From February 26th-28th, several hundred card shop owners, hobby media personnel, and other industry representatives came together at Chase Field in Arizona for the 2023 Topps Industry Conference.

I was not able to attend this year, but Ivan Lovegren (@watchthebreaks), The Sports Card Investor team, and WaxPackHero Sponsor, The Sports Card Shop at MoCo (@_sportscardshop), were all present and shared some of the best insights to the conversations and presentations that were happening.

I wanted to wait a few weeks to let the dust settle before sharing my perspective on what I thought were the key takeaways from the event based on the social media posts of the individuals above.  Follow them to see their full stream of content from the event.

I’ll start with what’s new, move on to impacts to existing products, and then spend some time on operational impacts.

New Products

Let’s start by discussing several new or expanded product lines which were announced. 

It sounds like Tennis is in the plans for multiple upcoming releases.   They referred to an upcoming Topps Chrome release as well as the potential for a more comprehensive release next year.

They also signed a deal with the J League for Japanese soccer cards.  Soccer is probably the sport I have the least depth knowledge of, so I don’t have much to say about the significance of this product.  But I’m always a fan of testing new products for smaller leagues and have done very well in the past with secondary products like AAF and XFL football products.

Many collectors are on the edge of their seats waiting for the return of Topps Chrome Basketball once Fanatics takes the NBA license from Panini, but Topps is going to try and release some other basketball products to try and appeal to hoops collectors in the meantime.  

They will be releasing a product focused on McDonald’s All Americans and Bronny James will be signing cards for that release.

Overtime Elite or OTE will continue to have products released, but it sounds like attendees were not all that excited about them.  While the league itself seems to be gaining momentum, and has a big presence on social media, the cards have been slower to catch on.

Most of these products don’t really appeal to me as a collector, but as a seller, I’ll be more than happy to use them to try and fill holes in the collections of other collectors who are passionate about these sports, leagues, and athletes.  I feel like these were all positive.

The lineup of NCAA related products will continue to expand with brands like Bowman Chrome, Bowman’s Best and Bowman Inception.

A Tom Brady baseball card?  Yes, some may not realize Tom Brady was drafted by the Expos, and Topps will be releasing a kind of “what might have been” card featuring the NFL goat in an Expos uniform.  Autographed copies will also be released.  It’s kind of gimmicky but kind of cool at the same time.  

While we’re on the Bowman topic, I want to mention retrofractors.  I wasn’t able to find much about them, but the concept is that they were going to release “1st Bowman” cards for players who never had one in the past.  The example shared was a Babe Ruth 1st Bowman.  This doesn’t excite me one bit.

It also sounds like Entertainment releases will be a focus for Fanatics in the coming years.  Dune, Stranger Things and what sounds like an expanded lineup of Star Wars cards will be coming out in the coming months.  I love the focus on Entertainment cards and I think this market is one of the ways Fanatics can help meet their goal of 10xing the number of collectors.  

It seems to me that the percentage of passionate Stranger Things and Star Wars fans who collect cards is much smaller than the percentage of sports fans who collect cards.  Then there are all kinds of other Entertainment properties which don’t even have cards yet.  This seems like a fan segment which could be reached to help grow our family of card collectors.

Finally, I want to hit on what in my opinion is the dumbest, most gimmicky idea to come from the conference.  

Topps Frozen Fractors

What is that? Good question. A new numbering convention that goes below 0.  -5/0, -4/0, -1/0 etc.  This just seems dumb.  The original point of serial numbered cards was to give collectors a sense of scarcity.  Having a negative serial number makes no sense.  I don’t know how this idea ever got the green light.  

Who knows, maybe collectors will love it.  I’ve been wrong before.  If so, I’ll be happy to admit it was a good business idea.  However, personally, I’ll continue to have no interest in the gimmick for my own PC.

Impacts to Existing Products

Occasionally we see adjustments to the Topps product mix, but I never thought I’d see the level of baseball products cuts which were announced at the event.  The list of products discussed at the event (which may or may not be comprehensive) were as follows: Topps Archives Snapshots, Bowman Heritage, Clearly Authentic, Bowman Chrome X, Topps Gallery, Opening Day, Topps Fire, Gold Label, 1st Edition releases, Bowman Transcendent, and Gypsy Queen.

