I Built A $3M/Year Trading Card Business
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
My name is Brian and I own PokeNE - We are a 7-figure TCG business that provides customers Pokemon cards as well as a few other IPs (One Piece, Dragon Ball, etc). Our specialty is providing a safe and secure source of foreign-language cards. We are the largest online store to provide not only English Pokemon cards, but also Japanese, Korean, Thai, Indonesian, and Chinese Pokemon as well.
Our Japanese Pokemon cards are what put us on the map but English cards are equally popular. The main thing people buy is sealed booster boxes which contain around 20-36 booster packs. People love giving our other niche items a try too - our best seller lately has been a variety pack of various packs that gives people a little taste of everything.
Margins in the TCG sealed space are rough but we try to add a 15-18% markup on most items - we work on volume - selling between $8K and 12K per day. Most months, we reach 300K in sales with a slight dip in the Summer and a decent uptick in the Winter during the holidays. We hit just north of 3M in revenue in 2023 and after all expenses (including 130K in shipping alone) we net around $300K
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Ever since I was a small child, I always liked making money. I was the stereotypical entrepreneurial kid: running lemonade stands, slinging candy bars at school, all that. My Dad was a big influence in my love for business - pushing me in a stroller through thrift stores, looking for Husker Football collectibles to flip for profit. He was an early adopter of eBay and I loved watching his listings get bids.
Like any kid, I always wanted the latest game system, toy and phone but instead of simply buying that stuff for me, my dad let me use his eBay to raise my own money. For a while, I just sold toys and games I no longer played with but by 8th grade I started buying other kids old toys and videos on our thrifting adventures. By middle school, I was doing this weekly - amassing enough money to buy whatever my heart desired - PS3, XBOX, Nintendo DS - I felt like a millionaire
The only thing I loved as much as making money, was playing Pokemon and funnily enough, my first Pokemon-related business came long before my trading card one . My first Pokemon business was 13-year old me using a hacking device to create rare Pokemon in the Diamond and Pearl video games. I sold these digital Pokemon on my eBay account until eBay shut that hustle down. Apparently selling digital items was against Terms of Service. Easy come, easy go.
While discouraging, that little hacking-Pokemon gig made me hundreds of dollars - and as a kid who would mow an entire lawn for $15, that kind of come-up was invigorating. Even though I couldn't sell my Pokemon, I continued using eBay to flip anything and everything that I could find while thrifting. It never got boring - in fact, as I grew into highschool and college, it kept getting more exciting. Bigger flips, bigger profits, bigger risks, bigger fails - finding peoples junk and selling it for the price of treasure was the ultimate drug.
Despite the steady flow of income eBay provided, my parents still insisted I get a “real job” too. I went from retail jobs to manual labor jobs, to internships, but I was always searching for more. I dreaded the idea of a 9-5 Office job and swore to myself I wouldn’t become another cog in the machine.
Well - to absolutely nobody’s surprise- I become just that. A Bachelors in Marketing, a cubicle, and desk plate that read: “Tech Recruiter”. I was depressed from 9-5PM … the pay was good, but I was miserable. After work, I was so hungry to “do something meaningful” that I’d spend the entire evening continuing to build my eBay store… hundreds of listings, 10+ sales a day. Between my depressing tech job and my thrilling eBay career, I was bankrolling. Bankrolling so well that at age 23 I bought my first house… a 3Bd, 2Ba, 1500SqFt home for $135,000 … I rented a room out to my little brother and house hacked my way through my early 20’s
At age 24, thanks to the eBay money, my brother's rent, and some savings, I was able to quit my depressing cubicle job and begin working as a Marketing Manager for the real estate team that sold me the house. It was the first job I enjoyed. I was able to work from home and be creative. The video editing, photoshop and SEO skills I learned here all carried over to the Pokemon business.
Despite my happiness as a Real Estate Marketing Manager, I was still hungry for more. The natural progression would have been becoming a Realtor myself, but watching my boss work weekends, holidays, and nights made me realize real estate was not the future I wanted.
So, I experimented with all sorts of different potential businesses. I started a clothing company, YouTube channels in the reptile, ASMR, and gaming niches (yes, I know - random). I considered starting a drone-video business, a smart-home installation business, and about a dozen other goofy businesses - nothing worked. The only side-business thing that remained successful during this time was my eBay-flipping hustle - but that had limitations; sourcing products was time consuming and gas was expensive.
