakers, those are the ones that are the standouts to me and I remember the first pair I purchased when I started working at Panini in 2010, so those and actually…………..haha I do cross-fit so I’m more into the cross-fit sneaker game so I have more cross fit sneakers than regular sneakers but then I wear them six times a week. I just got a new pair of sneakers from NoBull called plate drop and they are graffiti like very art inspired that are awesome. Those are my favorite right now.
