From Storage Wars to a $50M Sports Card Business | Rene Nezhoda at The National

My company pulled that $3 million Ohtani last year. I think solid eight figures was handed off maybe the table next to me. This coin was in the Beckett of a Roman soldier marching to Germania. They're going to create more Luffy cards than football cards together this year. I'm Ryan Alford. And I'm Bella Schaefer and this is Collector Nation. We are curating all of the in the hobby just for you all in one place. All the videos, all the podcasts, all the reels, all those drops you want, right here, right now. It is Collector Nation. We are sponsored and powered by Ludx here in the Ludx VIP lounge back there. And we appreciate everyone. Go to the collectordation.com. you can see all the content from today. And I'm proud to be joined. Hey, I don't want to make it a war, though. No wars. No wars, no war. We're just here for the hobby. To carts. And yes, he's a star of Storage Wars. Reynes Soda. What's up, buddy? Hey, nice. Thank you for having me. Yu-Gi-Oh man, my Pulsar I'm the sea of people here. Everybody's trading, they're making deals. I wonder how many millions of dollars exchanging right now. I guess last night someone asked me how much money is being said. You know, you're talking about comps. How many comp. The history from last night. I think solid eight figures was handed off maybe the table next to me. All right. I can imagine it's some of these young men and young women in here. They just make deals that I'm just like, Yu-Gi-Oh like I didn't drink like that when I was 10, 11, 12 or whatever, you know. Exactly. 10 year olds with million dollar cases. Only at the National. Yep. One on one. Ohtani's baby Renee. We're going to talk. We'll talk to the here and the now with what you're doing with breaking. But talk to me about this journey, man. Reality tv. Is it everything you thought it would be? I mean, look, I tell a lot of people anything that you do at the end of the day, if you do it for a long time and you want to be successful, you have to treat it like a professional. It's a job. And the fact about reality television. So I've done it for 15 years with storage Wars. I spend most of my time driving on the road from shoot to shoot. Some days I will drive eight hours and shoot for 15 minutes. So those days are pretty tough. But I mean, it's a job. At the end of day it's fun. I love being in front of the camera. I love talking to people. So it's not. But it's still a job, still built a brand. Right. You can't, you know, like, some people complain about the camera, some people don't realize it, but got your name out there for good, bad or indifferent, right? Yu-Gi-Oh So everybody has an opinion and they form an opinion about you, but the reality is they don't really know you just by watching a show. But this is the way I look at it because you said some people complain about the cameras or being recognized or whatever. I'm a man of God, so I see it as a gift from God that I literally. And it happens a lot here at the national where somebody stops me, asks for picture, wants to shake my hand because they're a fan of the show and I can put a smile in that person's face hard and just kind of make their day. And all I have to do is take a picture. I don't have to do anything special. I don't have to give money, I don't have to move the boxes. All I got to do is say hi. And it made their day. Any great stories from storage related to the hobby? You know, like hobby collectibles of any kind. So this wasn't on the show, but probably like three or four years right before the. The hobby really started exploding again and before I really got back into it strong again. I bought a 10 by 20 unit that was a famous deal in Southern California. Passed away. And he had like almost complete 52 sets, 53 sets, 54 sets. He also was one of the biggest star cards dealers and the nation at a time. So I had literally thousands and thousands of those Boston Celtics, LA Lakers packs, like a lot. They're not as rare as you think you are, right? Not much Jordan stuff. A little bit of Jordan stuff. And the entire unit was just Beckett with cards. And we got a really, really good deal on it. Like a few thousand. We flipped it really fast. I don't remember what we sold it at the time, but it was just so much work. And back then we didn't have the store yet. I think we flipped it for like 25,000. Sure. In today's market, if you were to come to like a national and just price it out one by one, I'm sure that'd be seven figures. So it was just insane. Sometimes I lay in bed and especially now that I'm Zebra active again in my own collection and journey in the hobby. I think back at that unit, that's probably one of the units I wish I would have just kept. And the sick part is I probably have 30 units worth of storage units of really good stuff that I kept throughout time. But that just was a flipping opportunity. It's like, all right, I'll make $25,000 in 24 hours, you know, so. But Yu-Gi-Oh I wish I would have kept that one. You take it in the moment, though. You take it in the moment, you know, you can hold it forever, right? Yu-Gi-Oh no, I have a lot of stuff we're holding forever. My wife makes fun of me all the time. Talk to me, Renee. You mentioned collection. What are some of the prized items in Renee's collection? So I'm like, old school, right? I mean, I know our hobby is very financially driven now. It's about the money and the comps and how much we get and what the upside is. I'm more from the old