In the building. Before we introduce our guest of mine, I just want to make a quick announcement. Folks, today is a very special day here at Grand Slams Collectibles. Since 1999, Grand Slam has been built around growing the hobby, building a community, and creating memories for collectors of all ages. As you see our guest here, he truly understands the meaning of building something from the ground up, from starting his first business in his parents' basement at the age of 12 to now owning one of the most influential sports entertainment companies in the world. This apartment claim your hands as we introduce the founder and CEO of Fanatics. Make a huge slam welcome for Michael Rubin.
Anything. You can ask anything you want. My favorite part about running Fanatics, honestly, it's getting to work with sports fans. Like, you guys are the best. To see 100, 200 people showing up here today for Rip Night, I freaking love that. It's honestly not every day is easy when you build a business, but you get so much inspiration from a sports fan. So to me, it's the absolute greatest. We get to work with the most incredible athletes in the world, the best teams, but honestly it's really all about the best fans. And I'll tell you one thing without question, and this is 100% factually accurate: the best fans in the world are collectors. No question. That's you guys. And you guys care more. You push us to be better. We love that energy. So thanks, man.
All right. So we have another one. We have another one.
My name is Joey. What do you think the sports card and collectibles hobby will look like in 5 years? And what should kids my age be paying attention to right now?
Well, first, how old are you? All right. So, first, where do I think the hobby is going? I mean, I'll tell you, we're in three businesses today. The collectibles business and being part of this hobby is probably the most rewarding because I think in a lot of ways it had tons of growth but without anyone really doing anything to get that. So for us, when we come in and say let's start really innovating products, things like the debut patch, things like Rip Night, so many different things that we did, things like that grow the hobby, really marketing, getting the athletes involved. When we got into trading cards only four or five years ago, athletes didn't really care, they kind of looked at it as something they had to do, like 'oh we have to sign cards.' Now in baseball, more than 25% of all active MLB players actively collect cards. You used to see guys on planes gambling, now they're trading cards. It's pretty awesome. So where do I think it's going? I think it's just getting going. This is primarily a domestic business in the US today. We opened a store in London less than a year ago, it did five times what we expected the first year because we were like, well, there aren't collectors there, but it made collectors. It created collectors. So I think we're very much in the early stages, and that makes it so fun. Even thinking about walking in seeing people with the Fanatics Fest and where we were 2 years ago to what that festival was at the second year and third year, I think there's so much growth ahead. And then for you, what would I be thinking about? I'll tell you something really interesting. It is proven that people who grow up buying and selling cards are some of the best CEOs and best business leaders in the future because you're learning about business, how to make sure you're making good deals, not bad deals. So I think this is great experience. I grew up as a crazy collector from like 8 to 12. By the way, I didn't sell the cards to my friends, I sold them to my friend's parents because they needed more money to buy it from me before. So, you know, if I look at what I said to my kid, enjoy every moment of the hobby, be a little bit less on social media. That kind of destroys your head a little bit. That's a message to myself as well. And by the way, after we get the question, anything you guys want to know, you can ask me.
Excellent answer. All right. What do you got for me? What do you got?
My name is Michael. What are your three favorite items in your personal collection and what make them important to you?
All right. Well, Michael, I'm never forgetting you. Michael's never forgetting Michael. All right. So, I'm going to tell you what my number one favorite item is, and nobody would guess this. I like making fun of myself. I'm a pretty easy person to make fun of. I grew up not very athletic, always the last kid to get picked on a team. So we had a football game in my house two years ago in the summertime and CJ Stroud threw me this bomb and Odell Beckham was trying to guard me. I actually caught it right in front of him, and it was like the most athletic thing I ever did. And CJ wrote the ball, he said, 'Rub, the most athletic thing you've ever done.' That ball sits in the middle of my office. That's probably my number one favorite thing because it was a good athletic moment for me. But I've become such a card collector. I've got so many incredible cards I've collected. Things have to be what's personal to you. That ball was personal to me. Who else wants to ask some questions?
Those are great questions by the way guys. So I'm a pretty big collector. Resonates when you're a young guy. All my money when I was a kid, sixth grade.
We're not young. I'm 47 now. But this is for me more than him. I actually visited your headquarters in Miramar the other day, by the way.
So, your view on game use versus cards when a guy like me sees a championship tag going for more than the whole jersey, right? And you're thinking even for young kids, you can go on some of these NBA auctions, get a jersey game for 500 bucks and you can't even get a card remotely as cool for that. So how do you think about the long-term view of owning the whole jersey versus the card itself?
Yeah. By the way, great question. First, I think one of the things we've tried to do in cards is to make sure what goes in the cards is game used. Many people here, if you're real collectors, you probably know other companies used to say, 'Hey, put that jersey on your body, take it off, you didn't have to play any game, it didn't mean anything,' and put that in the cards. We've eliminated most of that. We want to take things that are actually used in games. I think the thing about cards that we've been able to do is create product innovation. For example, we got in the business in 2022 and within a year we created the debut patch. The debut patch is now in baseball, it's been in the NFL for 2 years, and it's coming in cards now in the NBA. Think about Cooper Flagg's debut patch. I would think that would be a multi-million dollar card that came off of his jersey that day. So the question you're asking is, do I want to own Cooper Flagg's debut jersey or the debut card? I think they're both great items. That one-on-one card with the debut patch is kind of insane, but the jersey is also insane. The one thing about collecting that I've learned is everything's not for everybody. You may like the jersey better or the debut patch better. For me, I'm a giant NBA fan. I'm dying to buy the Cooper Flagg debut patch. And guys like CJ Stroud, Jayden Daniels, guys I'm friendly with, I can follow their careers. So it's really about what's personal to you. But they're both great items. I look sometimes at auctions and think, wow, this game used jersey, this ball, seems pretty reasonable. And a lot of times we may go buy those things and put them in cards as well because we can make great products with them.
