Don't Study Fanatics Fest. Study What It Reveals.

What's going on everybody? Welcome back to an episode of Stacking Slabs, your hobby content alternative. Hopefully you're off to a good start this week. Hopefully you're checking out the rest of the content we have to offer here on the Stacking Slabs Network. There was a double dip of hobby jobs, some conversations that I just had to get out the door. We've got a whole lot coming with the Football Card podcast booked to last. WNBA Card podcast will be back. Flagship all the things. Having so much fun putting together this content for all of you and I want to do something a little bit different. Today I am attending my first Fanatics Fest. As a matter of fact, by the time you hear this, I will be either on the way or touchdown in New York. I've been having a lot of conversations ahead of Fanatics Fest to try to solidify the in person connection that we all desire being online. I can't wait to meet many different collectors and business builders. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about making sure that my time is valuable when I am out in the market, that I don't waste my time. And so I think prepping before shows is really, really important. And there's a lot of shows going on right now in the summertime, obviously the Nationals on the other side of this. But I want to talk about Fanatics Fest and I'll say this from the jump. If you came here looking for the standard Fanatics Fest preview episode, this is not going to be that. I'm not going to run through every athlete appearance or autograph opportunity or panel or booth you need to go run to before the doors open. There are going to be plenty of people doing that and honestly, most of that content has a shelf life for a very, very short time. What I want to do instead is use Fanatics Fest as a lens. Because I think Fanatics Fest is not just an event, but I think it is a signal. I think it is a case study. I think it is a physical manifestation of where collecting is going, of how fandom now works and how attention gets converted into commerce in the world we all live in online. And if you care about sports cards, which I think you all do, memorabilia, modern fandom, brand building, kind of where this space is going, I think this episode will be for you and the event itself is worth studying at a much deeper level. So the angle I want to bring to this conversation is I'm going into Fanatics Fest as an observer. I'm going there for relationships. I am going there to try to understand how pieces of this industry fit together, what works together, what doesn't. I'm going in there thinking about hobby jobs, I'm thinking about operator role, business mechanics and what all that means for the collector who might just think they're showing up for a fun weekend. And the idea I want to put out right on the table, right at the beginning of this episode, is that Fanatics Fest is a top of the funnel event for fanatics. And I don't say that as an insult. That's not me trying to be edgy or get shares. That is just the cleanest way I can describe what the event appears to be when you actually study how Fanatics talks about itself, how it structures the event and how the business is set up. So we'll start with Fanatics itself. Fanatics now describes itself as a global sports platform. Not a merch company, not a card company, not a sports book, a sports platform. And when they describe that platform, they include commerce, collectibles, gaming, Fanatics Fest markets, advertising, credit cards, studios. They say that together those businesses create an integrated platform for more than 1 million fans globally. And I think that matters because the moment you stop thinking about Fanatics as the guy who sells jerseys and now owns tops and start thinking about Fanatics as a platform that wants to sit across every part of the fan journey, the event starts to look very different. Now, Fanatics Fest, from my observations, is not just a convention. It has become a physical layer inside a much larger, much larger ecosystem. It becomes a place where fans can buy merch, discover cards, meet with people in the hobby, see athletes, create content, redeem loyalty, currency, maybe watch live breaks, watch a podcast. I know I'd like to get there for the mind the game, Tyrese Halliburton, LeBron James conversation. I hope I get in town for that. And I think these are the exact categories and touch points Fanatics has published across its event, app, loyalty and business pages. And if that sounds familiar, it should, because that is the attention economy. Attention becomes the scarce thing. Platforms compete to capture it, then they convert it into outcomes which can be purchase, behavior, loyalty, content, partner value, future engagement. Academic and policy research on the attention economy describes attention as a scarce rival and monetized, often through platform structures that connect users on one side and advertisers and partners on the other. Fanatics Advertising now says in plain language that it wants brands to engage fans at every touch point across content, commerce