Talking Trading Cards With Bel Air Sports Cards' Mel Lundgren

and welcome into press box live i'm stan the fan charles from press box and pressboxonline.com with me as usual and by the way i say as usual our usual night has been wednesday night it conflicts with gary's broadcast schedule at umbc and i deem gary important enough gary stein importantly to move this entire endeavor on thursday night yeah gary how are you my friend stanley i don't know what i that is the highest compliment that you can pay me so thank you i appreciate that i'm great i hope the payment of that compliment is good enough pay for you it's gonna have to be so okay all right hey we're pretty excited to bring on somebody tonight who i met through my my connections over at maroon pr uh john maroon's company uh his name is mel lundgren and mel we welcome you in to uh this thursday night newsmakers in the world of sports zoom how are you doing real good um nice to meet both of you stan and gary looking forward to it yeah this should be an interesting conversation um mel owns a store out in the bel air area and it's got a very clever name it's called the bel air sports car card store uh and mel has a brixton he has a bricks and mortar business and mel where's that location uh we're located in bel air um it's on 201 gateway drive it's about an eighth of a mile from the hartford mall right there in the center of town all right well we want to dwell we don't want to dwell on the past too much but i think it's it's an interesting to give fans and viewers the context of what's happened with your business clearly you've been a baseball card and a sports card fanatic for a long time and you opened your business in the summer 2017 briefly tell us what happened leading up to the pandemic that put your business in some great risk sure um so we opened in 2017 in downtown bel air on uh in a real small location it was only 600 square feet um but we opened up with the same business model we're known for our home of the card bar so our first store had a small 16 foot card bar in it and the sports card industry and novelty industry had really taken off during 17 and 18 and we saw that little 600 square feet we were we were growing out of it daily um so we had a short lease at that location it was only a two year lease so in 2019 we moved into our present location which was a a much larger facility it was 2 000 square feet and we were able to expand our our famous card bar from 16 feet to 36 feet so you know things were really good you know august of 2019 i just moved into a nice big location five five year lease right yeah five year lease and i'm like okay i gotta gotta make this work here and you know first you know at august september october november you know we're going good and then december started to roll around the holiday season and then of course right after that we started to hear that um you know covet 19 and all sorts of different things that were all you know we kind of were ignoring them over here i guess until you know we found out that hey wait a minute this stuff's for real so the um the impact on my business of course i'm sitting there okay i got a five year lease i'm into it about five six months and now i'm getting the notice and governor hogan's going out saying all right all small businesses have to uh cease their day-to-day operations as you know it and i'm like whoa wait a minute you know that's not what it's not what i signed up for and i'm not going to pay the bills type of thing so um i pride myself on uh sensing and adjusting and looking at uh you know control what you can control i couldn't control covet 19 but i could control you know maybe how to operate my business so i leaned um we always had a facebook presence we were always on facebook and when we first opened and everything and we we would do monthly events and things advertising through facebook but you know as our business grew our facebook audience grew and then all of a sudden you know facebook was a really valuable tool for me um during during the pandemic because obviously we shut down we weren't allowed to let customers in the building we couldn't operate our normal business model which at that time was encompassing sitting at the card bar you know opening up packs of bar you know packs of cards and you know having a free drink and you know having a good time well now that was all gone so i had to figure out how to still get the cards into the customer's hands you know so we um we took our facebook page and um just kept you know offering services to our customers um we were allowed to do curbside pickup so we used um facebook messenger and facebook pages you know to message in and i would put a post up saying okay this product just came in you know drop a comment or drop a line if you want one and we'll put put it aside with your name on it and then then we advertise you know just pick up hours are going to be from this time to this time you know we we didn't offer 24-hour service or anything but we honed in on trying to be there when you know it would be convenient for people let me give let me paint the picture though so i get a better understanding of it and then i'll let gary ask a couple questions so at that time like as the pandemic started what was the number of facebook followers you had and what did that grow to over the past 18 months or so um when we first opened up or during that first year year and a half going into the new store when i say followers we have a national page and we have a local page the local page is private and the local page is basically the