What else you guys want to know? We're going to do something.
Go for it. My name is Shane. Who is your favorite athlete of all time?
Shane first. Who's yours?
Who's your favorite athlete?
Mine's definitely not Eli. Manny, by the way.
There you go.
You know, one of the funnest things about running Fanatics is you get invested in different people's careers. I'd say if I had to pick one favorite athlete, it would probably be Julius Erving because I grew up a huge Sixers fan. He was the guy I idolized as a kid. I'm going to tell you guys an incredible story about Dr. J that most people don't know. Unfortunately, I'm now 53, so that means I'm old. I met Dr. J for the first time when I was 15 years old. He came into the ski shop that I was running and he actually bought skis. He didn't ski, but he bought skis for his family. So I idolized him as a little kid, and then here's Dr. J showing up in my ski shop to buy skis for me. So he was definitely my first favorite athlete without any question. All right, I think we can now have a new way of doing questions. So I'm not in charge here clearly.
Well, the first goes out to you. Thanks for the courage and asking the favorite athlete question. So just real quick on what this is. So, last say again.
Yeah, Cactus Jack. So a little bit of background. Last weekend, we did a collaboration between Travis Scott's brand Cactus Jack at the NBA All-Star game. Michael took three boxes from the stadium here. So we're here to give them away. One, Shane, and two to the next people that ask some good questions. So I'm going to leave it up to Anthony to pick those two people and then Michael give them away.
By the way, I haven't seen these yet, so right now.
All right. Red. Okay. So basically what both of you guys, when were you, what were you doing when Logan were pulled?
What were we doing when it was pulled?
Yeah. So I don't actually know what I was doing because I try not to be on social media non-stop. I realized I had to give my brain timeouts, so I put my phone down when I go into meetings now. I'm not always paying perfect attention. So the honest answer is I have no clue.
Do you know what you're doing?
All right, but hold on. I want you to know I'm seeing these for the first time. He gets this box now, right? So these are the Cactus Jack. We only did like a couple thousand of these, right?
I think they were, we sold them for 700 bucks. I think they've got...
They're selling them for 1,200 but they had some crazy cards.
Clearly you see him making the decision. And clearly I got nothing to do with this.
You got the Fanatics hat on.
What inspired you to make Fanatics?
You got it. Um, first, here's your Cactus Jack box, spin. So it's actually a really good question because I think a lot of people here could take something from it. People always think I'm self-deprecating when I tell this story, but I was as a kid, I was not a good athlete. As bad as an athlete as I was, I was a terrible student. I was dyslexic, I had a speech impediment, I really couldn't read. So I was bad at school. But I always loved business and I always love sports. So the ability to create a business and build it around the best fans in the world, the best athletes, to me was the greatest honor and privilege. So the lesson is forget about what you're not good at, go to what you're good at. For me, I was always good at business, good at bringing people together. That's how we built Fanatics. That's what inspired me. It was honestly sucking at sports and sucking at school that I turned into building Fanatics.
Oh god.
Um, I just want to ask through your years of being the CEO of Fanatics, was there what was the hardest thing to come by and go past?
Really good question. I mean, look, as big as we get, stuff goes wrong every day. That's called business, that's called life. So it's focusing on what matters, not getting little things in the way, focusing on the big picture. Our brand purpose is to relentlessly enhance the fan experience. Today is such an incredible day. We came up with the idea to start this four years ago. We had 15 athletes show up in 50 stores and about 10,000 collectors. Today we have 800 stores instead of 50 three years ago. We have 160 of the best athletes in the world going out to the stores, from Tom Brady to Cooper Flagg to Ant to Mike Trout to Cody Rhodes, all going out in stores throughout the country. We've got more than 100,000 people. So seeing things like that gives you so much inspiration, but you also have to recognize things go wrong every day, and you use that to learn and grow and create more inspiration. Never knock you. I got to find you a box of cards.
Good.
So, I think we're going to take one more question and then we're going to dip into Michael's PC from some of his favorite athletes and give away some cards. So we'll do one more question, then we'll do right here.
What are you going to do next?
Great. Great one. Well, first of all, today this is the first store I'm going to. I'm going to go to five stores today. Then I'm going to go home to my two little cute three and 5-year-old daughters who boss me around probably the same way you do your father. And then I'm going to go right back to work because I love what I'm doing so much. I do this 16, 18 hours a day every day. It's the greatest honor in the world. I'm going to keep figuring out how we can be better in everything we do. I'm going to keep pushing boundaries. How do we get 150,000 collectors out next year? How do we get 200 athletes in the stores? How do we keep making more innovative products? Just how do we keep pushing everything to be better? Because if not, a competitor is going to take you out. That's the way it works.
