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Welcome to the Stacking Slabs, a podcast for sports cards collectors. There's been a tremendous amount of change to our Hobby over the last few years and the one constant has been the passion from the collecting community. Stacking Slabs is built by the collector and lives to tell stories for the collector.
alright we are back with another episode of passion to profession brought to you by my good friends at ebay excited to talk about live selling building a business and a whole lot more with today's guest i'm joined by collins boyce he is building an awesome business curated cards and collectibles there is a lot going on with his team and what he is doing been following along on social media in preparation for this episode but without further ado collins welcome man how are you i'm good i'm good it's good to meet you brett happy to be here looking forward to our conversation yes i am looking forward to it as well and we're gonna get into a lot we're gonna cover a lot of ground but i want to maybe start with the live selling component of this and we have talked to a lot of people selling on ebay we've talked to fewer selling through ebay live but i'm interested in what have you learned about collectors from selling to them live that you never learned before just listing the cards on ebay there's a few things i mean the biggest thing i've learned about collectors with with ebay live is is how many there are it's you you you go to these shows you see all these people flipping everybody's wheeling and dealing and everybody's in it for the money and then when you're on ebay live you've got you might have twenty people in your room you might have forty you might have a hundred ninety percent of them are collectors they're hardcore collectors they honestly don't care as much what a card's worth they don't care what it comps for you know they're they're they're trying to find something that will look nice for them they'll appreciate it and then you know that that's really the biggest thing i've noticed is is they just they they want a card that they like you know it's it's i i've noticed you are out in real life behind showcases doing the negotiations selling cards at shows and i'm sure through that process you you get a feel for you know everyone's trying to get a little bit off of this card so that they can go flip it and resell it you made mention that you know on the live platform you're noticing a lot of people who just like are the end user they wanna buy the cards because they love it they wanna collect them they wanna stash away in their collection is has that been refreshing for you as someone who buys sells and trades in this space to understand that the cards you're selling via live platform are likely going to the end user yeah definitely it's it's it's nice to know that you're gonna you know somebody's gonna be happy with what they're buying and they're they're gonna appreciate it a lot of the times when you're you know you're selling stuff the card most of these transactions the card itself is irrelevant the person buying it already has it sold you know it could be the best player in the world it could be an absolute nobody but with these guys you know you you you throw up a card if if it they're like don't really like that one but there's another card that might be double the price that someone else might not like but they love it and they'll they'll pay up for it how how far do you does your kind of history go back with cards were you collecting as a kid has have cards always been a part of your life maybe take us into kind of your your collection or how long you have been you know collecting cards in this space yeah i had a on and off relationship with cards as a child i mean i was you know i was growing up in the early twenty tens so it was cards weren't huge then you know i was i was really young i was ten twelve years old my uncle was really big into it he was an angels fan in early two thousands twenty tens so he made a lot of money on trout just just he just happened to have it you know he when i got back when i got back into cars i was like hey do you still have your collection he was like oh yeah it's sitting in a box and i go through he's got updates and refractors and all this stuff i'm like oh cool i was on and off though i i you know i i didn't hit i had no home runs there was nothing that i had got when i was a kid that was worth tens of thousands when i when i you know grew up but it was always baseball for me tops flagship little chrome i had a bunch of junk wax that i accumulated but but i was never really big into it until early high school that's when i you know i pulled out my old cards and then i got back into it during covid you know that's when the vast majority of the people in it now got back into it so that that's same with me it was it was during covid that's when i started exploring ebay online and instagram discord started going to shows once everything opened up so you you played it's funny we've had a a few conversations here recently with individuals who played college sports and then have parlayed that into kind of this career in sports cards you played baseball were you were you actively on this buy sell trade journey while you were playing baseball and did that like influence at all kind of the direction you took after college oh incredibly i mean playing baseball growing up my whole life was has probably had the biggest influence on both cards and other aspects of my life i remember in high school i was i told the coach i was sick i'd missed a practice and i ended up going to a card show you know and i and i got benched a game for it but but i bought a i bought like three cards made jammed out of pool as rookie from that show that i went to and so i told the coach two years later i'm like you know i made like