I love this announcement.  They didn’t seem to give a detailed explanation of why these cuts were being made, but in the context of the overall event, it seems like Fanatics is wanting to focus on an increase in quality and an improved customer experience.  In my opinion, many of their products have felt bland and watered down over the last couple years, and my hope is that with a more condensed lineup, they can put their efforts towards increasing the quality of the other releases.

Now it’s possible that this is just a short term blip to allow them to fully catch up with a timely release schedule (which in of itself would be a good thing). They also might just be clearing space for additional release which they didn’t announce yet.  Time will tell.

Operational Impacts

Lastly I want to focus on what I’m calling operational impacts.  These are things which I think hit more on the day to day operation regardless of product line, or maybe point to a strategic shift.

First, the impression I got from the social posts was a continued focus on direct to consumer and direct to dealer relationships.  It seems like further reductions to distributor relationships were a possibility.

The number of direct hobby shop relationships has more than doubled to over 500.  In addition they will be introducing a set of standards and practices these shops will have to abide by to stay in good standing.  I love this.  In theory it will reward shops who have integrity and are forward thinking, and will penalize those who are less reputable and don’t have as much of a focus on their customer’s experience.

Fanatics/Topps has raised dealer cost which has begun to shrink margins for dealers.  They also discussed dynamic pricing which also would seem to be an avenue which allows Topps to get a bigger cut and force dealers to pay more when reordering product.  The answers to questions on this topic seemed to push towards shops finding additional revenue from other programs and marketing.

A program which should both help local shops and bring in new collectors is a focus on partnering with Little League.  I was not able to pick up many additional details except that the program will entail getting free packs of cards to kids who sign up.

The continued MVP buyback program seems to be another effort to reward collectors, shops, and even bring in 3rd party marketplaces like COMC.

During a Q&A portion of the event, the company officials mentioned that more people were being hired to help improve the customer experience and the quality of products being released.  It sounded like this was more than just additional phone reps. It would also involve resources dedicated to customer focused programs designed to build collector interest such as rewards for building a set, etc.

Another focus for the company was to improve the customer experience by reducing the number of redemptions.  I don’t believe they gave many details about how they were hoping to accomplish this, but if they do, it would be a great win.

They answered a question focused on what they were doing to address the environmental impact of their products.  They mentioned they have reduced the use of toxic glue and are testing biodegradable wrappers.  I think this great.  There is currently a large amount of cardboard, plastic, and foil waste in our hobby, and anything that we can do to reduce it is a big positive.

Finally, there was some discussion about the new live streaming platform being developed.  While there is still more to come, they did say it was not going to be purely a breaking platform, that it would not be exclusive to Topps/Fanatics products, and that the goal is that it would be broadly inclusive both for sellers and products.

I also want to throw in more of a wildcard item.  It sounds like all the attendees of the conference were given a free 4 day pass to The Mint Collective.  I find this interesting for a couple reasons.  1) what does that say about the presale of tickets for the MINT?   I can’t imagine Topps is paying $600 a ticket to MINT for attendees who only paid $400-450 to their own conference.  Are MINT sales that bad?  2) We’ve had several competing “industry conferences” over the  last couple years.  Beckett Industry Summit, MINT, Topps Industry Conference, and Upper Deck had their own event for a number of years as well.  We’ve started to see a bit of collaboration between the MINT and the Beckett Event, and now we are seeing some collaboration with MINT and the Topps Event.  Might we be working our way back towards one united Industry Event with a primary focus of growing our Hobby? I would be a big supporter of that idea.

And last but not least, they mentioned that in the very near future they would share the biggest hobby announcement in a generation. There has been a lot of speculation about what this announcement will be and when it will come out. I have no knowledge and don’t want to sound like a blabbering idiot with uneducated speculation, so I’m not going to even try to guess.

But my general feeling is that this type of thing rarely lives up to the hype. That being said, I do plan to pay close attention to social media throughout the upcoming MINT Collective event from March 30th - April 2nd.

What do you think of these announcements? Leave a comment below to share you thoughts and to continue the conversation!