and culture. That is the same playbook. I think one of the most revealing details in all of this is not that not on the Fanatics Fest homepage. It's in the Executive bios. Lance Fensterman, who runs Fanatics Events, says his team is focused on elevating the Collector experience while introducing new fans to the myriad of offerings under the Fanatics umbrella. Scott Fisher, the head of strategy for Fanatics Events, says his role is to make sure Fanatics Fest delivers outsized impact and measurable value for the Fanatics ecosystem. That is incredibly revealing language. It tells you the event is not being judged on only vibes, it is being judged on strategic value to the full machine. And once you know that, the whole show starts to make sense. The inaugural Inaugural fanatics fest in 2024 was announced as a three day event at the nexus of sports fandom, culture and collecting. It had a 400,000 square foot floor, partner activations from major league and brands Live Podcast Product drops Fanatics Live Breaks Retail Superstore tops Exclusive Fanatic Sports Book a trading pit collecting 101 for beginners Fanatics did start with did not start with a quiet Collector meetup. They started with a spectacle designed to collapse multiple fan behaviors into one experience. Then the audience showed up. More than 70,000 people attended in 2024 and more than 125,000 in 2025. The show sold out on Saturday in 2025 and the 2026 event expanded to four days to tie itself to the FIFA World cup final with FIFA specific programming and what Fanatics called the festival's largest branded activation. That is not the growth curve of a niche side product project. That is the growth curve of something Fanatics believes can become a franchise. Now here's the question that interests me the most. Do attendees realize this is top of the funnel even for Fanatics? My guess isn't fully I think they feel it more than they name it. They feel the energy, the abundance, the celebrity and density. They feel polished activations. They feel the sense that everything is connected. But I do not think most people are walking in and saying I'm entering a live acquisition environment for vertically integrated sports platform. They're walking in and saying this is going to be awesome. And that emotional layer is exactly what makes this model work. That is an inference, but it is one strongly supported by how Fanatics has wired this event. Look at the mechanics this year. Fanatics app is the hub. The app is where your tickets live. The app is how you manage your schedule and maps. The app is where you check fan cash. It's also how you participate in Fanatics Quest where you scan QR codes across the floor to unlock badges and claim rewards. And if you transfer tickets, the recipient is tied to a Fanatics1 account. You might ask why does this matter? I think it matters because it means the event is not just a crowd, it is an account linked crowd. It is a crowd moving through branded checkpoints, loyalty mechanics and app behaviors. It is a crowd whose experience is organized through Fanatics own digital layer. Again, I'm being careful here. I'm not making claims about internal analytics that Fanatics has not published, but I am saying the architecture is plainly designed to make the live experience more measurable, more repeatable and more transferable to the rest of the ecosystem. You Got Fan Cash Fanatics 1 describes Fan Cash as the currency of sport across Fanatics businesses and redeemable for apparel tickets, live card breaks, Fanatics Collect purchases, bonus bets, casino credits and more. Inside Fanatics Fest, Fan cash can now be earned and redeemed with participating dealers, brands, retail locations and concessions. That is not a throwaway feature, that is unified economic loop running through the entire platform. And then there is the Collector conversion layer. The card combine teaches buying, trading, grading and protecting cards. The Collector Experience page pushes, tops, drops live breaking rare memorabilia, trade night, big grading brands and instant rips experience that place a complimentary pack directly into your collection in the app through Fanatics Collect. This is a very intentional answer to a big question. How do we make collecting legible to the sports fan who is curious but not yet committed? Collects reporting from 2025 may be the most important line of this whole conversation. They said Fanatics told them that around 30 to 40% of the 2024 attendees were hardcore collectors and the rest were either lapsed collectors or people who did not care about trading cards at all. That's everything that tells you Fanatics Fest is not mainly a servicing event, it is a conversion event. I think this is why I think Fanatics Fest is such a clean microcosm of the online world from a collecting perspective. Online the game is simple. Capture attention, create a moment, lower the barrier to action, make the action feel social, turn the action into identity and turn the identity into repeat behavior. Fanatics Live makes the logic explicit. The company says it wants to marry content, community and