two grand that day i skipped practice he was like oh shit but no it's taught me a lot because i i was when i was playing baseball i was always the one i i was not gifted i wasn't i wasn't the kid that was you know i wasn't the starting shortstop on my high school team i wasn't i had to work for it you know i i was i was always in the cage always always in the gym grinding and i think that that discipline that work ethic that i learned through baseball translated into cards and it translated pretty well into cards so that's the biggest thing do do you remember do you remember which pool host rookies you came with when you played hooky from practice to go to a card show it was the ichiro pujols o one traded chrome okay i paid like one hundred and fifty dollars for it raw and jammed it out i bought it at the hofstra hofstra shell when i skipped practice and then i jammed it out and then at ten that card's at the time it was twenty five hundred i think it's a little more than that now it's it's but it yeah that was a that was one of my first big come ups before you know before that that was before curated existed so you obviously like when you buy a card like that and then you grade it it jams and then you resell it and you look at the margin like i'm sure there's a lot of business builders and collectors out there when they have those sales where their wheels are spinning they're like you know i'm working this job or i'm thinking about what kind of job i i wanna do but man there's no way it's going to pay me as much as what i did with this card over here so it kinda plants the seed i'm curious like was it a compilation of just sales and success was it your passion a combination of them like what was the moment when you realized like this is actually i i don't wanna go get a corporate job like this is actually what i wanna do for a living once i'm done with school yeah you know the the big come ups are great you know when when that the first time it happened i was like oh wow this this seems easier than i thought you know i'm gonna make all this money i'm i'm not i'm not gonna have to get a real job and then you do it again you're like oh that card got a nine now they're not you know it it you always gotta just you gotta you gotta find what works but it the same thing isn't gonna work forever so that's that was the biggest thing i noticed and deciding that i wanted to go full time into it and not go the traditional route you know that that decision was partially my own decision also getting hurt playing baseball not wanting to just go to college without baseball i i just decided might as well give it a try you know it was a huge question mark honestly honestly when i went into it i i wasn't sure that it was gonna work out but it did so when we make these decisions to like take the leap of faith and go all in on something usually like it's it's like this conviction we have in ourselves and kinda scanning the opportunity in the market and we believe in ourselves enough to do it and then also during those moments there are people that are like saying you know you're crazy like you know go get a normal job did you have any of that when you were like making this decision to run at this full time were there people telling you you shouldn't do it and like how did you if so and how did you absorb like that feedback and decide to make the decision for yourself yeah the biggest people telling me well well the biggest people that were scared of me doing it was my parents they always supported it but even now they're still like hey are you ever gonna go back to school i'm like i don't think so you know my mom still wants me to go to college but there there was some of that you know it once once it got to a certain point most of those people realized oh okay so it's real you know when i when i show them one card that's worth fifty grand a hundred grand they're like okay that's it's real now and it's becoming so mainstream that it's it's not this little niche thing anymore yeah when when you say you sell cards peep people actually know what it is now it's it's not it's not a weird little niche industry anymore that's for sure through through kind of the research phase it looked like your business started as blitz sports memorabilia out of the gates and then it moved into curated cards and collectibles like take us through kind of those two two different companies and how you ended up at curated like what transpired during like the v one of you going out on your own and into where you're at now yeah i started blitz when i was in high school i was just you know set up an instagram page i was on discord that was sort of your traditional like get a table at a show flip your cards sell on instagram it's what thousands and thousands of people do it was great i never it was just me i i never really scaled it it was a little bit of selling on whatnot a little bit of selling on ebay core and then towards the end of blitz i i met a shop owner and show promoter in jersey and i started working with him he was he was doing a lot of traveling he he would go all over the northeast we even went to the west coast we went down to louisiana to buy collections and i i was just traveling with him he'd he'd pay me you know five hundred bucks a grand to just come with him and look through collections with him help him comp and help him buy it so i learned a lot about running a shop buying buying full collections not just going to shows i learned a lot from him and then december of twenty twenty three i one of my close friends in the hobby angel who's now my business partner we were talking we decided you know let's go into business together because both of us were doing well on our own but we'd we'd hit a ceiling you know without without an infusion of capital or more manpower we weren't gonna be able to scale what we were doing solo to to the