Sports Card Dealers
Ezra Levine launches Mascot, a new inventory management platform for collectors
About a year ago, Ezra Levine discovered Slabfolio.
The sports card inventory management and distribution tool stood out to Levine because of its functionality and how much potential the product had.
In April, Levine — the former CEO of the fractionalization company, Collectable — came on board as CEO, and Slabfolio’s name was changed to Mascot.
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Late last week, Levine announced the launch of Mascot, just in time for the company to make a splash at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Rosemont, Ill., July 26-30.
“What excited me about this opportunity was the ability for this product to be used and have value across the entire industry, whether you’re an individual collector, whether you’re a dealer, whether you’re a marketplace, whether you’re a grading company,” Levine told Sports Collectors Digest. “There’s so many applications of Mascot that make it useful and exciting for all.”
There are two main components to the product right now: inventory management and listing optimization — selling items within a wide range of outside platforms.
“Even if you just want the inventory management part, this makes it super easy for you to upload items into your collection and just to track it in a lot more elegant manner. I did this with my own collection,” Levine said. “I was using a fairly outdated spreadsheet, and every time I added something new, I put it in. Every time I sold something, I had to take it out. This really does everything for you.”
Levine said loading items onto Mascot is simple — they don’t have to be manually entered into the program. An existing spreadsheet can be uploaded, images can be dragged and dropped onto the site and grading serial numbers can be plugged into the program. Mascot has direct partnerships with all the top third-party grading companies: PSA, BGS, SGC, CGC and TAG.
For sellers, with the ease of clicking a box, there is the option for multi-sales channel listings. Mascot has integrated with marketplaces eBay, MySlabs, ComicConnect and Shopify social media platforms, which include Amazon, Meta (Facebook), Twitter and Instagram.
“Our expectation is within the next month to a year there’s going to be a lot of various channels that you’re going to be able to sell into,” Levine said.
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Since Levine stepped into the top management role, Mascot has undergone significant changes.
“What we did over the last three or four months is we really improved three things primarily. One was the user experience,” Levine said. “We made it a lot easier to navigate, made it a lot easier for items to be uploaded or synced into the platform. We made it just more intuitive.
“The other thing we did is made it a lot faster. With Mascot, it’s about 100 to 200 times faster just in terms of getting items into your collection, and that’s through direct API feeds from all the grading companies and all the various vendors that we’re working with. The third thing we did was we expanded what types of items the product can support.”
When the company was known as Slabfolio, it just dealt with graded sports cards. Mascot has expanded to include comic books, TCG, non-sports cards and raw cards.
Levine noted other categories will be added to Mascot as the product continues to grow.
“Our view is that this has potential to be a core operating system of any collectible vertical, whether it’s sports cards or comic books or watches down the line,” Levine said. “This is a product that all different types of collectible participants could use. It’s not a fully revolutionary concept — this concept exists in other markets. It exists in tickets.”
Mascot, which as a company consists of six individuals, can be impactful for a collector or individual seller, but also as a dealer.
When Topps came out in June with a new set of guidelines for hobby shops that sell its products, one major change required is tracking point of sale (POS) figures.
On a quarterly basis, shops have to submit to Topps complete and accurate reports regarding total sales of Topps products, sales by channel (in-store, online, convention, etc.), customer type (retail customer, dealer, convention, etc.) and social media metrics for all platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, Whatnot, etc.)
With Mascot, Levine said the program takes care of inventory management.
“Now with new entrants coming into the space and having various different requirements for card shops and breakers and all these other platforms to really operate, data capture and inventory management and inventory tracking is a huge component of it,” Levine said. “From our intel, not a lot of people are fully equipped to be able to kind of fill those requirements as of now. By migrating the inventory onto Mascot, it will essentially give you everything you need. It will make it so much easier. We have reporting tools, we have the ability to sort and filter. You can create essentially custom tags to say, ‘OK, we bought this item from this place, or this is John’s consignment, for an example. So you’re able to filter and sort and keep track of all the data and all of the analytics in a way that you can literally just essentially print out a report directly from Mascot, send it over to Fanatics, for instance, and you’re at least most of the way there if not all the way there.”
Mascot is free for anyone to use. Levine noted that down the line the company will add advanced features and institute paid tiers for the product. However, he anticipates the basic inventory management tools will remain free.
Mascot will have a booth, No. 329, in the corporate area at The National. Levine encourages collectors to stop by to chat or to check out a demo. Levine and his staff are always interested in hearing feedback to constantly make the product better for its users.
“We have a pretty aggressive roadmap of whether it’s other partnerships that we want,” Levine said. “Certainly, one thing we’re tracking closely is how many distribution channels can we give the average collector. We want as many partnerships, we want as many distribution channels as possible. Our view is that if you’re looking to sell your items, really what you want is three things: you want to be able to maximize how many people see it; you want to be able to optimize for the best sales price; and you want to be able to optimize for how quickly it sells. No one wants their inventory just sitting and sitting and sitting without someone buying it.
“All you’re really doing is making sure that as many eyeballs that could possibly see it are seeing it. That’s really the job of Mascot, by creating one listing, you can really create 10 listings. There’s real magic to that and it saves collectors a lot of time.”