commerce. And it says commerce is the byproduct of highly entertaining program. Nick Bell's role atop Fanatics Collect is explicitly centered on live content based commerce and building commerce around content and personalities. That is not the old hobby model, that is the creator era, platform era and social era commerce and now Fanatics Fest takes that same logic and brings it into A building and a big building. Instead of scrolling a feed you have the Javits center. Instead of thumbnails you have branded activations. Instead of Instead of creator intro clip, you have a live panel or athlete walkthrough. Instead of a link in bio you have a QR code, an app hub, a fan cash redemption point, a TOPS drop, a live break, a photo op upgrade. Instead of online social proof, you have lines, crowds, scarcity cameras and giant screens. That is why this event matters. It is the Internet but embodied. Now I do not want to make this sound like this is all downside because that would be lazy. There are real benefits for collectors here. Fanatics has brought enormous institutional energy into this space. The hobby has major league licenses acquired, TOPS rebranded PWCC into Fanatics Collect, launch Fanatics Live and keeps trying to embed player moments and league authenticated storytelling directly into the product. MLB debut patches are a big example of it. You've got the crazy sales of those Wrestlemania patches. I think it can be good for collectors. More people in the funnel can mean more demand, more cultural relevance, more liquidity, more product awareness, more merchandising creativity, and more reasons for leagues and athletes to care about cards. If collecting becomes easier to understand for the sports fan, that expands the pool of future hobby participants. I think that is something most of us can agree we want to have happen and frankly a lot. For a lot of years, the hobby was not especially good at welcoming people. Fanatics is trying to solve that, even if they are solving it in a very corporate way. But here's the trade. When the hobby gets rebuilt around attention, the collector no longer lives only in a market of objects. The collector also lives in a market of moments. And moments are different. Moments are louder. Moments travel faster. Moments reward spectacle. Moments tend to flatten context. A giant athlete walkthrough clip can produce more energy than a great quiet conversation around vintage scarcity. A stage celebrity table moment may outperform an honest hobby lesson. A flashy patch or exclusive on site drop may get more traffic than a card with deeper historical meaning. That doesn't make the flashy thing fake, it just means the center of Gravity Changes collects 2025 reporting captures this tension very well. They praise the event's improvements, but dealers also said stages and activations could act like magnets that pulled people away from dealer rows. In some athlete visits to tables felt inorganic or staged. That is the tension in one sentence. Fanatics Fest can create incredible access and creatable distractions both at the very same time. There is also the Concentration issue. Fanatics is not only making cards, it's selling merch, running events, operating a loyalty system, building a marketplace, doing live commerce, running sports books, launching prediction market, all the things that they're doing. And you think about that. And I think that's just a lot. And it's a lot from a collector perspective, like, where do we sit in this pecking order? Where do we sit? Are we getting attention? So I think about Fanatics Fest and hell, I'll have all these thoughts about Fanatics Fest without even attending it. But I think I'm thinking about the national too. And I'm thinking about these two shows coexisting. I know it has been a lot for me as a business owner and operator to plan and prepare to get organized around these two events. And. And I'm not even selling cards. I'm just meeting with people and I'm creating content. So I think about the national and I think, where does this leave the National? I think from an attendee perspective, the clean, cleanest framing is that these are now two different flagship products for two different parts of the hobby cycle. The national is still the hobby's dense center of gravity. It has history back to the 1980s. It is still fundamentally a trade show built around the hobby depth. Fanatics Fest, I think, is different. More about experiences, it's more about moments, and more about fan engagement. So I don't think the right question is which one wins. I think the better question is what job does each event do for the industry? And my answer would be this. The national is still the inventory engine, the liquidity engine, the trust engine, the ritual engine in Fanatics Fest is the attention engine, the conversion engine, the partner engine, and the amplification engine. And right now, the hobby probably needs both. If Fanatics Fest keeps growing, it will pressure the national to modernize presentation, improve polish, and think more intentionally about onboarding the next collector. If the national stays strong, it