Sports Card Dealers
New, high-tech, state-of-the-art card shops designed to enhance collector experience
(EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a two-part series on new card shops in the hobby.)
QR codes that show high-resolution images of the front, back, and population report of slabbed cards.
On-site breaking rooms. Vertical display cases. Specific rooms to rip product.
LED fixtures to illuminate the show floor. Flashy signage outside and inside the building. Interactive in-store activities.
Cutting-edge ideas.
The future for brick-and-mortar hobby shops is now.
In this cutthroat industry, it’s survival of the fittest. And these days, hobby shops are opening around the country with a state-of-the-art, 21st-century look that showcases some of the latest and greatest technological advances.
Aaron Amarant and his dad, Mark, designed their AA Mint Cards shop to resemble an Apple Store, with bright lights and a modern, sleek appearance.
“I recognized that the world of cards was sort of an outdated world when it came to the retail front,” said Aaron Amarant, the AA Mint Cards owner. “It seemed like everything was moving online and that level of technology in-store just wasn’t there.”
Amarant, who is 21 years old, is a self-proclaimed “sneakerhead” who picked up some ideas for his store from the shoe company Flight Club. Its store design concept has a clean look and features an open show floor where wall space is utilized to display products.
“Most card shops, at least around us, [from] first-hand experience, you’re walking in, it’s a dustbowl, you’re stepping over autographed Dan Marino footballs that are half inflated, there’s grumpy grandpa in the back that won’t budge on his outdated comps. It’s not meant for the customer,” Amarant said. “It’s really him telling his wife, ‘Hey, I’m trying to sell this,’ when he’s not.
“That’s not what we want it to be. We wanted to make it such a unique, modern experience towards the future of what sports card collecting was turning into.”
The Amarants opened a 600-square-foot store in Cooper City, Fla. in October 2021. They had so much success, they wanted to expand on their unique ideas, so they built a 2,400-square-foot shop to replace their other location. They rang in 2024 by opening their doors to customers in January.
“It’s like being in a sportsbook, but instead of betting, it’s all cards,” said Mark Amarant, the buyer and business advisor for his son’s shop. “We’ve got a breaking bar; we’ve got a breaking studio; we’ve got rooms to help customers with their grading and with buying; we’ve got a 36-foot sports ticker; we’ve got LED TVs to watch all the games going around; and we’ve got a wax wall that was 14½ feet at the old store that’s [now] 60 feet at this store.”
Show Calendar: Find a card show near you
ENHANCED CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
The new wave of card shops is tailored to enhance the customer experience.
New hobby shop owners now dub their shops an “experience,” and every owner has a different spin on what the experience should be like.
“This is going to be the destination for card collectors,” Mark Amarant said. “We are going to be the Burbank [Sportscards] of the East Coast with all of the technology that they’ve never thought of.”
One innovative concept the Amarants designed could be the next big thing for shops. On the walls at AA Mint Cards are six grids filled with PSA slabbed cards and six grids with SGC slabs, totaling just over 1,000 cards.
Collectors can approach the grids and decide which card image they would like to take a look at. The person points their phone to the grid to scan a QR code that will then display the card on their phone. The price of the card will be visible and it will show a high-resolution scan of the front of the card; click again and it will show a high-resolution scan of the back; click it a third time and it will give the population report of that card at the time it was loaded into the grid system.
“You can be in our store, and it looks like a Taylor Swift concert because everybody’s on their phone pointing it at the grids,” Mark Amarant said. “It looks like a rock concert, but what’s happening is we’re providing a great experience to the customer because they never have to ask us, ‘How much is the card? What does it look like? What does the back look like? Is this a parallel? How many are out there?’ We’ve answered all the questions, making a fantastic experience for the customer.
“We own the IP and its patent pending with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office. That’s something that can be scaled nationwide, eventually ultimately by someone with really deep pockets that wants to open stores in every city.”
SPORTS CARD INVESTOR SHOP
The Amarants are friends with Geoff Wilson, the founder of Sports Card Investor. Wilson announced in October 2023 he was opening a massive 14,000-square-foot hobby shop called CardsHQ. The shop, which is near Truist Park, the home of the Atlanta Braves, also opened in January.
Wilson received advice from the Amarants about his plans for the state-of-the-art shop.
Wilson nabbed the best ideas from a number of card shops he visited, including the aforementioned Burbank Sportscards in California. He also picked up valuable information when he traveled to Japan and China last summer. MINT Sports Cards & Card Games Shop in Japan provided plenty of inspiration for Wilson’s cutting-edge shop design.
“One thing that I really noticed about those stores in Japan was that all of their displays of cards were upright. They were all vertical, as opposed to what you see in the U.S., which is almost entirely showcases where you have to look down,” Wilson said. “I saw this, and I said it’s such a better experience for the shopper to have cases that are upright. However, no U.S. case manufacturer had a solution for this, so we had to have cases custom manufactured to the same style as what I saw in Japan.
“But I think it’s going to create a much better experience for the in-store shopper, and when we livestream to be able to have all the cards upright and facing you and you’re not going to have to lean down and look in cases.”
Wilson said CardsHQ, which is located in a strip mall inside an old Pier I store, is going to have a Pawn Stars-type feel as customers will be able to walk into the store and sell their cards.