school, right? Anything that goes in my collection, number one, will never be sold, except for two reasons. If I upgrade it or if I die, then my wife will have a dollar sell. You guys all get it cheap, right? But hopefully it goes to a collector. So my journey is also a little different. Like, it changes all the time. So maybe I'll be like. My PCs are like the Padres, the Dolphins, the Suns, German national soccer teams, international kids. And I'm really into vintage modern. But right now, my main thing, especially this national and last national, what I'm really looking for is rare graded sealed packs. So I got some crazy stuff going back to the 20s and a lot of pop ones, and I try to find the highest PSA crates, Zebra low populations. I got a lot of packs that are like one or two known in the world, so. And luckily, a lot of. I probably shouldn't talk about this here because it's going to get more expensive. A lot of people are not chasing that yet. And I think it's way undervalued, but I actually love it for the art. And a lot of these 80s and 90s packs take me back to when I was a child. And then the older ones are even cooler with the colors and the history. I got packs that are like, literally been sitting on shelves 100 years ago, and I just try to take myself back to the kid that was working somewhere trying to get that pack for a penny or whatever, you know, when we opened the card shop, one of the biggest things we had to figure out was how to make the buying process easy. Because in a business like this, people are not always Shopping the same way some customers are coming into the store, some are going to see a product online, some are watching what we post, and some are ready to buy the second they see something they want. This is why we use Shopify for our storefront. For us, Shopify helps keep the business moving. Whether someone is checking out online, buying sealed product cards, merch, or coming back to grab something they saw from the shop, the process feels simple and professional. And when a customer is ready to pay, that checkout experience matters. You do not want a clunky system getting in the way of the sale. That's called friction. And I'll be honest, hearing that Shopify, when an order comes through, still feels good. It is that reminder that the business is working even when you're busy running everything else. This is why Shopify does so well. It gives you the tools to start, sell and grow so you can spend less time fighting the setup and more time actually building the business. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So get out there and make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com collectornation Start your free trial at shopify dot com collectornation@shopify.com collectornation. What's the oldest pack you've ever opened? Oh, I, I hate opening old packs because I like to keep them together. But you know that now you probably opened them at some point. I'm trying to think. Probably. Probably something in the 60s. That's non sport. Was it worth opening? No. Yu-Gi-Oh every, every time I opened I'm like, what was I thinking? Every time? Yu-Gi-Oh I have four boys. We rip. It gets expensive. Yu-Gi-Oh ripping is expensive. But you know what, a lot of people, I was like, they always say, oh, ripping is no good, it's not fun. I'm like, you're missing the hobby. Ripping packs is like to me. And again, ipc, singles, ipc, everything but ripping packs. The anticipation, you never know what you're hitting. My company pulled that 3 million dollar Ohtani last year, so you never know what comes out of the next pack. And like, there's nothing more fun than ripping packs. Well, I tell people in my store, it's entertainment you're not buying. You buy the pack is, but you're buying entertainment. Yu-Gi-Oh the chance for sure, the entertainment. And you know, there's not many people in the country that rip more packs than we do. And you know what I do when I'm not ripping packs? You're smart now. You let you sell it, doing it your own through streaming, and I mean live streaming. Man, the last five years, unheard of. I mean, I told people in 2018 at a FedEx conference it was the next big wave. And it's been more than next big wave. It's. It's almost unfathomable how big it is. If you do your research and you see what's going on in China right now with live streaming and also what's happening in Japan and you look at the numbers they do and what they do and how the consumers don't. I mean, just research Chinese live streaming, you will realize that in the United States, we're just at the baby stage right now. We are just getting started. Yu-Gi-Oh People think we're at a bubble or we're like really high. And this isn't insane. We haven't even started yet compared to China. Yu-Gi-Oh exactly. Talk to me about bargain hunter breaks then. I mean, good, good segue. Now you guys are selling a lot. You get a lot of live breaks happening. Talk to me about what made you get into it. So, I mean, like a lot of people, I've been collecting cards literally my entire life, off and on, depending on marriage and kids and financial status, right. So when you have a newborn, you cannot justify buying cards for thousands of dollars. At least I Goldin when Covid came. And I'm still, throughout the entire time, when I see cool cards or packs, I buy them, but I never really hunted them, right. If I see an opportunity, I'll buy them. Usually not at card shows, so more like at a swap meet or a thrift store card store. So when Covid came, same