CEO of ONIT Athlete on the Future of College Sports Cards | Live at The National

Fandom doesn't start and when someone's right on an NFL team that fandom starts in college. I think there's a lot of prospecting going on if you think about college sports, especially football, it's massive, the collectability plus the investment side is there and it's a delicate balance. And if you're somebody who wants to collect the best players, you want them for their entirety of their career. And that's only possible because what we're able to do now in the NIL space. Welcome to the collector nation podcast here on the collector nation network. Whether you're chasing grails or calling bluffs, we take you inside the hobby. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. On today's episode of Collector Nation, we have Evan Parker. He's the new CEO of Onnit. He's got big plans, big things in mind. We've got new football coming out, new chromium coming out, all things Onnit today on Collector Nation. What's up, guys? I'm Ryan Alford. I'm the host of Collector Nation. My co-host, Brian Ludden, he wears a lot of hats. CEO of Luddex. And we're honored. One of my favorite new products. I call it new because I've been preaching about it for a couple of years now. But he is the new CEO of Onnit. Evan Parker. What's up, Evan? Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Hey, we're at the National, baby. We're at the National. What's going on? I mean, this is pretty amazing. Like this is, I mean, this crowd is insane now, but think about the trade nights. I mean, I don't know. This is like unackable stuff. This is just the VIPs now. It's like the biggest trade night. I don't even know where they're going to go. I'd love to just have like a camera on every table just to see the deals going down because you just know interesting things are popping up that you'll never see trade there. They're not going to hit the comp suit. Just little things happen on every one of these tables. I think if you need like if someone was like, tell me about the hobby, just come to one of these trade nights for like 30 minutes. Yeah. And you'd understand what the buzz is about and why it's on the news. I'm telling you, I want like next year, David Marino is listening. I want like the, uh, the, the world poker, you know, sort of like the, the, the, the cameras under the table. So you can just see what's going on, what people have in their pockets. Yes. That's awesome. Evan, I know you want to touch briefly your expected mantle. We're going to get to on it. Yeah. But maybe what you've been building with, with mantle. Yeah. And then we'll talk all about on it. Yeah. So, you know, mantle is a social network for collectors. We've been around since 2023 built it with Alexis Ohanian, who built Reddit and Brent Montgomery, who is the creator of Pawn Stars and also the King of Collectible show on Netflix with, with Ken Golden. And the goal was to try to bring the community together because there aren't card shows like the National every single day. And so how do you find other people who like the same things that you like? Find trade partners, find the best cards and the best collectibles out there. And so we've been doing that for about three years now. Platform continues to grow. The space continues to change. So we're always trying to figure out what collectors are looking for and how we give them the best experience when they're not able to be at a card shop or a card show. When building, you know, watching Mantle come to life, Is there something that surprised you about the community or anything that like, cause for coming in when you're building a community, oh, there's a lot of like-minded people doing things. What's maybe like biggest one or two takeaways having built it that maybe you didn't expect? Well, I think that the community is so vast and everybody collects in their own way. So, you know, the things that you'd be connected to with other people, like you might like one thing somebody likes, but then you don't like the rest of their PC and you like something somebody else likes. And so there's always ways to connect with each other, but there's not a great way to show that now, at least, you know, publicly in the same way that I think will be as Mantle and other platforms grow. LetEx does a good job of connecting, you know, from the data standpoint. And I just think that the hobby is still a little bit behind. It's so much in person, but you're not in person all the time. So I think that that was a little bit surprising to me. And then, you know, it's global. It's amazing how big this is getting. If you go to shows in Asia, if you go even Latin America, card shops are popping up. It's just such a global thing. And as sports become more global, I think we're going to start seeing... The National will have things like this in other countries in ways that we haven't seen in the border. And you guys are you guys are here with the president. Presidents who was on it. And it's what it was like a fire, a fire drill. You probably had like a month to prepare for it. Yeah, not much time. I saw the booth in the other