nuts and bolts of my business because they're the people i see every day and i you know i have like 100 100 regular customers you know 100 people and right now uh today we just hit i think 399 or or whatever so during the pandemic we saw that number i was getting facebook friend requests day you know like multiple requests every day for about a year and that's one more thing one more thing before i give it to gary so that 394 that is that indicative of all through the sports card business is has the bantemic in a weird way been booming because people are home looking for things to do yeah i can't speak specifically to every market or every business owner that was in involved in the sports cards industry but if they if they had social media if they had facebook and i'm sure that i know a lot of them thrived i mean the industry is a whole thrive during facebook i mean during turn to pandemic the industry as a whole survived and did really good but whether how much each store store owner used facebook i i couldn't speak to that but it definitely was very very uh good for us gary go ahead yeah so mel is it is it dads bringing in their kids or is it dads or all you know older men just coming in and kind of have they've been you know card collectors for years like who actually comes in it's a full spectrum gary um you had when the pandemic give me when we first opened our business model was about family and it was you know grandpas were bringing their grandkids in dad was bringing their kids in single moms were coming in with their kids it didn't matter we were always a family family versed uh business you know operation but then when the pandemic hit and people were like closed up and stuck inside we were getting a lot more of the dads like going in the basement digging out their old cards or going to the attic or the garage and getting stuff out and then sharing it with their kids and then all of a sudden their kids wanted to do something so it brought back memories and then you know people were looking for card stores during the pandemic okay and how do i get a hold of a card store and they would you know they would google and see that there was something in bel air you know website and facebook and and notify us um a lot of single guys where we really saw the uh increase in in followers was both was twofold it's about 50 50. family family numbers increased but right when everything shut down and there was no sports betting there was no casinos there were no ball games you couldn't go to a basketball game or a football game you couldn't tailgate those there's a there's a segment of our population that had some discretionary income to spend and they looked at sports cards as a way of getting their sports fixed so they would come in and buy that box of cards trying to chase that autographed lamar jackson card or that you know joe burrow autographed rookie card or something that was you know that had a value and that people were you know wanting to to try to chase so it was it was a thrill of the chase maybe a little bit of the gamble for some and then for others it was just strictly uh a good thing to pass the time with when they were locked up inside the house so if i can jump in garrett can i jump in with a quick follow-up to that yeah um so from the time that the pandemic came and you had this new five-year lease how long did it take for you to go whoa what the hell is going to happen to my business to wait a minute this is an opportunity here i mean was that a matter of two months or six months i'd say within six weeks um when we shut down i can remember just basically emptying the inventory off the front of the shelves because i didn't you know didn't know if we were going to be coming into the store every day or everything and i didn't want everything out plain sight so we moved everything into a back room and we kind of set up a back room retail display area and we did a lot of photos we did a lot of photos and a lot of posts and ads and we just kind of were it was almost like i was operating out of my house but i was at my store and but it when i saw the amount of product move the first six weeks i figured well that was a good six weeks what's the next six weeks gonna bring and then then that challenge came you know with everything else with you know the pandemic you know the the toilet paper aisles were empty and uh you know this aisle was empty and that aisle was empty well then we had to try to find product right well i was i've been pretty well at keeping my store inventoried and stocked and i um i was successful because i had a lot of inventory and we were able to um keep pulsing that inventory through facebook ads and through messaging and things on facebook and it really you know it kept us going and then once the once you know things cycled around at the time the manufacturers were still trying to produce cards well then all of a sudden they had to go to one shift a day instead of three shifts a day instead of having 100 people on the floor they could only have 30 people on the floor well then everything started to slow down and back up but we were aggressive and went out and kept the shelves you know kept the stock up so we could sell stuff go ahead so what did what did the pandemic do to the price of cards then like a like a box of tox cards let's say yeah unfortunately gary it goes back to economics 101 supply and demand exactly and the demand was i don't know if you could say it was 10 times or 100 times the demand and the supply was actually less because of the constraints because of all the constraints