point where it would make sense to do it full time so that that's when curated was formed that was december of twenty twenty three so there's a couple things that i wanna dig into there first like you going out on the road with someone who has been doing it for a while has experience buying collections like it sounds like you you know you got paid but it was more like a an apprenticeship role where you're just like trying to understand how things work like how important was like absorbing the knowledge from like an industry veteran like how much did that matter and contribute to like your next phase of your journey it it was everything i mean without without that experience i i could say i will not i would have not i wouldn't be where i am now it was it was everything he i learned a lot of what to do honestly i learned more of what not to do there was a lot of that his shop no longer exists he doesn't own it anymore but you know that that's a whole other story but there's a i learned a lot a lot what not to do you know sports sports cards as we all know is is a sketching industry and there was a little bit of that going on so i learned a lot about you know how to carry yourself when you're going into somebody's home and looking at their collection i mean they're they're basically letting you into they're letting a complete stranger into their house to look at stuff that's worth tens of thousands of dollars anything could happen so you know that that was important and he also had a shop so i learned how to manage a shop through him which was great and but he didn't track any inventory he had to tackle books so i was like okay maybe if i do this i should have books i should track my inventory i should keep track of all this stuff those those were really the biggest things and then you had a friend who's now your business partner i think a lot of times we're building these businesses in isolation and we don't we know we need support but a lot of the times we're bullheaded and we don't go make that have that conversation or make that move that will eventually help help scale the business that we're running like was it just organic conversations over time and you both realize it hit a wall was it something different like how did you finally get to that point where you were making the decision to not go in it alone anymore anymore but collaborate with someone who you know and trust and believe can help take the business to the next level yeah he was asking me to go into business with him for probably about a year before we we decided to he had there there's there were things that i was hesitant you know going into business with someone is a big decision you know you gotta have agreements and everything written up you have to completely one hundred percent trust that person and then that you know that was the biggest thing is you know building that trust before jumping into it yeah it the the trust is the was a scary thing going into it i it was kind of nerve wracking for the first few months realizing okay we're locked in this is at least the next three to four years is going to be this we're gonna see how it goes and it's luckily it worked out you know and then when did you realize that it was the right decision like was there a specific moment was it just over a a a certain period of time like when did it hit you that like this is this is we're i'm in a good spot this is what i should be doing right now i would say about three to five months in it was it was pretty pretty evident once we once we moved into our first office and we we had a few big collection leads that panned out very well and some that my business partner got that i i would have never if i was on my own i would have never have gotten them and they really helped catapult us in the beginning so that that was really the the turning point how important is the collection buying in into the business that you're building like obviously like you're selling at shows and store like online through ebay live like how important is it to make sure that you are getting the right fit collections kinda at your doorstep on a regular basis it was very important in the beginning because it was all we had we weren't on ebay live we didn't have a store in the beginning yes you can go to shows and and you can buy there's a certain cap to that especially if you're not wholesaling so the beginning we were not wholesaling anything so everything we were selling we were selling on ebay we were getting eighty seven percent on regular ebay even whatnot was about the same so we had to buy these large collections that you could get at the sixty five to seventy five percent mark so it's super important that now it's changed a little bit the fees on ebay live are less we sell in the store at pretty much full you know we we have wholesale relationships where we can move things so so we can go to shows and source enough inventory to keep us afloat without having to rely on these big collections coming in at at lower percentages and it's still great when they do but it's it's it's a little less frequent than it used to be maybe share a little bit about your role specifically as head of operations i i don't think enough people realize how important like having systems having operations in place are to the sustainability of a sports card industry of a sports card store in the sports card industry like i think it's a topic that is not talked about enough but like every owner of a business like yours who has seen success over a long period of time like when i'm have having conversations and asking questions like at some point like building the system and the infrastructure comes up and it's like it a light bulb clicks for me it's like okay i understand why they've been able to scale in this time frame so maybe dig into like your role how you think about operations like the things you're