Sports Card Dealers
Roadshow Cards brings hobby joy to new area with first card shop in South America
Famous DJ Steve Aoki travels the globe, selling out venues on a nightly basis. Prior to a show, Aoki makes it a point to hit hobby shops in and around the countries he visits.
When his tour was on its South American leg last November, Aoki was searching for a card store. He wasn’t having much luck.
When Juan Pablo Duarte heard Aoki was looking for a shop to hit, he reached out to Aoki’s team. Duarte let Aoki know a card shop was opening in a few weeks in Bogota, Colombia, and he could gain access when he came to town.
Aoki was the first customer at Roadshow Colombia, and he loved his experience. The Bogota shop is the fifth location in the successful Roadshow franchise owned by Jimmy Mahan. Mahan, as well as South American Roadshow managers Duarte and Santi Cardona, were thrilled to welcome Aoki to the store.
“He stayed at the shop for longer than his concert was,” Mahan said. “He did four hours in the shop, a three-hour concert, and then he was off to Brazil.”
On Dec. 6, 2024, Roadshow Colombia officially opened its doors. It marked the first hobby shop in South America.
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In the short time the shop has been up and running, it’s been well-received by collectors.
“It’s been great,” Duarte said. “All the people around the area that walk by and they see the jerseys [hanging in the window], they think we sell jerseys. That’s what captivates them at first. A lot of people come in just to check out what it is, because they don’t know and it just looks cool from the outside.
“People are very excited about the shop. They are definitely feeling more part of this community, because they like to come here and hang out.”
Collectors now have a place to gather to talk cards or just talk about their favorite sport.
“It’s nice that the hobby doesn’t have borders,” Mahan said. “If you take it somewhere and treat people right and have the stuff that they want to buy and welcome them, the hobby will take care of itself.”
ENTERING SOUTH AMERICA
With shops in Lexington, Ky. (Kentucky Roadshow), Mansfield, Texas (Texas Roadshow), Bronxville, N.Y. (New York Roadshow) and Sonoma, Calif. (California Roadshow), Mahan and Roadshow Cards wanted to expand his operation to an area he loves. Prior to launching the shop, Bogota had become a second home to Mahan.
A former staff director for a YMCA camp in North Carolina, Mahan hired people from all over the world. That’s where he met Duarte and Cardona, both Bogota natives. They have become family to Mahan and his wife.
While on a trip to Bogota a couple years ago, Mahan scoped out the landscape of cards in the area. He was told by locals that it was tough to get their hands on cards. Soccer stickers were the most common items to collect.
“I always wanted to do an international shop, but let’s go somewhere and do something where nobody is. If we think it will work—it’s got to have sound business practices,” Mahan said. “But I’ve got the perfect guys and girls to run it. They’re awesome.”
Mahan set up a breaking operation—Fútbol Roadshow—in Bogota in 2023. Under the direction of Duarte and Cardona, the business thrived from a small, local office and an apartment that was rented by Mahan.
Locals wanted to get their hands on cards. The next logical step was to open a brick-and-mortar store.
“There are a lot of people down there that have collected, but they’ve never had a shop,” Mahan said. “It’s the first shop in continental South America. Now, they’re getting to do the things that we’ve always taken for granted. It’s, ‘Oh, I’m in a shop and I don’t really know all these people. I know a couple of my boys/girls are here. But we’re opening a pack and everybody crowds around and you hit a big card.’ That’s never happened there. We get to do it all the time in the U.S. They’ve never had that, and that is the joy you get to bring with the shop.”
As natives of Colombia, Cardona and Duarte know how special it is for them to be part of the inaugural shop in their continent.
“I think it’s historic,” Cardona said. “The first shop in South America, it’s like a privilege to be part of this project. I have a huge responsibility, because we have to show that this works. Thanks to God that it’s working—step by step. But it’s working.”
Added Duarte: “We dreamt about this from the very beginning when we started everything. We were like, man, imagine one day having this job and having Colombians and people from different parts of the world—because Bogota’s very international, so you can see some French people walking or Americans, from everywhere—coming here.
“It was two years of breaking and online. We did advance and did all that stuff, but we didn’t have our shop. Now that we do all this shop stuff, it’s just hard to believe sometimes. We actually have the first shop. We are actually in the shop now. People come and try to sell stuff. It’s real.”