with either the manufacturers getting the product or the actual production place making the cards you know there was always someone was having workforce issues or supply issues so the the supply of cards was nowhere near what was needed to pacify the demand for them so the prices unfortunately went up and they didn't go up a little bit they went up a lot yeah and yeah can you can you can you give me an example um it's embarrassing but i mean basically let's say the the couple years prior to that a top series one flagship box might have retailed for around 69 to 79 and then during the pandemic they were you know easily 135 to 150 dollars so wow you know again that depends i know that varies from product to product some products we get a lot of other products we get less of the products that you get less of were already in demand and now you take in the fact that there's that many more people wanting that product it just the prices went they went pretty astronomical so mel you know it's interesting a couple of minutes ago when you were talking about cards you use the example of a lamar jackson card or a joe burrow card or something like that it's it's it's interesting to me that both of those are football players i've always associated card collecting more with baseball than any other sport really so my question is is baseball still king when it comes to sports trading cards you know i think it goes by by demographic market and and by part of the country it's like we do well with baseball you know because we have the orioles and we we do well with football because we have the ravens but overall my sales i mean i think baseball's still the most popular um there's a lot more baseball product made than there is football products so the football product inventory and the store is always weaker than baseball just because of what's available for us to get on the shelves but we have a lot of a lot of kids really gravitate to football right now i mean it's i'm not just going to say baseball hasn't been replaced by football you know nationally or anything but it's definitely increased its market share in other sports like soccer soccer is a world phenom you know it's world known or world renowned right now and the world cup's coming again and we had the world cup in 2018 and so a lot of people had been that was still a good time you know there was a lot there wasn't pandemic then so yeah a lot of people got into the world cup and the soccer in 2018 so they the fan base grew and it still is it's still we're getting ready for you know the 2022 world cup so um all sports are doing very well hockey you know basketball i mean everything's strong i think if you're in you know dc you got the capitals and the wizards which those are home teams for them the washington football team and the nationals so the card store down there might see a little bit more even sales or you know they might sell more hockey and more basketball locally because they have a hometown team we're up in bell you know we basically support the baltimore we sell a lot of philly stuff we sell a lot of eagles and a lot of philly's cards too so gotcha so everything's moving into the digital age and i'm sure sports cards are not immune to that i've heard you know we all know about nft's non-fungible tokens you know all this stuff so are you moving into the digital age yeah we have um i mean i'm experimenting a little i'm experimenting a little bit with it um there are cards both the manufacturers like panini panini makes a lot of nft product and i'm i'm dabbling in it myself i'm i'm sure my into my customers might be doing it individually but as far as us marketing it through the store i mean we'll if somebody asks me a question about it or wants me to try to explain it you know we go into depth about it but um basically for me my business model has always been predicated about the in-store experience we do you know i don't sell online in a like a traditional store does i have a website that i don't sell product on my website i have a facebook page and i sell experiences on my facebook page not not like really product okay and there's nothing like having somebody sit in the card store grandfather and his grandson resulting in his first pack of cards that that's that's what it's all about for us you know i mean we do online breaks now breaking's a big business um a card breaking or case breaking box breaking is a huge business and it's thrived you know it was doing well before the pandemic and we run our um our breaks you know through facebook and that's been very well for us so we use that that media for that but um it's it's just you know nft and there's a lot of other things coming i mean there's um there's you know like you buy a card and it's stored in a vault somewhere it's like an electronic vault you buy these and you don't actually even own them okay i'm a little old school for that gary i want to i want to own it i want to hold it if i'm going to own it i want to hold it okay but then there's there's there's things going on out there in the world where you know there might be a 2 million card for sale and you know 10 guys get together or 20 guys get together and they buy a share they buy shares so i mean there's all sorts of different things that you know can go on it's just i'm kind of like that you know i wouldn't say we're a mom-and-pop shop even though you know it's my wife and i and we have a staff of six people six or seven we have six months you're the definition of it yeah but we have six or seven employees and you know we're we need the employees because