The first version of my website was rough. Just a single landing page - built on Wix - with one item available: my Japanese Promotional Charizard cards. I had a stock photo of the card, a buy button, and a short description.
That said, I was good at it. I started looking at ways to scale my eBay business where I wouldn’t need to leave the house as often. This led me down the long and winding road of drop-shipping, Amazon FBA, online arbitrage…ALL the YouTube buzzwords that work for some people but fizzle out for most.
Fast forward to the pandemic in 2020. The lockdowns killed a lot of entertainment sources. This lead many people to turn to nostalgia for their needs. Pokemon was one of the many brands that 90’s kids returned to. Celebrities were opening cards on YouTube, vintage booster boxes were selling for record high prices, and EVERYONE wanted to cash in on the excitement.
The rapid increase in demand for Pokemon Cards became a problem as stores could not keep them in stock. When there was a restock, scalpers raided the shelves and tossed everything on eBay for triple the price. The money-making opportunity got so intense that people began physically fighting over products; it was like Black Friday before the internet. After an incident with a weapon, some Walmart and Target locations stopped selling trading cards altogether; they didn’t want the liability.
Like I said, I’ve always been a huge fan of Pokemon but I wasn’t ever a hardcore collector and yet, the media frenzy still got to me. I was with all the other crazy people - fighting the crowds at Walmart for cards became a normal part of my weekend routine. The fan in me was excited with whatever I could get my hands on, but the ‘business person’* *in me was tempted to flip my Walmart hauls. Afterall, the market was crazy enough where you could charge double the price of MSRP. But this wasn’t some clearance coffee maker or refurbished piece of furniture. … These were Pokemon Cards… it just felt sacrilegious to scalp them.
That said, i KNEW there had to be a way to capitalize on the frenzy - a way to make money without scalping fans… I just had to keep my eyes and ears open. I watched all the Pokemon card YouTube content, Followed all the IG pages and joined all the Facebook pages and subreddits… I began seeing a trend: JAPANESE POKEMON CARDS.
Collectors who didn’t play the card game realized they didn't need to read the cards - they just liked the art on them - SO, they began buying cards from Japan directly. Despite Pokemon being a Japanese company, the demand in Japan wasn’t nearly as high during the pandemic so prices were dirt cheap - even cheaper than English Pokemon cards before Covid even entered the newswaves.
If there’s one thing I learned from business school, it's this: the best way to build a business is to find a gap in a market and fill that gap up. The gap was affordable pokemon cards for US residents… Japanese Pokemon cards were the filler. Now I just needed to find a way to get some.
My biggest piece of advice would be reminding yourself it's okay to start slow. Having an idea is the fun part, the part where everything seems easy and exhilarating; it’s really tempting to throw all your money at something thrilling before learning the parts that aren’t so thrilling.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
The good thing about starting an ecommerce business selling items as established as Pokemon cards, is you already know the product is a success. The bad thing is the competition; the barrier to entry is low; build a website, list cards, collect money; anyone can do it.
Since we all were competing to sell the same thing - Pokemon Cards - the only thing I had real power over was my brand. I needed to build a website that people preferred over my competition.
The first step in building the perfect online store was to investigate where people were currently getting their Japanese cards. To my pleasure, there wasn’t much competition in the US at the time. I struggled to find any quality websites in the US doing what I wanted to do. There were a few US-based websites that sold some Japanese cards but it seemed like more of an afterthought to them rather than a flagship product.
Most customers were either buying Japanese Pokemon cards from random eBay sellers. Others were importing cards straight from Japan itself using websites such as Buyee.com. Buyee and similar sites provide users with a PO-BOX in Japan. You buy directly from Japanese websites, ship the items to that PO box, and then Buyee ships them to you. It's convoluted and expensive, and oftentimes the sites people were buying from were scams. This was great news for me; all I needed to do was provide an easier shopping experience and not scam my customers.