A new concept to the hobby that Wilson is implementing will be livestreaming, where online customers from around the world will be able to shop at the store 24 hours a day. CardsHQ will have hosts to provide a virtual tour to take collectors through the aisles of the store in real-time.
“Our entire shop is both a retail experience for people in Atlanta and it’s a livestreaming experience for people around the world,” Wilson said. “We want everybody who watches our content from around the world to be able to experience our store virtually through livestreaming and have kind of the feeling that they were there without actually being there.”
While exploring the idea of opening a hobby shop, Wilson knew he would need to be associated with the right partners who could handle the day-to-day operations as well as the buying of cards.
Two Atlanta locals, Ryan Van Oost, and Carter Musgrave, were on the verge of opening their own hobby shop. However, before closing on the deal, Van Oost and Musgrave met Wilson at a trade night. The three eventually got to talking, and they hashed out specifics and became business partners.
With the success of Sports Card Investor, Wilson—who will continue to produce all the content for his channel—had been pondering opening a hobby shop for a few years. He felt now was the right time to take the next step.
“We had obviously built a pretty big audience, and the different products and the type of thing that we market all tend to appeal to a certain segment of the audience,” Wilson said. “Market Movers is our primary product, and it’s a data product, and it has good usage, but of all the people who watch our content, there’s probably less than 5 percent that is serious enough about cards to where they would actually pay a monthly fee to subscribe to a product to chart card values and that type of thing. You’ve got a lot more casual fans in the audience who enjoy seeing cards and enjoy ripping boxes occasionally and having a small collection, but they’re not necessarily fanatical to that level.
“I’ve wanted for a while to have something that had a little bit of a wider appeal with the audience and the opportunity to connect and engage with more of our audience.”
PARADISE OF CARDS
Las Vegas resident Mark Laird started out with an online presence that ballooned into a full-time job.
“I was breaking from my house and all of a sudden there were 200 to 300 packages in my living room and I was like why not look for an office space,” Laird said. “I just started doing more research and seeing, hey, there’s not really a big card shop presence on The Strip. That’s why I kind of took a gamble and there was one spot open at our mall right by the ‘Welcome to Vegas’ sign. I just took a huge leap of faith.”
Laird opened Paradise Card Breaks in the heart of the Entertainment Capital of the World in September 2022. The shop is on prime real estate, located next to Allegiant Stadium, home of the Las Vegas Raiders, and down from the future stadium site for the MLB A’s.
When customers walk into Laird’s shop, they are greeted by a large neon sign that says, “Paradise.” That’s a hot spot for tourists to take photos in front of as well as a 10-foot tall Michael Jordan slab letting people know the shop is a PSA-authorized dealer.
“It’s more about coming in, having an experience, come relax while you’re here on a trip to Vegas and rip a box or two,” Laird said.
Laird made sure the shop gave off a modern, flashy feel to fit in with its surroundings in Sin City.
“I’ve got LED lights for all the wax on the wall,” Laird said. “Our signage in the window isn’t like the old-school posters. I’ve got these interchangeable 8-by-10 hanging signs that I can swap in about our trade nights or shows that are in town, things like that. I actually took that from the real estate world. I was in San Diego and I saw one like it outside of a little real estate office, and I thought that would be cool to highlight hits and things like that in our window.”
Paradise Card Breaks features four breaking stations along with an eBay Live studio in the 1,600-square-foot building. For Laird, he wants to make every customer feel important when they walk through the door.
“I always want people to come into the shop to feel like they’re going to learn something, they’re going to find a way to sell their cards, whether it’s us educating them or them actually being able to sell to us,” Laird said. “I want people to feel like, hey, those guys are honest guys, they’re going to help us make money. We had fun—that’s the most important thing. When they walk out, I want them to feel like, I had a lot of fun in that card shop, that was a great experience and I want to go back.”
OPENING TWO STORES
Nate Smith opened The Man Cave Card Shop in Stanton, Mich., not long after COVID hit in June 2020. He entered the market during the perfect storm when the hobby was at its peak.
“The crazy thing was I just started it, I didn’t even know if it was going to work,” Smith said. “I owned the building and I just had a little retail spot that I thought, ‘Man, if this could work, it could be fun.’ It’s just been crazy ever since.”
Business was so good at his shop that Smith decided to open a second location about 20 miles southwest in Greenville, Mich. That 1,400-square-foot shop—nearly double the size of the Stanton store—opened in November 2022. Both stores have a nice stream of regular customers, even in a pair of smaller Midwest towns.
“The nice thing about having a brick-and-mortar is the amount of people that bring in collections to sell, and that just keeps the inventory turning,” Smith said. “Then just being aggressive and going to card shows every weekend and buying stuff from people that are set up, as well as being active on eBay and Facebook and Instagram, buying stuff that we see that we can make some money on.”
There is a vast difference between the two The Man Cave Card Shops. Smith said the Stanton store is in an older building with older display cases. It has an “old-school feel” located on the small city’s Main Street. In Greenville, the store is located in a shopping center and has a bright, modern feel.
“It just has a newer, fresher feeling,” Smith said. They both are unique in their own ways. But Greenville is just updated a little bit more, and the display cases have lighting over the top of them.”
Smith teamed up with hometown basketball hero Chris Kaman, who played 14 seasons in the NBA. Kaman is a collector himself and jumped at the chance to split ownership of the two shops with Smith.
Kaman attracts customers with his presence and occasionally signs autographs at the stores.