room. Yeah, it's great. You know, so on it is all officially licensed cards for the college space. So we work with Texas and Alabama and Georgia and UCLA, USC, Michigan, Ohio State, like all the big schools, Illinois. You know, we've got deals with, we create cards for as many of their sports as we can, football, basketball, baseball, softball, women's basketball, gymnastics, volleyball, hockey, wrestling. So we're doing as many of these sports as we can. And our goal is not just to go out and find the one best player and do a card with him. So Fernando Mendoza, first pick in the draft, Heisman winner, was in our product last year, but so was the entire Indiana football team. So you get the quarterback, you get his autograph. It's all officially licensed. It's all on card auto. But you're also able to get the receivers he threw to the offensive line that blocked for him. And so for us, it's a way that we can create cards for for true fans of universities. The money goes back to the university, the money goes back to the athletes. So it helps from an NIL standpoint. The schools that are doing this are able to recruit because they've got assets that they're able to offer to these players and get them to be on the teams. And then, you know, for some of these athletes, it's the only card they're ever going to get. Right. Because, you know, you walk around here, you meet a lot of people who played sports in high school and college. You don't meet many who made it to the pros. You meet even fewer who ever had a Topps or Bowman card. But if you're somebody who has an honor card, that might be the only card you'll ever get. And I know I wish I had cards from when I was growing up. And how cool would it be to have something like that to hold on to? So I feel like it's a responsibility for us to create the highest quality cards we can, knowing that it might be the only one somebody ever has. And I think that's interesting because the fringe players, non-NFL players, these guys are still unbelievable athletes at that level. And I would think they're excited. The excitement of, like, coming in and saying, you're going to get a card. Yeah. And it also builds a brand, you know. Totally. They get a card, they get paid for the card, they get paid if they sign autographs. And so, you know, in this world, now college athletes are able to monetize their name, their image, their likeness. This is another way of, you know, they'll go get the deal with the local sandwich shop or the, you know, Toyota dealership, but this is another way that they can kind of be involved in a way that their friends and their family, people from their hometowns can support them and can collect them. It just didn't exist in 2021. It was impossible. You know, so this business could not have existed even five, six years ago. And now we've got a thriving, a thriving business that's only going to grow. It's been interesting watching Onnit's growth. We carried it. I have a store in South Carolina. It's called Collector Station. We carry Onnit product. I've talked about it a lot on the podcast. I love the fact that you guys take care of the athletes. It was long overdue that they get revenue, I believe. It still needs to be cleaned up a little bit. It does. But you guys are finding this balance between collecting And investing a little because the cards look, I think, biggest thing that happens in our store, someone opens it. There's the quality that you guys have leaned into some of the best attributes of some of the best cards while also having all the players on the team. So the collectability plus the investment side is, I think, there. And it's a delicate balance, right? Doing both of those things. Yeah, so we've got two basic SKUs types of products and types of collectors. We create a team set that's more base cards. It's got parallels. It's got autos, but it's more base heavy. And that's where if you're a fan of the school, you went there, you're like, all right, you know, whatever. I went to Illinois. I want the Illinois basketball team. And that's what you would end up focusing on. But if you're looking for prospects, you want something that looks and feels, has the quality of anything you'd get out of Topps, Panini, Bowman. So those cards, we have these mixed sets that have players from multiple schools, and then you're able to go out and get for our baseball set, we had 13 guys who were drafted in the first round for the MLB draft, including Rock Choloski from UCLA, who was the first pick in the draft. And you're able to get his autograph on an officially licensed card, on-card autographed. with parallels and inserts that look as good as anything else that any of these card guys, you know, the collectors here have experienced. And that's important for us. We don't want to create anything that feels like a souvenir or like a giveaway that you get. We want this to be something that's going to be part of people's PCs. And I believe, I know I'm biased here, but I believe that if you're thinking about down the line, Roksholoski, let's just assume he goes off and has an incredible career and he makes it to the Hall of Fame. He's in