thing, our business shut down. I was sitting at home, I got back into breaks and I really, really loved breaking. But this sounds bad because I love all braking companies and everybody has their own style. But for me personally, I have a very high stress life. So when I break, I want to relax. And most of these channels were just playing really loud music really fast with like Zebra sales tactics. And it was like I felt stressed out watching breaks. And then sometimes we hit some really big cards and it wasn't the best shipping, right. I would get mad because I'll hit a huge one on one and it comes in a bubble envelope. So I told my wife, I was like, I think we have an opportunity here. I think there got to be more middle aged guys like me that must feel the same way, right? We don't want to be stressed out breaking. So we decided to start a breaking company. There's no music, no sales tactics. 90% of our breaks are PYT. So you can always know the price, what you're paying and pick the team that you actually want. Like I could care less of hitting the Dodgers because I don't collect the Dodgers. Even though there's a money cards. If I, if I break baseball, I only want Padres and that's it. Unless there's like a really cool PV Reese with the Yankees, I might be chasing that. So we started doing that and then everything you buy with us, it comes shipped in a box. Doesn't matter if you had $4 in cards or $4,000 in cards. If you hit a big card with us, you are going to get it. Unless the post office steals us, which we have never had happened. We started doing it and ever since we got into breaking we got a lot of support from Topps and Fanatics. They loved us. They thought it would be a really nice crossover between Storage wars breaking and a card community. We went from 480,000 in the last two quarters to 4.8 million to 16 million to this year we're in pace at 50 million and we're going to double that again next year. So our tactics worked and the people appreciated. We got all five star feedback and no scandals yet. Not yet. I'm going to say something stupid eventually because I'm a big mouth, but I try not to. Folks, I think with live streaming it really is. There's different channels for everyone. Yu-Gi-Oh every team's a different channel. You know, in a way. Well, I tell people, find what makes you happy, find what works for you. But it's not even as much as about the breakers. I mean the breakers are important. We entertain, we guide and we provide the service. But it's also about the community that we create. Right. We have so many people that come in every night, they talk to their friends, they root for them, they root against them, you know, and just, it's a place to go. A lot of our customers are nightly and they just don't want to sit on the couch and watch brain dead television. It's kind of funny that I say that since I'm on television, but it's like they want that interaction a little bit more interactive. Yu-Gi-Oh exactly. And I do think, you know, it's, we're just kind of scraping the surface of what the channel can be. You're going to have different players coming in, different things, you know, and I think you'll see an evolution of that, of that medium. Is there anything you guys are thinking about from the formula you're doing now? The teams that you have any Exploration in the breaks. Yu-Gi-Oh So we kind of. So in the business side, we're kind of in a tough spot right now, right? So when we came in with Fanatics and tops, like for the last few years, the only license in sports was baseball, right? So we really went into baseball. The baseball community is really good trained and those guys like pyt's. Pick your team, know what you get, right? One of the challenges that we are facing right now, and I gotta make a decision and just see how it goes. We were really trying to push PYT's in the NFL and NBA community, but, man, those guys really love the dollar starts and the spinning wheel. And I hate doing that because the most dissatisfaction on customers is if somebody pays a lot for a spot, but now they don't get the team they wanted and now they're unhappy. But the minute before they said, Yu-Gi-Oh I'm good, you know, so. And we've been trying to push the PYT forward, but sometimes it takes a long time to fill a couple hours to fill a break, which is long for us. A lot of times we pre sell, we're sold out. So we're slowly started doing also these dollar spins. But the one thing that we do that no breaker does, like the other day I ran three cases of Inception basketball. And I tell him, like, look, guys, we had Inception basketball Yesterday. It took two hours to fill. I just did dollar spins. My PYT price in the case was like 4700 or 4600 on spins, you guys paid 5100. So me as a breaker, you just made me an extra $5,100. But I tell you guys, that's all the time. It's not good for you. But they still don't care. So I'm like, okay, well, I mean, it's really tough. I want to give them the best thing that I know is good for them. But as a business, you got to give what the community wants. So they want a dollar spent. So that's a little tough for us. It is. Everybody wants the chance in every move. I'm seeing it now with like, everything's a mystery. Mystery this, mystery that. Yu-Gi-Oh we don't do any repacks. We were thinking about it. If we ever do repacks, I guarantee you there will be some of the best in the industry. Yu-Gi-Oh Do you see yourself staying in media? Like, are, you know, doing it again or getting out there? Like, as far as