Before taking the time to build a website, I tested the waters by selling on eBay myself. I already had a very successful eBay account so I figured it was worth a shot. Funnily enough, my inventory I started with all came from eBay too. Japanese sellers gave good discounts on a per-item basis if you bought in bulk. That's mostly because of how shipping works from Japan to the US. One Booster Box might cost $25 to get here, but 20 Booster boxes only cost $30…all I needed to do was buy in bulk and sell the individual parts.
My first item I would test this theory on were Japanese Charizard promo cards. I could buy 100 cards for $1200; just $12 a card including shipping. The US market price on these Charizard cards was $25 so the margins were huge. I sold through the 100 cards almost immediately simply by undercutting the competition by a couple bucks. I was shocked at how quickly they sold and more shocked by how quickly the 10% eBay fees added up. It was time to build my own website.
The first version of my website was rough. Just a single landing page - built on Wix - with one item available: my Japanese Promotional Charizard cards. I had a stock photo of the card, a buy button, and a short description. The site cost me just $30/month to run… the domain was $10 and the professional email was around $6/month. I designed my logo using a free tool on Canva
And that was the first version of PokeNE.com….A simple landing page with a single item available. Gotta start somewhere.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Launching the business was as simple as the press of a button on my WIX website editor page. “Publish” … just like that PokeNE.com was born but anyone can build a simple website, the real challenge of a lunch is getting people to that site. My strategy? Flooding every Pokemon collector’s feed with my content.
I made a TON of content 8-10 videos per day on TikTok, IG and Facebook. At first I was surprised that no one complained about me spamming the feed but then I realized, the Pokemon-side of the internet is SO VAST that even if each video I made got 10,000 views, the chance of people seeing more than 2 videos per day was miniscule.
The Pokemon Card market is the biggest pond on the internet. And that’s a good thing because I wasn’t trying to show the same person my Charizard cards 8 times a day; I was trying to go viral. I figured if I posted 50-100 videos per week, virality was a sure-fire thing. And while that theory is probably flawed, it turned out to be true.
I had 10+ videos go semi-viral on TikTok. They were simple, crude, and ironically, the videos I put the least effort into. Basically I would throw the Charizard cards out on a table like a Poker dealer - rhythmically with the beat of the trendiest songs. Just picture someone tossing 100 Charizard cards to the beat of a Sabrina Carpenter song; that's all I did.
Those viral videos shot my TikTok up to 25,000 followers within a couple weeks. While followers are great, I knew it was important to show the viewers who I AM as a person. They’re not buying cards from Sabrina Carpenter, afterall. So, to build trust with my new following, I started making face-to-camera videos explaining who I was and what I did. They were extremely crude - blunt - “real” … Instead of pretending to be some big company I basically said “yo I got all these Charizard cards from Japan, they're like $25 on eBay but I'm selling them for $22 - go get one”. I think the straight-forward delivery resonated with a lot of people.
At the time, there wasn’t a ton of Pokemon content where people were so brash…the Pokemon content space was more theatrical … think of the average influencer screaming “WE JUST PULLED CHARIZARD!!! FIRE IN THE CHAT!!!” That was the vibe at the time and that was entertaining for children but there were a ton of adults online that just wanted to buy cards and packs without all the fanfare; I was their source for that.
While my content was blowing up on TikTok, I was on Instagram sending a DM to anyone from Japan that looked like they might sell cards. I would look at their posts for stacks of booster boxes and cases - the larger the stacks, the better. I intended on finding an actual business-person, rather than some kid selling 2-3 booster packs a week.
I DM’s hundreds of people - to the point IG would stop me so I used my Wife’s phone and account and then ended up making us both 2 more accounts each. It was madness but I knew I needed to get this right. My entire business model hinged on me selling Japanese Pokemon cards that people could trust; if I came across a supplier with fake cards, that would end me.
I eventually found a guy, and he provided me with my first few booster boxes - they were the same sets as the ones that were being scalped in the US - just with Japanese text instead of English. They were a MASSIVE hit with my new found audience. We did over 20K in sales in one month, and grew every month after that for a year.
By Summer we were doing 100K a month and a few months later we hit the 1M mark. In 2022, we got the attention of a major US distributor - AKA ENGLISH CARDS BABY… Distributors in the US typically work with brick and mortar stores exclusively but the sales manager watched my content and made an exception. Since then we added Thai, Indo, Korean, and Chinese Pokemon cards to our inventory sheet. Our business model never changed; make tons of content, provide foreign (and now domestic) cards for a fair price from a safe site. We just kept doing it.