Cooperstown. He's going to have his rookie year card. He'll have his first Bowman. He'll have plenty of cards in his top set. But he's also going to have... his on it card that is going to look as good as any of those other ones. And if you're somebody who wants to collect the best players, you want them for their entirety of their career. You want them when they did the big things, when they, when they won big awards, when they did had, you know, amazing plays. And so that that's only possible because what we're able to do now in the NIL space. Yeah. And I love you guys just launched your first Chrome product, right? Chrome product. Beautiful. Ion technology, holograms, like all the bells and whistles, everything everybody expects and experiences from the biggest and the best in the space. Like, you know, we never want anybody to walk into a card shop. Somebody comes to your shop and then they see, you know, Topps Chrome and they see whatever Bowman's got out there. Sorry, whatever, Panini or whomever. I don't want them looking at the honest stuff and saying, okay, well, this is less than. Like, it's got to be in the same category. What are we doing? What's the biggest challenge that you're either experiencing now or the headwinds? What do you think? Yeah. The college space is complicated. We work with 80 schools. That means we've got 80 different relationships. Every school handles things differently. Some schools you're going through this department, some schools that. Some schools have these rights. Some schools have those rights. Some schools want to work with you, create content, do all this crazy stuff. Some others are just like, give us the check, get out of here. We're not interested in anything more. So that's always a complicating factor. And the collegiate space is changing so much. You never know when the government's going to get involved and change things. Just in the last five years, there have been... 400 different ways that this industry has gone. And so we're always trying to keep up. So I think it's that. And then we have to introduce ourselves to collectives. You know, I think everybody knows that, you know, the top's name has been around forever. Leaf has been around, you know, you see on the boards here, the 1948 Leaf cards and stuff like that. Panini's been around for a long time, Upper Deck around for a long time. We launched in 2022. And I think for people to be willing to put their money down and buy one of our cards or come to trade night and trade a card that they know what it is because it's something that they've been collecting that their dad may have collected versus ours that we're sort of introducing ourselves to them. There's a lot of work that we have to do to make sure that people understand who we are, understand what our brand is about and know our names. And when I read the news about that, I just thought it was just such a smart move. I mean, fandom doesn't start when someone's on an NFL team. Like, that fandom starts in college. I mean, you go to college football games now, it's insane. Absolutely. Yeah. And if you pull all the colleges together, it's like the second biggest sport for college football, you know, in the country. So we're not talking about something small. It looks a lot smaller because everything is disparate, right? All the different conferences, different TV channels. But if you think about college sports, especially football, it's massive. The other thing that we're doing, it's not just football. So like, you know, I have a daughter. She's probably not going to end up making it to the NFL, which I'm hoping she ends up playing sports. And if, if she plays volleyball, if she's a gymnast, if she plays, yeah, I was talking to, you know, Bella on your team, Ryan forces a gymnast and she likes her, our gymnastics cards. And so to make sure that, that there's representation that, you know, the sports world, uh, The fandom of the sports world is massive and it's not just men, but the cards are pretty much other than WNBA. You're not really finding many things that are not men. And I think that for this to continue to grow, for the hobby to be 10x, which I know is the talking point that everybody likes to say, it's not going to happen just because of a bunch of dudes that played football and baseball. It's going to be a lot of women getting into the hobby and they need to find things that they want to collect that they relate to. And if we're able to do that through softball cards or through soccer or whatever it is, I think that that can do a lot to help this industry continue to grow. Yeah. The representation is interesting because we, you know, you went there like women's sports are becoming like, oh, you want to do that softball? Like the fans, the ratings were supposedly surprisingly good. We're not talking about football good, but like pretty damn high. And so it's there is money and revenue being generated. And there's a lot of, you know, female athletes out there. So, I mean, it's a segment that's underserved. And, you know, part of the gymnastics. I do like a lot of one on ones that are sitting. They're not for sale, by the