doing to make sure your business continues to see the success that it does yeah this building systems is just it's nobody talks about it when when i first when we first started i was try i was trying to do research on how i should set up our systems for live for ebay there was nothing nobody was talking about how do you store your inventory how do you create a sku system how do you build out a shipping system and the people that were talking about it it was you know it was solopreneurs that were had a small operation and it didn't really apply so you're you're you're kinda on your own especially if you have a bigger operation so over time we've built out we have we use printers for live that build out a sku system for shipping we have three people on our shipping team now and we're moving into a bigger office so we can grow that and the the systems are it's a nightmare it's the only it's because it's an industry where every single item is unique for the most part you can't just count the items and sell them at a a flat price so building something that you can both track your cost and know what you have have left is it's on it's next to impossible and we're we're still trying to tackle it so a lot of that work is i think overwhelming to a lot of people where they know they need to do that if they wanna go out on their own but then they just never take the step to go do that because it's too much work does that work excite you is that like you identifying opportunities where you can improve the systems inside your business like is that something that motivates you to keep going or is it just kinda like just work that you know is needed like maybe talk about just like how you feel about that work inside your business i love it it's it's kinda weird but it's the the the little things trying to as small as like what side of the table am i gonna put the cards that i'm selling so i don't have to reach as far and it's quicker little things like that are it's it's the best part of it trying to completely optimize what you're doing and making sure everything is as quick and as organized as possible is it's the best part of it and there's some people that would completely disagree and absolutely hate it and you know that to be successful you you you've gotta stay organized you've gotta have systems and it's gotta be accurate how has opened opening up a retail location changed the business what have you learned why'd you make the decision opening up our retail store was it it was a little bit of a screw it why not type of thing it was i believe about a year almost a year ago exactly we signed the lease for our retail store it was it was a about a fourteen hundred square foot unit that became available down the road from our office it it was perfect it was a perfect location enough parking good traffic the not didn't need a lot of work everything kinda just worked out the price was fair so we're like screw it why not let let's do it you know our our wholesaling business had slowed down at that point and we this was before we were on ebay live so we were kind of in a lull we didn't really know what to do we were just going to shows and buying and selling and it was you know nothing crazy was going on i was like screw it we'll open the store so we got in there september it took us about a month and a half to build out the store and we got that opened in i think it was the second week of november of twenty twenty five we opened the store so it's coming up on a year it's it's been good it is a huge headache to manage it loses money which is not great but there's a caveat to that the store itself loses money the stuff that gets bought and sold in the store does not cover our rent our payroll but the stuff that we buy in the store and sell elsewhere mhmm is what is how is where we make the money and if you wanna open a card store especially in this age where everybody and their mother is opening a card store you cannot just buy and sell in your store you will not survive you have to buy everything that walks through the door and sell everything as fast as you can take us into one of those moments you're in the store a collection comes your way like from start to finish like how are you not only evaluating the purchase negotiating making the deal processing like then where the cards go like take us through like all of the steps that lead to having a store making making sense for your business because you there's profit on the other side yeah i mean i'll i'll just like take you through the the life of a collection if as we buy it and then when it's out the door so if it if it walks into the store assuming it's somebody let's assume it's somebody that knows what they have you know they know what it they know they kinda know what it's worth you know it it's not a it's not a situation where somebody's walking in with a fifty two mantle asking fifty bucks they come in with the collection they're like okay i think it's worth ten grand i want eighty five hundred we we go through it we're like you know i i think i think it's worth ninety five not ten and if we can agree on that then we we decide where we wanna be percentage wise we don't pay flat percentages because certain cards are more liquid than others i'm not gonna pay ninety percent for you know jj mccarthy rpa this is you know a a brady so we find a fair percentage you know say we pay them seventy eight hundred for the collection that collection then gets put all together we put a index card in with that collection that says the amount we paid the day we the date and time we bought it in the store and it gets set to the side in the store either end of that day end of that week it gets sent to the office where then it gets broken up into different avenues for sale so let's say that collection was ten cards two of those cards are twenty five hundred dollars plus though those