We regularly hit 250K/month in sales and during the holidays it's up to $350K/month … our best month was $360K and I can’t even believe how much we’ve grown.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
The key to attracting new customers in the Pokemon Card market is trust. There is and always will be a ton of fraud involved in trading cards, so anything you can do to maintain trust is essential. For me, I relied heavily on content. There weren’t very many online trading card stores that regularly showed their face. I thought that was odd because when you go to a brick and mortar TCG shop, the owner is kinda the life of the party. It’s a community and that's what keeps people coming back.
SO, my goal was to build a community online. Daily uploads, vlogs about the behind-the-scenes aspects of the business, ultra-transparent talks about profits, marketing, even how I found my suppliers! I started a playlist called “How to Build a Pokemon Card Business” and it’s been a huge hit. People eat transparency up and having a face to a name goes a long way.
Another way to get my name out there is in person events; now that we have 25K subscribers, we get a lot of requests for meet and greets in the TCG world. Traveling to conventions is one of the best parts of the job.
Meeting subscribers, fellow YouTubers, and mentors of mine is both fun and great for building my brand. For times when I can't travel, I go Live on YouTube answering business questions, playing Pokemon video games, or just chilling with my audience… it all goes back to building a personal connection with the people buying from me.
Content aside, I do a lot of standard marketing efforts too. 1 Email Blast per week about current sales, 2 phone notification blasts per month with coupon codes, Instagram carousels with new products, IG story posts linked to hot products on the site.
On a deeper level, we have automations like “you left this in your cart” that goes out 24 hours after an abandoned cart and then again a week later. We spend $3000-$5000/month on Meta ads depending on the season and the ROAS on our best ads are north of 1300 - yes, it’s a crazy number; but that's what happens when you’re selling something as well-recognized as Pokemon Cards.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
2024 is a very different market than 2021 was when we started. For example, English Pokemon cards are available in stores, Japanese Pokemon isn’t as hot and the economy is always in a state of chaos - at least from what the news keeps telling me. That all said, we are doing great. We regularly hit 250K/month in sales and during the holidays it's up to $350K/month … our best month was $360K and I can’t even believe how much we’ve grown.
Most items we tack on 15-18% … after processing fees, shipping, profits remain slim with a 10-11% Net | all of our sales take place on our Website through Wix.
We sell Pokemon cards in every language a collector could ever want and we’ve expanded to some other brands like One Piece and Weiss Schwarz too. There is a lot of crossover between Pokemon and Anime as a whole so the new products have been a hit.
The volume of sales forced us to move to a larger space but instead of leasing a commercial building and making a landlord richer, we decided to build a new home and lease the basement to my LLC. The basement is 1500 sq ft and we have a 400 sq ft space in the garage for imports too. That's much larger than the small 450 sq ft basement we started in 3 years ago.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes running this business and I think 2 of my biggest mistakes will help whoever is reading this tremendously.
Mistake 1 - Not being ready for credit card chargebacks. If you’re running a site through Wix or Shopify, there are “levels” of how strict your credit card processor is. By default, most processors just let any transaction through. This cost me thousands of dollars when my website began accepting payments made by stolen credit cards…We shipped about 10K of inventory over the course of a Summer when the chargebacks started coming in.
10 victims of CC theft were charging back the purchases they never made. We lost all the money and never got the inventory back. I learned I need to request 3DS credit card authentication. 3D stands for “three domains.” The first is the card issuer; second, the retailer receiving the payment; and third is the 3DS infrastructure platform that acts as a secure go-between for the consumer and the retailer. Since activating this, some honest customers do get transactions declined but on the bright side, we’ve never had a chargeback run again.
Mistake 2 - Not being aware of Tax Nexus Thresholds and when to charge customers sales tax. Starting a few years ago, thresholds were established on a state by state basis. Once you sell enough goods to said state, you need to register there and collect sales tax from its customers.
For example, CA has a threshold of $500K … that means that once you hit 500K in sales, you need to call CA, register as a business there, and collect + remit sales tax to the CA government. I was never made aware of this until I was too late. We hit the threshold in a handful of states and never collected sales tax… since we never collected the sales tax, I was forced to pay each state what should have been collected. This cost me $20,000 with interest and penalties.