will pressure Fanax Fest to keep respecting the collector and not reduce the hobby to vibes, lines and exclusives. That tension, I think, is healthy. The danger would be one event trying to become the other. If Fanatics Fest fully abandons depth for spectacle, it becomes a sports culture expo with cards as a decoration. If the national chase is spectacle, instead of leaning into its unmatched breadth, history and transaction power, it weakens the very thing that makes it essential. Because I'm going in as observe, as an observer, here's what I'll be trying to study. I want to know where the lines are and why it's the longest wait attached to celebrity access, exclusive product brand activation, or actually collector education. Because that tells you what is winning attention. I want to see whether the collector area feels integrated or tucked away. I want to watch how many people are learning the hobby versus versus transacting in the hobby. The card combine might be one clue. Collecting one of one is the original event. The reported mix of 2024 attendees, being mostly non hardcore collectors, is another. If you're trying to understand where the hobby is going, you have to study the new entrant, not just the existing power buyer. I want to pay attention to where the real relationship value is, not just who gets the biggest stage, not just who has the flashy setup. I'm looking for translators. The people who can move between fan culture and collector culture. The people who can explain products without sounding like they're running a funnel. The operators who understand community. The hobby companies that can actually build trust with a newcomer. Those roles matter more and more in a world where collecting is becoming more entertainment adjacent. This is partly my interpretation, but it follows directly from how Fanatics has structured both its events and platform. And yes, I'm going in with hobby jobs top of mind. Not because I think a booth equals a career, but because events like this reveal labor demand. If you know how to look. Fanatics already recruits across corporate commerce, betting, gaming and collectibles. The company has more than 22,000 employees and its platform now includes events, studios, advertising, loyalty, marketplace and content production. So when you walk into a show like this, you're not just seeing venture vendors, you are seeing the visible layer of partnership teams, event operations, merch planners, content producers, commerce creator, commerce operators, marketplace signals, authenticators, sponsorship, sales team. A lot of hobby jobs now live adjacent to traditional collecting. So what does this all mean for the existing collector? I think it means you need to become more self aware. Because the old hobby muscle of just walk the room and buy what you like is not enough in a modern environment designed to shape your attention at every turn. Now you need to ask better questions. What is the event trying to make me feel? What is it trying to make me do? What part of this is for my enjoyment and what part of it is for my conversion? Where am I genuinely discovering something meaningful and where am I just getting swept away into the crowd's energy? How much of my collecting taste is still mine? Those are not anti fanatics questions that are pro collector questions. And honestly, they're pro human in any environment shaped by the attention economy. Because attention is not neutral anymore. That's the larger point. The collecting world used to be fragmented, more local, more dealer dependent, more publication dependent and slower. Now it is faster, more centralized, more visual and more content driven, more app driven, more personality driven, more moments driven. Fanatics did not create all of that, but fanatics may be the company best positioned to operationalize it at scale. So if you want a sentence premise for this entire episode, I think that would be something like Fanatics Fest is not just a sport fan festival. It is a live demonstration of how modern attention gets captured, organized and turned into hobby growth, platform value and future spending. And that is why I care about it. Not because it's loud or flashy or or the guest list is insane, but because if you want to understand where the hobby is going, you have to understand the incentives of the company shaping the stage. And whether you're an existing collector, creator, dealer, grader, marketplace operator, or someone thinking about hobby jobs, the question remains the same. When all of these systems come together in one building, what are they building you into? That's what I'll be watching. And honestly, that's the conversation I think that is worth having on day one. I really appreciate you listening and supporting and telling a damn friend about stacking slabs. Hopefully for anyone attending Fanatics Fest or just watching from afar, it gives you some sort of lens to think about as this show is going on. Appreciate all of your support, Appreciate you tuning in each and every week. Really appreciate all of it. You all take care. Happy collecting. Talk to you soon.