two cards will most likely get listed on ebay core and not go out in our store those will just get put on a shelf listed on ebay and they'll they'll sit there the rest of that collection will get broken down between ebay live and our store so some of it you know probably new york stuff or more niche cards cards that we don't think will perform on ebay live those will get sent to the store and everything else will go be processed to run an auction on ebay live at some point now tracking the cost of that collection and what is sold versus what we still have we're still trying to iron that out it's really tough when you have all these different avenues if it goes to ebay core that goes towards our inventory if it goes to live we know it's gonna be out the door within at least two to three weeks or at most two to three weeks so that goes right to cost of goods sold and then the stuff that goes to our store we're still trying to figure out exactly how to keep track of it because putting twenty dollar cards into a pos system is not fun it's just it's it's just it's such a waste of time so we're we're trying to figure out how to track inventory in the store still for singles for sealed stuff it's easy it's like any other but for for singles it's it's pretty tough so i love this and i'm gonna get a little nerdy with you and because i think this is interesting and it would be interesting to the audience i don't know if we've ever discussed this but as you're breaking this down and you're you know allocating specific cards to specific channels and you mentioned like there's two let's just say there's two twenty five hundred dollar cards you're like we're gonna list these on core i'd imagine like maybe with a buy it now or make an offer or whatever you you you talked about like ebay live's good because you know you're moving the cards and you're getting paid right away well in the instance that you list a card like you don't ever know quite when that card is gonna sell or when you're gonna get the right offer like how do you in the market the market is constantly changing right so how do you feel comfortable with those bigger cards and the uncertainty of when they're moving and kind of considering that in your payback period of like buying the this collection like how do you mentally be okay with like card sit sitting for a while and like when is that moment where you're like alright maybe we should do something different or maybe we do wait this out a little longer because this tom brady market's going up specifically like shiny cards like maybe help us understand like how you get a get good with card sitting that might not be like transacted in a month but they might be sitting longer yeah i it depends very heavily on what the card is there are certain cards that we buy small and big that i will list on ebay core and i could not care less if i go to the grave with them you know there's these you know low pop psa ten nineties inserts and both base and and really any sport and you know anything vintage you put it on it it might sit there for six months eventually it'll sell mhmm where there's a bit of a give and take is with the modern stuff that's pretty volatile it might we might put it on ebay core for two three weeks let it sit if it doesn't get any bites after that we'll probably just pull it off and send it to a consignment company that's usually what we do with a lot of our debt inventory is we just pack it up and send it out to dc and just run it you know it's kind of a loss leader like i'm sure we're we're losing on most of those cards that get sent out but overall on those deals we're still making money so it's you know it it's it's really as a give and take on on the quality of the card and then the trajectory if it's a low pop nineties griffey i'll let that thing sit forever you know even if i get an offer at comp or even a little over i might still let it sit because i think it's just gonna continue to go up but if it's a rookie quarterback i'd rather just get that out the door another fun area to dig into just based on what you're talking about thinking about the idea that i think is so good and again we're hitting on a lot of these that i haven't really heard anyone talk about but i'd love your perspective you see all the content you hear all the deals and you know you hear individuals say like well i paid this so i need this on this card which like if you're the buyer like that shouldn't be it's like what concern is that to you like that's always my mindset but like you made mention there it's like you know we'll send send these over to dc and you know we'll lose money on them but it's okay because we know we're making money on the whole collection based on all the different areas where we're sending these cards maybe take us into that mindset as a business builder and business owner where it's like yeah you you you're not gonna win on every single card that you buy but if you look at like a lot of cards you understand like maybe one card performed four times better than you expected so at the end of the day like you're coming out on top it just feels like there's a lot of narrow minded thinking that individuals think card by card but from what i gather and you kinda your description there it's like we're looking at things in a much bigger picture most of the time from just like and we have to win on every individual card that we're selling yeah people get greedy a lot of the time with with these really these these not so quality cards that are expensive they'll pay the comps will be consistently let's say the comps are consistently eight thousand they'll pay like seventy four hundred for it which is pretty strong and then the comps will fall to seventy five seventy six and then all they can get offered is seven seven seven and then there's like oh no i'll just hold it i'll just hold it it goes back