Handelskort finds a new home in NFTS
The trading card industry has been resurrected from a doomed fate in the past two years.
When Covid-19 began to rage around the planet, in a wave came right behind the rebirth of the once massive trading card industry. In short order, retailers like Target and Walmart began rolling out expanded sections to accommodate the crowd.
Traffic picked up at various small hobby shops around the nation as well as on eBay. With an increase in interest came the normal increase in the value of new and existing cards.
At the same time, a new avenue of collectibles was growing in popularity: non-rogue tokens. As corporations, sports leagues and entrepreneurs began to jump on the bandwagon, so did trading card companies.
Panini America, a branch of the Italian card company dating back to 1961, jumped into the land of NFTs with both feet. Recently, Jason Howarth, VP of Marketing for Panini America, joined Innovation technical talks What a thorough talk about the features Panini has done.
The following are excerpts from that interview. Follow the QR code to listen to the entire interview as well. youtu.be/jjb8l-nmn6q
Innovation and technology today: What would you say the state of card collecting is right now?
Jason Howarth: I would lie, but the absolute truth is that I mean, you might expect me to say this, but the absolute truth is that the trading card category has never been healthier than it is right now, both at the Hobby Shop level, at mass retail with retailers like Target and Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods and so on. And then in the online room. And so across all sports. So great strength in the NBA and NFL, great strength with the UFC and the growth that we’ve seen there in the last year, NASCAR, you name it. And the power of our brands, whether it’s our Prizm brand, which is just an absolute monster in the trading card space globally, we make that product across all sports.
I & T today: So Jason, we know NFTs are here. They are everywhere. You were way too early. You saw an opportunity with blockchain. You knew there was something here. It’s perfect for collectibles because you have that unique serial number and you have this… were you guys the first and did you know it would be as big as… I mean, I don’t even think it’s gotten there yet. I think it’s still getting there. How were your internal discussions?
JH: So as I mentioned earlier, we started thinking about blockchain in 2018. And when we started thinking about it and then fast forward to 2020 when we launched our private blockchain platform on our website at Paniniamerica.net in January 2020, we started thinking, “Okay, how do we engage the consumer? How do we help them understand blockchain? And what are the steps we need to take to get them to understand that? ” All the steps were not things we really liked. It was like, “Okay, we have to tell them to get a crypto wallet. Then we have to tell them to buy a cryptocurrency. But we can’t tell them which one to buy.” Then they have to figure all that out. And now are they finally ready to buy one of our products I’m like “No, no, no, we need to get paths to buy the product.”
So we decided that on our blockchain platform we would introduce it to consumers where they could buy in US currency. So even today you can still buy our NFTs on our blockchain platform at Paniniamerica.net in the US currency. Over the next six weeks, we will begin accepting forms of cryptocurrency as another form of payment.
But when we launched it in January 2020, no one was talking about the non-heavy token part of the blockchain, NFTS. We were like, “Okay, that’s just the engine that makes the train run down the track of the blockchain. That’s exactly what you need to have to live on the blockchain and be able to carry it and form multiple chains and create this story around that asset.” … and to introduce it, we launched the 100 card set with the best athletes across all sports. And yes, we were the first to do it, in January 2020, but we launched it with the best athletes in 100 across of all sports and we tied it to a physical card.
So consumers and collectors understood the value of the physical card. When you have an autographed Kobe Bryant or JA Morant or you name it in the product as a physical card, you know what the value of that card is from a physical standpoint. You may not fully understand the value of the digital asset associated with it. But at least you understand that there is a value, and that there is now a prize. So that’s how we went through and started explaining and educating the consumer. And when we started to progress in the platform, we started to sell only purely NFT assets or purely blockchain assets, no physical cards attached to it. It was just a digital asset that looked like the physical card.
I & T today: Yes. It almost squeezes out the average collection.
JH: Exactly. And so we’ve always been a believer that we wanted to recreate that physical experience that we talked about earlier with sharing that joy of opening up a package and that experience of what’s inside and the unveiling of the card and all the other things . And then we couldn’t do it on the individual short side of it. And then in July 2021 we launched the package format, starting with the NBA. And it really replicated the physical experience where you open up the deck of cards on the website and you’ve got three to five cards that are there and you touch it and it flips over. But we launched in July 2021 with the NBA packages. And we followed that up with the Major League Baseball Players Association, and we followed that up with the UFC, and then we launched the NFL packages during the season, and we just launched the French soccer league on our website as well. And then we roll into the FIFA WC NFTs here as well during the next few months. And that cadence continues to build because they recreate the experiences and the physical short side. So we have so many different dynamic products that we can launch in the NFT space as a result.