way, but Bella gets to keep those. She's in charge. But it is, you know, like finding that balance of serving those audiences that, you know, a product that's premium that there's demand for. Totally. There's as many women around as there are men, right? Yeah. So why are we just focusing on half the population? It doesn't make sense to me. And at the college space, there's there's a lot of women who are playing these sports and they're doing really big things. And you think about the Olympics coming out to L.A. in 2028, gymnastics, an Olympic sport, right? So all these these women who are in college now are the next Olympians like Jordan Childs won a gold with the U.S. women's gymnastics team and she's in our UCLA product. And so, you know, you're able to get her autographed. You don't get her in her in her UCLA outfit where she's won a national championship for like that's the kind of thing that that I think as more people start realizing it's not just baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer that people play that people love. I think it'll it'll only lead to this industry continuing to grow. But you think about it like we all want to grow the hobby, right? Yeah, we have to. It's good for business. You want the big brands to come here? You need to be open. And we can double this room if that happens. Yeah. I mean, we're sitting right in front of the Walmart booth. I don't know the data. Brian, you might. But my guess is that the vast majority of people who are shopping at Walmart are women. Right. And Walmart's getting into the hobby. It means that they're their number one customer, probably a mom. Sixty seven percent female. Yeah. So is that what it is? So right. So 67 percent. Yeah, that's it. It's a great. I mean, I guess the business podcaster would know that. Yeah. Right. Like, so 67% is a lot of people that we're talking about here. Let's create products that they're going to relate to, that they're going to be excited about, that they're going to want their kids to collect. Exactly. So, I mean, a bigger hobby is better for everyone in it. Including the collectors. Yeah. Uh, Hey, but even bigger activation. So, you know, you get, you know, the Walmart slide in the middle of the, the math. So let's talk about the national and like, what do you, what do you collect? Uh, how many nationals have been to and the migration from what was until what is? So this is my fourth, I think fourth or fifth. Um, Every year, I mean, this yesterday, Wednesday, biggest Wednesday I've experienced in my time doing it. I've been in this room a lot. Brian, you and I sat here last year. I think this is the busiest I've ever seen it during the day. So, you know, it's pretty impressive. I know there's a lot of talk about Fanatics Fest versus the National. Like, I don't see these things in competition. There's more than enough collectors to go around and make many, many shows vibrant. not just this weekend, but every weekend across the country, across the year. So I love seeing the growth. I love seeing a lot of new brands down there. My favorite thing to do, though, is to walk along and look at some of these guys who are selling things that you just don't find. You know, like I would love to be able to get a 55 Sandy Koufax. Yeah. I don't know that this is the weekend that I'm gonna do it, but I know it's down there. But I'm not stopping to look at many of them because it's a card that you can find. But I see things, autographs and documents and photos and things like that, that you just never see anywhere else. And so for me, this weekend is usually about just trying to find as many things as I've never seen in my life. And then usually I get a little weak by the time that I'm getting ready to head out of here and I end up buying one or two things that have nothing to do with my PC. I've never thought about it before. I know nothing about comps and I'm not, and I'm just saying I've never seen that before. It's in my price range. I have to have it. Yeah. Talk to me about, it seems as listening to you talk, Evan and connecting the community and the audience, you sit in two interesting seats and, How can you leverage what you're learning on Mantle to enable maybe what's happening with Onnit? You know, it seems like you've got a pulse there maybe that you can tap into. Yeah. I mean, look, three years of living and breathing a social network that everybody, every single post is about farts. And especially in the early days, I read 100 percent of our posts. You know, I was the guy who was, you know, QC, making sure nobody said anything that they weren't supposed to before we had moderation built in. So I have a pretty good sense of what people are looking for, what people like, what they don't like, what they're going to complain about. you know, and the types of themes that come across through that, that people are interested in. But I also know that collectors are looking for community, right? Everybody here is trading, but, you know, like the transaction is part of it, but they're also talking to each other. I see that people are like, hey, here's my Instagram, find me later, we'll do other