up to eight and then two months later it's a six thousand dollar card you should've just lost two hundred bucks when you you could have and now you're gonna lose two grand mhmm so if it's a card that you don't believe in for six months to a year after two three four weeks just get rid of it there's no reason to risk especially with you know guys like young quarterbacks and baseball prospects you don't know if that card's going up down left or right in the next two weeks so we try we we we also try not to buy stuff like that but when you're buying whole collections you usually gotta take it all so you get that stuff but you just gotta know basically just cut your losses people are a lot of people are really afraid to cut their losses when someone brings a collection to you and you see it i'm sure there's a lot of the same commodity cards a lot of the same stuff during covid case hits that sort of stuff stuff that you maybe you you know you'll be able to move at a a margin or maybe stuff that you just look at and you're like man this quarterback was relevant like two three years ago i'm not gonna be able to sell this for anything i'm sure there's a lot of that back back and forth over and over again but like what when a collection comes up to you that like gets you really motivated and gets you really excited and you start like seeing all the opportunities like what what's in that collection like what gets you excited now after seeing all these cards come up to you at all the areas that you're set up or your store my favorite cards and and sort of like a overall genre not necessarily a specific sport or a player is cards that i think are worth more than the comps reflect because you can honestly buy those for fifty percent of what you think they're worth and you're not ripping anybody off that card could have sold a month ago for two thousand dollars but there's nothing available on the market and they believe it's worth two thousand dollars and other people would agree you could pay eighteen hundred for it if you think it's worth twenty five so when you get collections that have a lot of that type of stuff you can create incredible margin without you know without having to use shady business practices that people use in this industry you know it's huge so it's it's what what is maybe to kinda illustrate it for the listeners what is maybe what is an an example card that comes to your mind that you saw that maybe didn't have rich sales history but you knew was something that you could make a percentage on and it was a cool card that you know even if you didn't sell it right away you were happy to have it around yeah lately it's been griffey psa tens any griffey psa ten both modern nineties you know ultra modern nineties anything like that last sale will be three hundred bucks two months ago you'll go to a show a guy will have it stickered at four fifty you check online there's nothing listed you offer them four you list it it sells for eight hundred bucks we've had that happen we it keeps happening we picked up a big collection of griffey psa tens and every single one of them is just outperforming the last comp some of them are doubling the last comp and then a week later we look and the next comp is forty percent higher you're like i i should've held it and you still you still doubled your money so it's yeah it it that's the biggest thing lately that was huge it was big for soccer in in the spring it was a lot of soccer stuff worth a lot more than the comps reflected even current comps you know everybody's everybody wants to buy off at auction comp because they think the auction comps are you know more reflective of what a card's worth and there's people that refuse to pay more than what a card sold for at auction i'm the complete opposite auction comps in my mind a lot of the time are lower than what a card is actually worth because that if a card goes up for a seven day auction it's only available for seven days if if someone willing to pay more didn't see it in those seven days they wouldn't they didn't bid on it but if a card sits for a month and a half on ebay and and then somebody comes along willing to pay that price the card's worth more so everybody thinks you know you'll buy it now offers buy it now sales are fake and best offer sales are not accurate i think it's the other way around so that that's other thing so so you're buying like as a buyer are you con like do you have like a huge watch list because you're constantly tracking like these are cards that are up for auction now that fit this criteria where i know i can make a margin on these cards if i'm able to get it at my price like are you constantly canvassing kind of just all the current auctions that are running on ebay a little bit like not a ton honestly i i don't really have the time to sit on ebay and look for stuff constantly we will buy stuff every once in a while that we think is sitting cheap like i found a griffey sold the game psa ten in the spring on ebay it was sitting at three k the last sale two weeks before was twenty two hundred dollars it had sixty five watchers as a buy it now which if you know anything about buy it now listings that is a lot of watchers i binned it at three k sold it to the national for six because that was the only one available and it's a pop twenty seven maybe like around it pops around thirty so i knew another one most likely wasn't gonna come up and there's there's even some i've looked at that i regret not buying there was a griffey there was a jeter listed at the same time that i didn't buy that i really wish i had so you you i looked at the psa nines on the griffey they've gone from i think they went from at the time the psa nine went from a hundred to about two fifty and the psa ten has last sold for twenty two when the nine is worth a hundred so i just assumed the ten has gone up with the nine