Dave Knox, Senior Contributor, CMO Network June 29, 2021
When Upper Deck was started in the late 1980’s, they brought first-of-its-kind innovation to the sports trading card industry. Over thirty years later, the company continues to push the envelope as the industry experiences a new surge. I sat down with Jason Masherah, President of Upper Deck, to talk about the heritage of innovation at Upper Deck, their efforts in digital, and how they are investing in the growth of the industry through local hobby shops.
Dave Knox: I want to start with the heritage of Upper Deck. How did the brand start in the early days?
Jason Masherah: The founders of Upper Deck were trying to address a couple issues in the late 1980’s. There was a lot of forgeries and fakes in trading cards as the market was starting to pick up. And then they looked at trading cards and said this can be better. The cards had basically looked the same way for the last 50 years. They felt that there had to be a better way to present this more premium feel.
The founders came up with several innovations to address this. They had the anti- counterfeit hologram that’s still on our cards today. They introduced the foil wrap, which was like a indestructible version of wrapping the cards so you could tell if somebody tampered with the packs. And then they went to a high gloss and premium stock that really showed the vibrancy of the colors of the games and just made it a more premium experience than anybody had used in the past. We maintain those same brand tenants today.
Knox: With an innovative mindset since day one, how is Upper Deck continuing to innovate in the industry?
Masherah: Well, I think the team does a great job of coming up with new and innovative concepts. We have done video embedded trading cards. We have done memorabilia pieces designed out of game used floor. There is always something new in the hopper.
The biggest thing that the team has launched over the last several years is UpperDeckEpack.com, which is an online platform that allows people to open up physical packs of cards but virtually. It gives everybody access to open a pack of cards no matter where they are 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You manage them online and we store them in a secure facility in Seattle Washington. But you can also have them shipped home. The fact that you can actually take ownership, if you want to send it home and put it in your closet or put into your safety deposit box, you can do it. If you want to bring it home and sell it on eBay or sell it to a friend, you can do that as well. If you want to take it home and set up at a card shop, you can do that. And it is that bridge between physical and digital, that is so much unlike any other thing that exists. The other big difference is it allows you to socialize and trade with other people across the globe and create a social community that really hasn’t existed since the days of when we were all on the playground trading cards. This gamification is important. You are rewarded if you collect a complete set or you do certain things. And this free stuff is tangible and are real cards.
It’s always a challenge when you do something that’s so far removed from the norm. In the case of ePack, it has been difficult because it is an online platform. It lives in the digital world, but the cards are real, they are tangible items. And getting that across to people is really tough until they get in and experience it for themselves. The card you see is the card you get and you can actually ship that card home. So if Michael Jordan signed his autograph a particular way on that card, and it’s number two of 23, that’s the exact card you get when you ship it home. Those are kind of mind blowing, technological advances that nobody else has seen or done. And it is hard to educate the market. So we’ve done it kind of in a slow methodical kind of way.
And it’s the same when you go into new markets, like e-sports, you have a traditional collector and you’re trying to bring on new collectors and then expand the horizons of the traditional collector and say, hey e-sports is a big deal. There’s millions of people that watch this on a yearly basis. And eventually we will know some of these e-sports athletes the way we know traditional sports athletes. But it is sometimes hard to comprehend because it’s a foreign knowledge base for most people. It takes time. It really takes time to just educate people on doing something completely new and off the grid.
Knox: In addition to sports, Upper Deck has a long history in entertainment. How do you approach this side of trading cards?
Masherah: I think that’s one of the interesting parts of Upper Deck. We are viewed as a sports company, but we are so much more. We have a gaming division where we make tabletop games and trading card games. We have an autograph memorabilia division. And we have done entertainment trading cards since 1991 with things like Looney Tunes and Space Jam. We regularly put out sets for Marvel, both the comic books and the movies. We do different movies from Fox with the Aliens franchise. We do James Bond. We have a partnership with Kevin Smith for his movies. Those card sets are not as visible as just traditional sports because we all grew up with doing traditional sports, but there is a great industry behind the entertainment cards and the fans of those properties are really rabid fans and collectors of those properties.
Knox: On the digital side of things, we have seen the rise of NFT’s like Top Shot in the past year. Where do you see NFTs going in the years ahead?
Masherah: NFTs are going to have to really evolve from where they are at today. The NFTs are essentially just a newer version of the trading card apps that have existed for several years now. They reside in their own ecosystem, but they have some cool functions and things that you can do in the digital world. You can do highlights, you can do fancy graphics and stuff that the digital world has been doing for several years. But there are some limitations for sure that definitely have to evolve. For us, the definition of collectible is something that will live multiple generations that you can pass on to your kids or to a family member. And we’re not there yet. There’s no ability to take those things and put them on a jump drive and put them in my safety deposit box and pass them on to somebody later. And we really need to see the technology evolve over the next several years. And I think it will.
Knox: Over the last few years, we have seen a wave of entrepreneurship around trading cards, but entrepreneurship has always been at the center of the trading card industry with hobby shops in your local community. How has Upper Deck supported the new wave of entrepreneurship that’s emerged?
Masherah: We saw this new wave coming in about 10 years ago, and we started a co-op program to support it. We’re the only card manufacturer that has a co-op program, where we actually help these young entrepreneurs improve their shop, improve their website, or even start a second store. We will match dollar for dollar up to $25,000 to help these young entrepreneurs build their business and give them that extra push. We take a lot of pride in the fact that we have helped a lot of these guys accelerate their business and take it to another level.
The one thing that’s a little bit different about how we approach the hobby is that we want to make sure that these entrepreneurs are invested in the industry long-term. We require our dealers to have a brick-and-mortar hobby store to be an authorized breaker and to get the investments that we offer to these shops. There is nothing like a brick-and-mortar hobby store for people to be able to go in and socialize and see the product. We see those shops as hubs of knowledge for new collectors, and families, and a safe space for people to go in and learn about the hobby. So it’s very important for us to have that space, but we also realize we live in a digital age and a lot of these shops also need to embrace that technology. That’s why we invest in the shops to make sure that they’re successful in both the physical and the digital space.
Knox: When trading cards saw their initial peak in the early 90’s, many brands did promotional retail partnerships. Over the last few years, Upper Deck has had a major partnership with Tim Horton’s as well for hockey. How do you think brands can get involved in this emerging world of trading cards?
Masherah: It’s one of the things that was a huge initiative for us. Over the last decade, we have focused on forming strong partnerships with key brands around the world, and getting trading cards into people’s hands and utilizing them as a tool for these brands. We have not only done it with Tim Horton’s, we’ve done it with Hanes, we’ve done it with Gatorade, we’ve done it with Kellogg’s and Nabisco. They are a great marketing tools for all these brands and they are collectible. Unlike most forms of marketing collateral for these brands, people save them till the end of time. We see this with historical things, things from the 30s, the 40s, 50s. If you go all the way back to trading cards for better or for worse, they were advertising vehicles for candy, gum, and tobacco, and people have saved those for a 100 years. And in many cases, those trading cards have outlived the brand. I think it is important that brands continue to realize that trading cards can play a key role in their initiatives to build their brands.
