Cards
A drive-thru window, a railway line and a pack bar make Collector Station a unique experience for hobbyists
Most hobby shops don’t have a drive-thru window, a railway line located just a short distance from the main door and a 15-foot-wide pack bar for ripping product.
But most shops aren’t Collector Station. And most shops don’t have a founder and owner who could be considered a modern-day P.T. Barnum in the industry.
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Ryan Alford’s day job as a marketing wiz for the last quarter century has prepared him for this moment. In early February, Alford opened the Collector Station card store in Easley, S.C., which has quirky wrinkles that are intriguing customers.
“I am focused on the customer and the customer experience,” Alford said. “We want to be an experimental store. It is about transaction—you have to do business, of course you do. But it is very intentional, and if you are looking for just a transaction, there are probably other places to go. We want you to spend time here, you want to spend time here.
“We have couches and seven televisions bigger than 100 inches. You want to hang out, we’ve got space. Two dudes, two girls, whoever could come hang out and never say a word to us and it doesn’t matter. We’re not turning the clock on them and saying, ‘Did you buy something?’ We don’t have to, they do anyway. Then they hang out. Then they tell their friends. It’s an experience first and a store second.”
Alford is a successful podcaster, starting the Right About Now podcast eight years ago. For the last three years, it has been the No. 1 marketing and business show on Apple Podcasts. Alford has plenty of business knowledge to share having worked on the largest brands and campaigns in the world.
A couple of years ago, Alford’s four boys got into collecting cards and that brought him back into the hobby. Alford, who will turn 49 in mid-May, was a collector as a kid.
In August 2025, Alford turned his passion for collecting into a second podcast: Collector Nation. Running twice per week, Alford interviews a guest every Tuesday and Ludex CEO Brian Ludden joins the show on Fridays to dive into the hobby. Collector Nation has become a top 10 sports show on Apple Podcasts.
“We’re building out a media team,” Alford said. “The goal is to be the ESPN of the hobby.”
After establishing both his podcasts, Alford thought the next step was to dive deeper into cards and collectibles and open a hobby shop.
“I loved collecting growing up. I see how big of a business it is now, and it’s not just fun and games. There’s big business here from the media perspective, from the cards and collectibles, from the legacy money that’s coming into it,” Alford said. “So, I just saw it as a business opportunity along with being a way to hang out with my kids.
“The retail store, though, for me was, if I’m going to be in the business of this and do it organically, I need to be in it. With a hobby store, you’re in it. You know what the consumer mindset is, you’re selling, you’ve got the overhead of running a store and creating an experience. Honestly, it leverages what I’ve done for 25 years for other people and have a lot of knowledge on. It’s a physical manifestation of what I know how to do.”
Alford sought a building that could serve as a combination hobby shop and studio to conduct his podcasts. While searching for his ideal location, Alford was driving down Main St. in Easley—which has a population a shade under 30,000—and found an interesting option.
The building was a car dealership in the 1950s, so it is surrounded by a large parking lot. The 3,000-square-foot structure later on turned into a dry cleaners, so it featured a drive-thru window for customers to pick up their garments.
“The building had this retro look to the front that if you look at it, it almost feels mid-century modern,” Alford said. “It has this shape of like a wing. I’m a creative guy first; I’m a marketer first. So, I had the vision, I’m just like, ‘That’s going to be a trading card store.’”
SHOP QUIRKS
Since Alford thinks outside the box, he wanted his shop to be unique.
Having a drive-thru window is definitely one way to achieve one-of-a-kind status. When he was designing his shop, Alford kept getting asked the same questions.
“‘What are you going to do with this window? Are you going to box it in?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not. That’s going to be a drive-thru window,’” Alford said. “I’m crazy, I guess.”
With the shop only being open for a few months, just a handful of people have utilized the drive-thru.
“Truthfully, I didn’t build it so that people would come to the drive-thru. I built it so people would talk about it and want to come to the store,” Alford said. “Guess what? It’s working.”
Alford is expecting the drive-thru to become popular as time goes on; he said customers can go online or call in an order to pick up.
“You can get on your phone, be a mile away from the shop, click three buttons, and we’ll have it in the window for you,” Alford said.
Another thing that sets Collector Station apart is a railway line located just outside the shop’s front door. Hence the name Collector Station, which inadvertently rhymes with Collector Nation. A train comes through town on average about three to four times per day when the shop is open. Alford is finalizing specials for customers who are in the store when a train passes by.
