Small business takeaway:
- The trading card boom shows how niche consumer passions can become powerful engines for growth when businesses pair product demand with experience, community, and expertise. Giant Sports Cards, a fast-growing trading card retailer, built momentum by spotting rising demand among adult collectors, making stores experiential, and serving casual collectors and serious buyers without choosing between accessibility and premium appeal. For businesses, the lesson is to turn a category people care about into a brand they want to spend time with.
The Founder of Giant Sports Cards appears to have hit a home run with his experiential retail stores that leverage growing consumer interest in trading cards of all kinds.
“There’s definitely been a big paradigm shift,” said Jon Butts, Founder and CEO, in an interview with CO—. “Back in the day, collecting wasn’t as mainstream, or it was considered something for kids, or kind of nerdy, but now there are a tremendous number of athletes getting into it — movie stars, rappers — all these big names in pop culture.”
For example, celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary of “Shark Tank” fame, where he is known as Mr. Wonderful, last year paid $12.9 million for a rare sports card featuring basketball legends Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. The value of that card was recently reported to have risen significantly to between $17.2 million and $20 million, less than a year after he purchased it.
News like that has only helped drive interest in trading cards, especially among investors, said Butts.
The U.S. trading card market will total about $15 billion in 2026, according to an Econ Market Research report. Econ predicted that the market would grow at a compound annual rate of 9.5% through 2035, to nearly $34 billion.
The report hints at one of the key appeals of trading cards among both casual collectors and investors, which is that their value can be very dynamic, meaning card values can move in either direction.
The price people are willing to pay can swing up or down based on variables such as player or team performance, the scarcity of specific cards, and the attributes and condition of each specific card.
“The market depends on a precarious equilibrium between supply, demand and cultural significance, and it is always changing in reaction to many factors,” the report concludes.
Revisiting childhood memories launches a business
After a previous career as the founder of a direct marketing company, which he sold in 2018, Butts said he began revisiting a childhood hobby he had as a collector of sports trading cards. He came across some of his old card collections while his parents were cleaning out their house, and it rekindled his passion, he said.
It helped that his own son was about 5 at the time and just about the right age to begin following sports, Butts said.
The stores seek to appeal to the full spectrum of card enthusiasts, Butts said, from children collecting and trading for fun to serious investors who treat their card holdings like high-end art collections.
“My favorite childhood memories are going to different baseball trading card shows with my dad, meeting heroes bigger than life, standing in line for autographs for hours,” he said. “It was just this perfect storm, thinking about the memories made with my own dad and looking through the collection, and wondering what some of the cards were worth.”
He soon discovered an emerging phenomenon called “live breaks” in which collectors live stream the “unboxing” of their newly purchased trading cards. Other collectors pay to watch these sessions and can secure the rights to buy certain cards that might emerge from the boxes, such as players from a specific team, for example.
After testing the sports card unboxing waters for a while as a consumer, and then as a wholesaler supplying boxes of cards to the breakers themselves, Butts launched a successful e-commerce business selling trading cards that eventually evolved into his current brick-and-mortar retail business.
“If you asked me a decade ago if I’d ever be in retail, I would have said, ‘You’re out of your mind,’ and laughed at you,” he said.
Butts decided that collecting trading cards was a hobby — and for many collectors, an investment strategy — that had legs, and he saw an opportunity to open a store of his own where these individuals shop, trade, and socialize with other collectors.
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Creating a one-of-a-kind retail experience
He opened the first Giant Sports Cards store in 2023 and invested in creating an experiential environment. The store, which the company has trademarked as the Ultimate Collector’s Cave, has a tiled floor designed to look like a baseball field and a 100-inch TV for watching games and sports movies, among other flourishes that evoke sports nostalgia, such as a wall of old trading cards sealed in plastic.
“Did I know anything about retail? No, but if I was going to do it, I was going to do it right and make it a truly one-of-a kind-shop where literally everything was custom done for that store,” said Butts.
Another card store in the area became available last year, and Butts bought it and converted it to his own Giant Sports Cards banner with a makeover that was completed earlier this year.
The success shows in the numbers: Giant Sports Cards ranked No. 1,889 on the Inc. 5000 annual list of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States in 2025, posting 231% three-year growth and placing among the top 50 fastest-growing retail companies nationally.
The company also still has a thriving e-commerce business, but Butts said he’s been scaling back the wholesaling side of his operations because of the lower margins.
He buys and sells cards from multiple sports — football cards have surpassed baseball cards as the top sellers at Giant, according to Butts — as well as other collectible trading cards, such as Pokémon character cards.
Reaching out to a broad audience of consumers — from kid card collectors to serious investors
The stores seek to appeal to the full spectrum of card enthusiasts, Butts said, from children collecting and trading for fun to serious investors who treat their card holdings like high-end art collections.
“I wanted to create meaningful memories regardless of your budget or age,” said Butts, noting that some trading card retailers focus strictly on high-end collectibles. “To me, that just didn't feel right.”
Giant seeks to provide an environment where everyone feels welcome, he said, by hosting trade nights for kids every month, where young collectors can set up tables in the stores to trade and learn about collecting.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a $1 card or a $5 card or whatever,” said Butts. “It is pretty cool to get them to come out, get off their iPad, and learn some face-to-face negotiation skills.”
Giant Sports Cards also serves the community of serious adult collectors who pay $20,000 or more for a box of cards, he said. These collectors reflect the segment of the investment world where some buyers view trading cards as an asset class, much like a share of stock or a piece of real estate.
“I think a lot of people just find it more entertaining and more fun and more exciting to create their own basket of cards of players that they believe in and then follow them versus listening to boring quarterly earnings calls,” said Butts.
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