being on, you know, trying to do another show or, you know, with your own stuff? I know you're you know, you do media, but, you know, I'm saying, like, could you see yourself, you know, going down the TV route again? I don't know. I'm getting old. So it's doing like, television. Television. A lot of people don't realize it's a lot of work. So I was showing kind of leading the witness there. It's a lot of work. Yu-Gi-Oh So our show is. I think our format is. It used to be 22 minutes, but then they doubled it. It's just more editing, but for my part alone. So you see how little I'm on one show, maybe three, four, five minutes. Yu-Gi-Oh I literally will film 40 hours a week of filming. So I don't know. You never know. I mean, if the right opportunity comes along, I do it. I love being in front of the camera. It's energetic, it's fun. But right now I'm really, really excited about Bargain Hunters Breaks, and I just want to keep on building that up. And then you play a little poker, don't you? Oh, Yu-Gi-Oh I've played once or twice before. Okay. Yu-Gi-Oh Are we a poker shark or like that? Is it. Is it just pastime play professionally? I used to before I got married. I actually quit poker when my daughter. Daughter was born because I was like, okay, being a professional poker player, if you do it right, especially in cash games. I lived in Vegas at the time. It's not a good family choice. Right. So when my daughter was born, I was like, okay, let's be responsible. Let's go to safe route. Let's build a business. Which honestly is a lot. I was very successful in poker and cash games, and I built the business. And then probably five years ago, I got back into it and I have a sponsorship with acr. We play ACR online. We play the World Series events. But the last couple. Couple years, I barely have time. It's like I'll probably go to one or two tournaments a year and then to the World Series. But even at the World Series every year, I say, okay, everything is running good. We running good. I'm going to go for an entire month, play a bunch of tournaments, play the mixed games. And same thing. This year again, I played one tournament plus the main event, and that's it. You know, there's a lot of debate, I think, in the hobby with collectors versus investors. Where do you fall in kind of that pendulum and what you're seeing happening day to day? Everybody tries to tell everybody what they have to do, how they should do it. That's dumb. Do what Makes you happy. If you want to be invested and you want to speculate, you want to flip and you want to treat it like the stock market and that's your downtime and that's fun for you. God bless you. Go do it right. If you want to be a guy like me, anything that I spend in the hobby, that's not part of my business. But my personal spending is 100% loss because I never sell it. Like, I bought packs that are really rare that I paid 500 bucks for, right? You can literally offer me $5,000 for that pack. And unless I got an upgrade or if it's one, it's not for sale. It's not. I've done it before when I was young and I've done it probably within the last five years. I collect coins also sold one of the best examples known. Made a lot of money fast because I got it right and then I still regret selling that coin and the extra money. Luckily God has blessed me enough where like my bills are paid. So the extra money doesn't do anything for me. But having that example in my collection just makes me happy. And honestly, we know how collectors are. We acquire stuff and then it goes in the same say for it goes in one of the boxes and I'll go back a year later, look at certain boxes and I'm like, oh, I forgot I bought that. I forgot I owned that. So unless I buy duplicate, which happens, or I upgrade, it's just not for sale. So for me, the hobby is terrible. It's 100% loss. Every money I spend, I never get it back. I have several friends that are trying to talk me into the coin thing. I haven't quite bought onto it yet. Is it the next big thing? Look, again, we talk about what makes you happy, right? So I'm a blue blooded American in my opinion, even though I'm German. I love capitalism, I love business, so I love buying ancient coins. I like buying early American coins. And again, just like baseball cards in the packs we talk about. I own a lot of Roman coins. I go back in my mind in time and I'm like, okay, this coin was in the Beckett of a Roman soldier marching to Germania, you know, and like just the history. Oh, it was an Italian merchant trading with Persia, like, you know, in the first early. So I think about what these coins represented or what might have happened with them and it's kind of stupid, but it kind of becomes for me a little bit of a fantasy world. So I love coins also that, but that's what all collecting I like. I collected for the story and the history and I don't know, it just makes me feel a certain way. But do you feel like the industry is coming? Like, I could feel the ground moving underneath me with cards. Like I collected growing up. I did not collect coins. I could feel the ground moving underneath me seven years ago with where this was coming. I can't say this. Me personally, I can't. But I have a lot of people that I trust that say that it's kind of picking up steam. Do you feel that or see that? I mean, the coin industry is huge. There's. There's a lot of money. Coins. Yes. Two. Two major differences, right? So when we talk about trading cards, if we really want to go early, right? Like stuff that we can still