and now the psa nine of that card is like six seven hundred dollars or something like that which you know i i kinda wish i still had my or the nine of that card is like twenty five hundred sorry i wish i still had my ten but of course mine has gone nuts so it's just yeah i think this has been good just digging into kinda how someone like you thinks about buying selling digging into building your business i wanna maybe spend a little more time digging into the live side like we talked about like the different channels where you're you'll sell through and one of those obviously is ebay live maybe it hasn't been one of the first you you jumped on because it's relatively newer in comparison to some of the other things you're doing but like take us into that moment where you decided like because it's it's i'm learning more and more about people who sell on platforms like ebay live and just like the amount of work that goes into it obviously like you have to show up you have to have the right inventory you have to have the right systems in place you have to get your cards out to the people on time how did you decide that that was a channel that was worth your time and and investment take us into that moment yeah when we started on live selling we were we were on whatnot for a little bit that was in twenty twenty four it was for a few months it was okay it it it wasn't it wasn't good enough to continue scaling so we stopped live selling for about a year then we applied to ebay live i don't remember when we applied but it it took about eight months we got wait listed it took eight months before we got approved to start onboarding we got onboarded i met with a rep at the philly show in november of twenty twenty five we had a in person meeting and then after that we started our onboarding process it took us till february to start selling on ebay live and then people are gonna say oh that's that's terrible why did it take so long because they're truly vetting every single seller that goes on the wrong platform to make sure they are running a legitimate business everything is honest you know everything's gonna go right and once we got on in february we we we're like alright we're gonna give it a try see how it goes it's a new platform you know i'm sure stuff's gonna do well so we we started out with smaller streams you know hundred items two hundred items smaller stuff and then over time we increased our you know average sale price up to about i think it's probably about twenty five ish dollars some of our streams are higher some are a little lower once we started once we realized we can once we realized nothing's really gonna undersell incredibly at least not the at least not the smallish stuff we realized okay we can just go all in we can scale this up because we're not gonna have to worry about not having any audience and then when we've we've built up an audience pretty quickly it's we're it is our primary business now even ahead of our store i think we're at probably about thirty five hundred to forty five hundred items a week so it's yeah it's a lot to keep track of but we we're moving into a bigger office now so that we can continue to scale live does that did that surprise you that you had you took a chance on i mean you're doing some whatnot stuff but you jumped over to ebay live and you saw the scale that you did in such a short time that not only is it something that you're like okay this was a good bet that we placed but it's literally like changing the way your business is structured by getting moving into a newer location so you have more room to invest more time on ebay live like does did that surprise you a little bit i had a i had a gut feeling that it was gonna be good in the beginning and then that it that it was gonna work but it scaled up a lot quicker than i expected that's for sure we did more we did more sales in the first week of quarter two than we did all of quarter one so it it it grew pretty quick and we we sort of flatlined a little bit through the second half of this year over the summer because we hit our capacity at our current office we couldn't sell more cars if we wanted to because we only have so much space to ship them but now that now that we're moving into the bigger space we're gonna be able to we're gonna be able to have three to four streets going simultaneously almost every day of the week the thing that i'm always interested in when i'm talking to someone who runs a live business is to try to understand how they think about the audience and i'm curious like you know if someone's tuning into a stream like they can just chill they can just sit there and they can watch or they can you know bid on some cards win some cards and it's a fun experience like people love it it's why live selling has become just a a macro theme across the entire industry i'm curious like how you think about the conversion of someone just sitting and watching and understanding the curated brand for the first time to buying their first card to then probably the hardest part is like getting them to come back to your next livestream to buy more cards like how do you think about kind of that customer life cycle it's it's it's tough because you you you do have a relationship you know with your customers on ebay live but it's not you know it's not incredibly personal you you talk to them on online you you you know you you get to know them you there we've we've got a few guys that that i know pretty well we actually met up with a couple of our our base buyers but i do wish there was a little bit more of a system to be able to get to know our buyers better we but our our streams are where they're supposed to be zero pressure you know there's no yelling i'm not if a card undersells i go great take that's all i say i'm not like if a hundred dollar card sells for sixty bucks i'm not gonna freak out and be like