I bought my first pack of baseball cards in 1981 at Buckworths, a small corner store around the block from my childhood house in Elkton, Maryland. For some reason, I decided I liked the Phillies. I honestly didn’t even know Philadelphia was only an hour away from me, but it may as well have been 3000 miles.
I spent every penny I had (and many I didn’t) on baseball cards pretty much all the way up until I started dating. I then took several very long breaks until rediscovering them again during the pandemic in 2020.
I started doing rip & ships as a way to get the thrill of opening packs of cards. I found I couldn’t afford to buy as many unopened boxes as I wanted to rip! Shortly thereafter, due to the demand, I started doing breaks.
All of this was done in a sports card group on Facebook. It allowed me to quickly assemble an audience of interested folks who quickly turned into a large group of friends. However, as time went on and I started to sell more and more, I found that it became difficult to run my events. For tracking my line of buyers each night I resorted to using sticky notes. I had to manually track who had paid and who hadn’t and then spend my free time tracking down those who hadn’t. I spent my free time sending buyers reminders and continuously updating my inventory list so people knew what products I had available.
Let’s face it…Facebook and Youtube are great at what they do, but they’re not great for handling sports card breaks and rips. You can watch the break itself on the platform, but you need to sign up and/or pay some other way. You can chat with your breaker/ripper while you watch your cards get ripped, but the video delay makes communicating very awkward.
The inability to collect payments automatically meant I spent every Sunday sending payment reminders and balancing my account.
The video delay meant I spent about 25% of my live event time waiting on collectors to respond to my questions such as “What would you like to buy?” or “What box number would you like?”.
I started dreaming of how to make the entire process easier and the seeds for DJAWN were planted!
Great read…youth and future, all memories 👍