things. So that I find is important. And the collegiate space is community by itself, right? You're connected to You go to a college football game in the South, you know, you go see South Carolina or Clemson, you walk, that is community. And I think what we're building with Onnit's Birds are our true community because players, you know, they move around or they'll go pro, but it's not like the pros where you kind of feel like you're renting them. If they go to your college, there's somebody that you're going to be connected to potentially and follow their pro career, follow them forever. And I think that that community stuff I've gotten a chance to really understand in my time on the mantle side of the business. Can you and I personally drive to Clemson and talk to Dabo Sweeney to get Clemson back under their umbrella? I don't, from what I can tell, nobody can talk to Dabo Sweeney about a damn thing. He doesn't seem to be listening to anybody these days. So I'm just waiting. I think he does. I don't know. Maybe his wife. Yeah. All right. I feel like Dabo's got another year or two with some bad performance, and then we'll deal with the next football coach. Yeah. I think something that I would, I love the day. I love data and, you know, Ludox at the end is a data company. Training the honor cards. We're going to want those on our, on our, our site. And then watching the prices of those cards, you know, as a team like Illinois now is ranked, you know, in basketball and football, they're ranked pretty high and see how the prices, the index, right. Create an Illinois index. Yeah. Yeah, and even like an alumni index would be really interesting because I think about all these guys that go pro and knowing how, how does their performance in the pro game relate to their college cards? Who are the people who are buying on its cards, fans of these guys because of where they went, they hold on to it stays in their PC or are they prospecting? And it's no different than buying a Bowman first and you're seeing that fluctuation based on how people are doing. I think there's a lot of prospecting going on and it'd be really cool to be able to see. If I'm Dabo, I want to be able to go and look at, you know, go to the Lodex platform and say to a recruit, like, look, like our cards are moving, but people, you go to Clemson and like that actually is another way to recruit is another thing to say you're going to make money from these cards, but also people want them. Like we have a fan base. This is going to only carry you into your career. Are you going to sell them in the stadiums? Do you guys have a license to do that? We work with some companies that sell in stadiums. Every one of these stadiums has a merchandise partner that controls that space. But we've been fortunate to be able to work with a lot of them. Some of our cards are sold in stadiums. In stadiums, you can buy our cards at campus bookstores and things like that, hobby shops across the country, breakers across the country, but even Walmart carries our cards and Best Buy carries our cards, and we're working on opening up as many doors as we can. Talk to me about the movement that is No Sticker Autos. So can we keep, as a CEO, will you promise to continue on it? It's on card only, right? I will say on the record, and you can put it all across the internet if you want. It lives forever right here. The no sticker autos Regates me That's what these guys Were doing before I was ever part of The company I can tell you that As long as I am here There will not be A sticker auto And if you ever do merch Could it be game worn only? I don't need Like a You know A t-shirt that somebody Put on for two seconds At an autograph signing Like we want it to be Stuff that's authentic And for us Like You can get a bunch of sticker autos, and you see companies will release them years later. They're not still working with the player anymore. The player never touched the card. The sticker looks like it peeled off. I want everything that we do, and that's what the company's always done. The player held that card. They signed that card. It's really important to us. It's always going to be licensed, and it's always going to be on card. Boom. There we go. We got it on record. And it's important. Look, that's the biggest selling point in the store. I tell people... There's on-card autos. It's the only point for me, as I talk to people, I can point to our competition and say, like, look, they're doing good stuff, but it's not licensed. So they're doing good stuff, but look, it's a sticker auto, and the sticker's crooked, and, like, the player never touched the card. You know, at the end of the day, we're all using a lot of the same athletes, the same sports. The designs are all different, but they're all like, you know, the size of the card is the size of the card. The medium is the medium. There's only so much you can do, right? So for us, we have to differentiate ourselves. I want to make sure our stuff is the highest of quality, that it's on card, that it's licensed, that it feels like when somebody opens a pack that they're not. You might get disappointed if you didn't