oh come on guys i'm losing so much money i'm i'm just gonna say great take you got a good deal you know it's i don't play music in my streams i don't i don't ever scream or yell about comms i i just want people to be able to hang out have fun if if you wanna buy some cards more than welcome to but you could hang out talk cards all day not buy a single card that is perfectly fine you know it's it's just supposed to be a fun atmosphere and there's weekends where i'll go for twelve thirteen hours straight and i can't do that if i'm yelling and screaming the whole time so you know it's i i with almost all of these live sellers mostly on whatnot there there's some of it on ebay live too not you know it happens they're just yelling and screaming and then they're you've got the two dollar card selling for thirty bucks and they're just you know they're just it's you just can't watch it for more than like twenty thirty minutes without getting burnt out no doubt so it you it sounds like like what i'm learning about you collins is that like you're not thinking with a transactional mindset like you're trying to come from a place of abundance look at the long game of what you're doing do you feel like your approach you mentioned like a lot of things you're not doing which all the things that you said you're not doing i feel like most people associate with live selling based on clips and videos that you know get distributed across social do you do you feel like the way you're doing it is against kind of the grain of what the mainstream hobby is doing and if so like is that helping you differentiate the brand amongst a sea of everyone who's trying to sell on live platforms yeah i i definitely think it's different you know the the majority of clips you see there's all these videos that go viral of whatnot streamer crashes out over card underselling and you know it it people are just fed up with it you know and it and there hasn't been that many people to fill that void because people still wanna they wanna buy on live streams they they wanna hang out they wanna watch the stream but if you're going into a stream and you're just gonna get yelled at about you know why you need to buy a card why you need to bid more then you're just you're not gonna stay you know know it it's it it seems like it would be obvious but but it really isn't when when you think about kind of the next phase of curated and where you want your business to go obviously live selling's a part of it you've got a retail location you're setting up at shows you're buying collections like what else like what is that is that is it just like specializing in those areas and getting really good at each of those is it more like how are you thinking about growth and scaling over the next couple years i would say over the next year it's just gonna be about scaling up live you know getting getting everything more organized we're probably gonna grow our team a little bit the next two to five years i would love to have everything under one roof that that's my biggest goal now that's really tough to do especially given how much space we need for live and other aspects of our business but that's my biggest goal is to move everything under one roof but that would mean a huge space so that would that would either be leasing a space where we're gonna have to pay twenty thirty grand a month or buying a property and using that to pull everything under one roof because i really wish we could have our store and then our office at the same place so i don't have to drive fifteen minutes when i forget something at the office but i gotta go to bring it to somebody at the store and it just it's it's it's annoying so that's probably the biggest goal being more organized we can all be more organized that's for sure we've i've learned a ton about you kind of the business that you're running your mindset mentality how you're thinking about growing and scaling i think everyone listening who is thinking about or is actively building a business in this space will find value in kind of some of the insights you'd share i'd hey as we close this conversation out i'd love for you to just give some advice like share some advice to anyone out there like you have made this decision to not take the traditional route or the route your parents wanted you to take but to go pave your own path and work in cards and you're doing that and you're growing like what advice do you have to anyone else out there who's thinking about making a decision like you did i'd say the biggest thing is you gotta be patient you gotta be willing to pay your dues if if you wanna do cards if you wanna turn cards into your profession this is both the easiest and the hardest time to do it at the same time you know you've got everybody wants to do it there's all this information out there there's hundreds and hundreds of shows every weekend anybody can do it but you gotta understand you're not gonna get into the hobby and then six month flip six months later open a store and be making a quarter million dollars a year it's just not gonna happen you've you gotta understand it's gonna take years you're gonna have to lose money you're gonna have to the only real way to learn in this industry is to lose money that's how you learn you buy cards and you sell them for less than you paid and then you know not to buy those cards you know that that's that that that is the biggest part you know you gotta grow your relationships you gotta pay your dues you gotta be patient and it'll it will work out if you just stick with it but but you gotta stick with it you know if if after two months you're not you know making a ton of money you know if you cut and run it's it's never it's never gonna work out great advice great feedback collins really appreciate the chat looking forward to doing this again down the road yeah i appreciate it it was great