My solution was to hire a tax company called Avalara to track my sales in all 50 states. When I get close to hitting a threshold, they notify me, get me registered, and manage the tax-collection process and filing process. They have been a lifesaver.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
My site is built on WIX which has always been great to me. Once I hit a sales milestone, they hooked me up with a personal manager who calls me once a month and gives really good suggestions on how to improve. Shout out to Katherine.
Shippo is our shipping platform that syncs directly to Wix. When we get new orders, shippo allows us to print the labels seamlessly with USPS, FedEx or UPS
Canva is the ultimate photo-editing tool I use for YouTube thumbnails, product images, marketing pieces, business cards, stickers and pretty much everything else related to media.
Capcut is a free app that I made most of my YouTube videos with until switching over to Adobe Premiere Pro. I still use Capcut for shorts and IG reels because of the speediness and ease.
ChatGPT helps me with some titles and YouTube outlines
Avalara - the tax company that manages by Sales Tax Nexus requirements
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
I spend 2-3 hours per day listening to YouTube - it’s the only content I consume and I package my orders while it runs in the background. I listen to 2 different “sides” of YouTube - the business side and the Pokemon side. On the business side are Gary Vee, Alex Hormozi, Think Media, and Pat Flynn and on the Pokemon side, some go-to channels include Danny Phantump, Alpha Investments, Nostalgia Comics, and Brandon Martyn.
Gary Vee, Alex Hormozi, and Pat Flynn have always been helpful with the mindset stuff. They upload multiple times per week - which, that right there, is a great thing to observe and emulate - but they also provide tremendous value every time. Gary Vee taught me time and time again to be patient, keep perspective, and appreciate what I have.
Alex Hormozi teaches harder skills; how to sell, how to analyze numbers and make decisions, and how to think logically in tough times. The thinkmedia channel has been great for learning the ropes on YouTube - lighting, audio, video, building a community, all the behind-the-scenes knowledge big creators have to build their subscriber base.
Pat Flynn has always been a great source for online tools, podcasting tips, how to monetize a personal brand, and funnily enough Pokemon content too. He started a separate Pokemon channel called Deep Pocket Monster right around the time i started PokeNE… watching his content on both channels always gives me great ideas
On the Pokemon side of things, Danny Phantump has always been one of the most positive people in the hobby; he makes extremely valuable content on the singles-cards market and occasionally peels back the curtain on his online card business - which I’ve always strived to compete with.
Rudy from Alpha Investments always provides business advice from a card-store owner's perspective and has the largest collection of Pokemon and Magic cards on the internet. Seeing him continue to grow pallet-by-pallet has been inspirational. Nostalgia Comics is run by Alex and he provides Pokemon card investing advice. His attention to detail on the market has always been a great perspective guiding me on sets to stock up on.
Lastly, Brandon Martyn aka mystic7 was a professional pokemon-go player I've watched for years. Recently, he shifted focus to entrepreneurship and started his own card business. His skill for making viral content, posting business vlogs, and insane work ethic keep me coming back.
There are several other Pokemon content creators I watch on a regular basis but I wanted to point out these guys because I think they would provide the most value overall to someone new to the industry, They all bring something great to the table
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
My biggest piece of advice would be reminding yourself it's okay to start slow. Having an idea is the fun part, the part where everything seems easy and exhilarating; it’s really tempting to throw all your money at something thrilling before learning the parts that aren’t so thrilling.
I started a LOT of businesses like this and realized that sometimes it's better to start a business with nothing than to start a business with a ton of resources. When you have nothing, you’re forced to be creative, motivated to grind… if you have a ton of resources, but lack the self control to deploy them responsibility, that's when things go wrong.
To go along with that, I’d try my best to encourage people to enjoy the journey - which is cliche and very hard to do - especially when its your first business and all you want to do is grow. I try to compare business to real life. When you’re a kid, all you want to do is be a “grown-up” then you get to adulthood and long for being 9 years old again.
Business can be the same way. The biggest tip I have that helps folks enjoy the moments would be to document everything. Day by day it feels like there isn't much happening, but if you vlog or journal every few days, you can look back at everything that's happened and it allows you to enjoy the wins you’ve had so far.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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