get your hit, the thing that you were looking for, but I never want anybody to look at the cards and say, These aren't even worth, even if I got the hit, this isn't worth my money. And that happens a lot with some of our competitors. I'm excited to see the growth because the one thing about business that I love is the blank canvas. And you've been in this, you are integrated into this industry because the knowledge you have for OnMantle. But I'm really interested to see what do you create? Now you can be creative and stick to the brand and build your brand from zero or continue building. Yeah, I mean, we get to look at everything now. And I think when I join our football cards that are coming out, had already been designed. A lot of the stuff that's out now was baked. It takes a long time, right? It can take us six months. from when we start on something to when it's in Ryan's shop. And even longer from when it's in Ryan's shop to when it's on your platform. Right. Like, you know, that that's kind of the life cycle of these things. It takes a long time. We're out there right now. Our football cards are our first set of football stuff comes out on August 21st. And we're starting to get autographs back from the athletes now. We're cutting cards. We're packing cards. We're getting ready. But for me to actually put my thumbprint on a design or say, I want us to try this. We're talking about next spring. And so I've been fortunate in that way that I've been able to open a lot of the cards, spend a lot of time with the team, really figure out what works, what doesn't. So that by the time I get to say, we should try this, I'm not doing it just because I'm a hobbyist and this is the way I want to collect, but it's based on data that we have. It's based on things that we've seen, customers that we've talked to. That's the important thing. I collect weird stuff. I don't have a lot of liquid. It's old Dodger stuff, but I collect sports broadcasters and their autos. Like... I'm not the one that should be out here deciding what things should look like because I'm not the one who's collecting a lot of the stuff that would be trading in this room. I have to do it based on the feedback that we get from the community, and I have to do it based on the data that we have and from the team that we know. I'm really fortunate. We got a really good team, worked in the industry for a long time, knows this stuff backwards and forwards. And just try to figure out how we can continue to innovate, continue to drive things forward to make sure that the way that the cards look today should be the worst our cards ever look for the rest of the time. Right. Like next year, I want to be able to say the same thing if I'm sitting here, Brian, Brian, this is the worst our cards will ever look again. And we can do that. Then we're heading in the right direction. any announcements you want to make it is football season it's football season we got i think 32 schools that we're working with august 24 first our our stuff uh hit store shelves so you know if for college football fans alabama ohio state michigan ucla usc florida um you know we're schools all across the country so you know i i hope that that that people come check it out last year fernando mendoza the heisman winner was was in our product autographs in our product and uh we have you know jeremiah smith and bryce underwood some of the big john material some of the biggest names in college football who are in our stuff who have signed for for us um so it'll be great we've got a booth uh over here on this on this floor uh booth eight zero zero zero five and so selling product out there baseball basketball softball So I hope people come down and grab me if you see me. I'd love to talk to anybody and get your feedback on what we're doing and figure out how we can do better. You can find them on the Ludox interactive math. Yes. We owe a gratitude to Ludox and Brian for that. That is a wonderful tool. It's probably the most useful thing in this entire building. Because you cannot find anything. If you don't have the app. That's right. That's right. Well, Hey man, I, I wish you the best of luck. I know you're going to do great. It's you guys, you have a good foundation to grow with. And I know you got the vision and I'll always be a fan. Really appreciate it. Appreciate all the support over the years, Brian, of course, like everything that you've done for us and we've been able to do together over the years. So I'm really, really excited about, about this new gig. Excited to see how the national goes for all of us. And, I just feel like this hobby has got more momentum, more buzz than it's ever had before. And so we just got to keep doing big things and let it grow. Awesome. Brian, we did it. Yeah, that's it. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. I appreciate it. Evan Parker, CEO of Onnit. Yes. Thank you, guys. Thanks for tuning into the show. Be sure to follow us on your go-to podcast platform and catch the full video episode over on YouTube. Visit us at collector nation.com and follow Ryan on Instagram at Ryan Alford. Now get out there and collect yours.