attain. Attain what? Like 1910, 1920. There's a few things in the 1800s most of us can't afford, right? So what do we have? Like, let's say reasonably stuff that we can still pick up cheap for under 20 bucks for common 1940s, 1950s. Right. So we have less than 100 years to work with of history. If we like the older stuff, obviously we like a lot of the new stuff, right? That's more nude trading cards produced in coins. But if you like history and errors. And also we have the United States pretty much, right? There's some Venezuela, there's some Europe. But it's not big in a hobby. When you look at coins. I was just talking about Roman coins. You have thousands of years of collecting when you want to call vintage or ancient, right? And you have the entire planet. So coins are huge. There's a lot of money there too, I don't think. Like, obviously our. Our trading cut. Hobbies. Absolutely exploding. And I just talked to psa, right? They said the sports community is nothing compared to tcg. And we don't do any tcg. They said, like we're a small fraction. They. That character from One Piece. Luffy. Yu-Gi-Oh Is that the one? Okay. He said they're going to create more Luffy cards than entire football cards together this year. And the reason they keep on upping the price is not because they want to charge us, but more and squeeze us more. They can't keep up. They want to discourage us to grade. Right? Make Better make. It's like so expensive to. Great. Stop grading so much. Right? So everything is exploding. All collectibles are exploding. And I'll tell you another thing. Like, I do a lot of research on Yu-Gi-Oh and what the future will look like. And I'm a strong believer one day, within the next 10 years, we're all going to get some sort of universal income. But not the way people think now. Like, it's. The poor person thinks. I think stuff to produce is going to be so cheap and we're not going to have jobs. We're just going to get that money. And what do you do with your time if you have money in the bank? Enough money. Right. And nothing to do. We just seen it with COVID Right. So either you just start drinking heavily, which is not good, or you start getting fitness, which I'm not doing that. I'm not going for a hike. So my only other option is being collectibles. Right. And I think the collectible world over the next 10 years is going to be absolutely going to explode. And we haven't seen anything yet. It doesn't matter if it's coins or trading cards or TCG or action figures. Collectibles are here to stay. And it's growing. And not just our industry has grown. Everything is growing. It's a good time to be in a business. Yu-Gi-Oh I have a store, and you don't have to talk to me about TCG. It's like, Yu-Gi-Oh it's 50, 50. I thought it was going to be 80, 20 sports. It's like 50, 50. It's nuts. I know so many store owners from back in the day, and they say, I'm never doing tcg. Pokemon, I don't get it. Opportunity. I didn't care. I just was surprised. I mean, it's unbelievable. I walk in the store, half of the store, and I was TC to him, like, what happened? You know, so everybody like, look, I'm. I'm not big into tcg. We're probably going to start adding it because we just have to provide the service. Right. I love things like Disney and Marvel new and vintage. If you've seen some of the latest Disney card, a Marvel card from Topps, they're just absolutely amazing. And again, it goes back to the same thing. Collect what makes you happy. If you buy and collect what makes you happy, you'll never be disappointed in a hobby. If you buy a card for $5,000, hoping that he's a good season, that goes to $8,000. Your heart can be broken. You can be broken financially. I don't care about money in the hobby, except on my business side. Renee, talk to us about where we can learn more about what you're doing with your company's offline online, all that stuff. Like Website links give everybody all those details. So we sell on Whatnot. We don't. We have a basic website, we don't really need it. Our break sell out fast. We give you fair pricing, try to push pyt. Anything that tops make, we break. Doesn't matter if it's football, basketball, baseball, soccer, Marvel, Disney, vee, friends. Anything they make, we break. We usually do case breaks. Right now we have four, four channels. Most of last year we had three streams going on usually eight hours a day. Now we have six streamers. After the national we have three more streamers that we start training. I think by the end of the year I'm hoping to be around 20 to 30 streamers going 24 hours a day with probably seven or eight channels on Whatnot and also on Fanatics life. So just keep on expanding, breaking more product, providing all the services. Renee, I really appreciate your time for joining us here on the national stage. Yu-Gi-Oh thank you. It's fun. I mean nationalist kits, it's collectors. Disneyland. Exactly. Thecollectornation.com will have the whole episode. We will link to the break so you can get on there. I love the alternative approach that you're doing and can't wait to see where you're going. Congratulations, Renee. Thank you. I really appreciate you. Thanks for tuning in to the show. Be sure to follow us on your GOTO podcast platform and catch the full video episode over on YouTube. Visit us@collectornation.com and follow Ryan on Instagram ryanalford. Now get out there and collect yours. Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, Filters ready to clog. H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.