A DESTINATION
A lot of locals are frequenting Roadshow Colombia. But there is also a great deal of interest from collectors all over Colombia and South America as well as from the United States.
“We started breaking and doing online, so, of course, we were selling and just putting content out there for everyone in the country, so not only Bogota,” Duarte said. “So, we do have a lot of people from all over these other cities. Once we opened the shop here, people drive.”
Not long after the shop opened, a teenager in Colombia convinced his dad to travel seven hours to check out the store.
“This is not straight driving. It’s mountains, so it’s a little harder,” Duarte said. “They came here, and he bought like two packs. That’s all he came for. It was interesting. Of course, we gave him more stuff. We’re like, ‘It’s awesome that you’re here, and you made that drive.’”
Cardona and Duarte like the mix of clientele coming into the shop, which is open Monday through Saturday, noon to 6 p.m.
“A little bit of everything,” Cardona said. “We are getting from all ages, from kids to adults.”
“Kids come with their parents and their families and they’re like, ‘What is this?’ Once they see the cards, they’re all just super hooked,” Duarte said. “We also have some older collectors that want to buy the good stuff. They watched some breaks or they lived in the U.S. or something like that. They’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’ve seen the baseball cards and the Goldin Auction Netflix’s show. What do you have?’”
Every time Mahan flies down from Kentucky to Colombia to visit his shop—which is quite often—he sees a wide range of nationalities.
“I have been in the shop with at least three folks that knew us from America that I had hung out with at The National—they were big collectors,” Mahan said. “Seeing also not just the new collectors, which I’m so excited about, or guys that didn’t have access to a shop, but also Americans. If they’re in Colombia and they’re collectors, they’re going to see us.”
One collector who has hit up Roadshow shops in both North America and South America is professional golfer Josh Teater. The Kentucky resident found the Bogota location when he was in town for a tournament on the Korn Ferry Tour.
Getting the first card shop in South America opens the gates for so many possibilities for the hobby for the future.
“We still think there’s a lot of room to grow it here now with the shop,” Duarte said. “It’s been doing great, thankfully. We’ve built a community and trade nights and all that. We really want to grow the shop here and get more people involved and excited and all that. But we for sure think that maybe another shop in some other part of the country would make sense at some point. But, also, just continue to grow the network in South America. We have people in Argentina that we know and Brazil and Mexico that really want a part of this. Customers from Chile that are like, ‘Can you send to Chile? Can you send to Ecuador?’ We would agree that’s the next step as well to figure out how to get them closer.”
What’s popular in Colombia? Duarte estimates roughly 85 percent of sales inside the store are soccer related. Colombians and South Americans love their fútbol, and it shows.
“But you had a lot of people watch the Super Bowl and start asking for more NFL product,” Duarte said. “Basketball, for sure, would be the second sport here. We had two cases of Topps Archives, and we sold out of those quickly. So we have people buying baseball, too.
“It mainly is soccer. But it’s cool to see like these kids were excited the other day when we told them we were going to have UFC. They were like, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to break UFC. We’re going to open so many packs.’ There are also a lot of groups that do F1 or UFC.”
The popularity of UFC and Disney cards are on the rise for Roadshow Colombia customers.
“My anticipation,” Mahan said, “is now that they know they can get it in a place and it’s not off of a marketplace and is this guy scamming or this or that, no, I can collect this now. I’ve always wanted to, I could just never find it.”
With Americans frequenting the shop, Duarte and Cardona make sure it is fully stocked with MLB cards and memorabilia.
“It’s really good to have different product, because a lot of people count on their favorite sports,” Cardona said.
The northern part of Colombia has a vast history of producing great baseball players, so that sport is becoming more popular to collectors in the country.
Mahan isn’t surprised basketball is Roadshow Colombia’s second best-selling sport.
“One thing that’s awesome for me as a guy that fell in love with Colombia a long time ago—and I go down there a lot—but basketball is huge,” Mahan said. “The NBA is on down there all the time. Regular-season NBA games are on during prime time—that wouldn’t happen unless the population didn’t really care about it.”
There was an interesting conversation that took place at the shop in early February. When news broke that NBA star Luka Dončić was traded to the Los Angeles Lakers, Duarte, Cardona and a few customers engaged in a long chat. That also sparked talk about when the NBA license will shift from Panini to Topps later this year. That was a dialog Duarte never thought he would hear in the store.
“Now you have a place where it can happen—that’s what it needed,” Mahan said.