“It was always in mind that when a train comes by when people are in the store that everybody gets 5-10% off, but we’re kind of putting a few more triggers around that are going to be fun,” Alford said. “We haven’t enacted that yet, but it’s coming.”
When Alford was designing his hobby shop, the last area of the building he figured out was his office. Located down a long hallway, Alford’s office is tucked away in a 20-by-15-foot space. Alford had a brilliant idea to make the gateway to his office a sort of secret passage. It fits Alford’s theme of his shop of having fun in the hobby.
One day, Alford jumped on Facebook Marketplace and saw a vintage Pepsi machine on sale. He envisioned the tall machine—Alford is 6-foot-5, so he needed something big—with a wide frame acting like a door to his office. Alford purchased the 700-pound machine and his handyman went to work on the project.
“He literally gutted the whole thing, we put it in, we kept the buttons functional and there’s a combination of buttons that you hit and it unlocks the door,” Alford said. “It lights up like a Christmas tree.”
When customers head down the long hallway to go to the bathroom, they see what appears to be a working Pepsi machine from the late-1970s/early-’80s.
“People see me come walking out of it and it scares the crap out of them,” Alford said laughing.
SHOP SUCCESS
Even though the shop has only been open for a few months, it is thriving beyond Alford’s wildest dreams.
“I didn’t set any unrealistic expectations,” Alford said. “I had a 12-month goal, here’s what I think success would look like. If you divide by 12 like our two months of sales, we’ve been probably 200-300% higher than what I thought we’d do. It’s been great, reception’s been good, sales have been brisk and the community loves what we’re doing.”
When Alford was designing his card shop, he contemplated a few ideas. Ultimately, Alford wanted to turn his shop into a sports bar—sans the alcohol—that sells trading cards.
“I wanted it to feel like a man cave and a sports bar and sort of a place that you want to hang out because we have plenty of space,” Alford said. “Most card shops you go into are in a mall or in a strip and they have 20-by-10, 10-by-10 [areas]. You can’t wait to get in to get what you want, but you can’t wait to get out. … You want to hang out when you come here. You walk in, we’ve got product, we’ve got old-school cases with good lighting.”
There aren’t any price stickers on the cards at Collector Station. They all contain QR codes where a customer can scan the item and the shop’s entire inventory becomes available.
“We really lean into old-school and new-school,” Alford said. “We’re embracing technology, but you walk in and it has the feel of an old-school sports bar or an old-school hobby shop. We’ve got gigantic tables that scream trade night every day. Our tagline is: ‘Trade night every day.’ We encourage and have the space for people to come out and hang out and trade or sit, whether they spend any money or not.”
Collector Station, which has already attracted roughly 30 regular customers who are frequenting the shop four times per week, has a pack bar. Collectors can pull up a stool to the 100-year-old barn wood surface and order from over 100 different products on a pack menu.
“We’re definitely building a community already,” Alford said. “That bar has become kind of the local watering hole but for packs.”
Alford makes sure his shop has a wide variety of high-end and lower-end sealed boxes, singles and accessories to meet the needs of collectors. The shop has over 2,000 singles that range from 1950 to present day.
Collector Station’s inventory consists of 50% sports cards and 50% Pokémon cards, noted Alford. He’s found that the two universes can co-exist.
“We’re sports first,” Alford said. “It feels more like a sports scene, but we’re catering to that Pokémon audience because it’s part of the hobby and it’s there.”
Even though his brick-and-mortar shop is in its infancy, Alford already has large-scale ideas for what it will become in the near future.
“We built the shop to be a laboratory. What I mean by that is we’re going to put in cameras everywhere where every part of the action is filmed and YouTube-able—with permission, of course—for people who come in,” Alford said. “We will have rip stations where people can rip on camera, so you get memories of that and we can put it on our channels. We’re leaning into the media side.”
Collector Station is hosting trade nights three times per month. It is also planning flagship events to take place and bring in some recognizable names in the hobby, including Gary Vanyerchuk, aka Gary Vee, and King of the Kards Kyle Kravitz.
“Our goal is to be a flagship hobby shop in South Carolina,” Alford said. “I’d argue we’re three-fourths of the way there already just by the nature of what I know is in the state. But we also want to be a destination. A lot of people want to hit these six shops in the whole country. We want to be one of those shops. Then we want to feed the media engine of Collector Nation and feed the community that’s broader than just our market.”