of the business that we have so it's um you know but we do we do like three or four we do three i think we do seven card shows a year and those are all where we go and set up and we do that in-store experience so we market to our national customers on facebook that hey we're going to be at the philly show or we're going to be at the chantilly show or we're going to be at nationals and we'll have customers come every year to sit at the we'll take a portable card bar to the national card show wherever it is and we'll have people come and hang out and sit down and or facebook friends with us but they might live 700 800 miles away so we use facebook for an awful lot to to keep in touch with our with our community so i want to talk a little bit about the event you have coming up february 3rd through the 5th called card mania in the bel air shopping center but i do want to ask if somebody's watching this tonight and says hey i'd be interested in checking out their facebook page mel how what do they go to is it as simple as bel air sports cards slash facebook just all you have to do is go into search engine on facebook type in bel air sports cards okay and yeah you should be able to find it without any problems so you asked about the event we're running um yup you can check that event out on facebook it's uh we have facebook ads and post up we have actual facebook event event page which we're using to promote it as well it's a three day event it's going to start thursday night at six o'clock it's at the hartford mall hartford mall is right there in the center of bel air major intersection at 24 and uh us-1 uh we're inside the mall in an empty storefront right next to the friendlies restaurant so if you get inside the mall you find friendlies we're going to be right there there won't be there won't be a big marquee sign that says bell our sports cards will be a homemade sign that's going to save bell our sports car you're hoping there'll be a big line of people yeah you get in exactly but what we're doing is um we thought it was time to give back to the community because um the community been really gracious to us during the um the pandemic and really supported our uh our our local store and and really helped us grow our business so what we're doing is giving back a little bit and we've we've partnered up with several uh different we part we partnered up with fallston youth sports um so the community of fallston which is adjacent to bel air a lot of our customers are from fallston and we partnered up with them and their youth sports program's going to be in there we partnered up with uh the keep punching foundation um that's the uh nonprofit uh fundraising uh group uh out of hopkins for cancer research and uh one of our we lost one of our dear customers um this past year to cancer to brain cancer and this foundation does a lot for for that organization so we've partnered up with them and unfortunately we we're i mean due to the circumstances we are going to partner up with the baltimore city fire department due to the uh really great great let me know horrible yeah the horrible thing that happened one of our um good one of our local customers that really helped us remodel the store and really has been a a personal friend of ours had just retired about a year ago from the baltimore city fire department he put like 30 years in his time was up he retired and um it hit home you know it hits home for us because he's a really good customer or friend so we reached out to him and um you know we made we got the balls rolling really quick so we got this all on facebook at bel air sports cards um what we're doing is friday saturday sunday um oh thursday thursday friday saturday excuse me it's thursday friday saturday thursday's hours are six to nine friday it's um four in the afternoon to nine and then saturday it's 11 to seven and um thursday night we have a marquee wrestler coming in from the aew circuit darby allen he's a top-ranked wrestler in their organization and group he's coming in for an autograph signing on thursday night friday's more about family we're featuring our family fun night inside this um 8 000 square foot facility and we've got a costume character like mario coming in to meet the kids and free photographs with mario and then we're gonna do um we have all these um fundraising games set up like uh papa shot basketball corn hole for cards football toss all these interactive games that the kids can do takes two carnival tickets to play and we're splitting the proceeds with the carnival tickets with some of the different charities that we're involved with and then um saturday is a big day we've got um we got a star wars um figure our costume character coming in uh baby yoda we've got pikachu coming for pokemon and then we have um the iron birds mascot is going to be in in the afternoon along with um two of our oriole prospects that are coming in for autograph signings saturday afternoon we have colton cowser and um jordan westberg from the orioles organization coming in on saturday so we you know we've got a lot going on that there's there's free activities to you know you can buy you know we're going to be selling some product as well you can support the cancer fundraiser you can support the fireman's uh you know the fundraiser we're doing for the the families of the fallen uh firefighters you can support the youth sports that are up there there's you know they're gonna be volunteering their time to help run some of the booths so it's just a good clean wholesome indoor activity for kids and families to come in and really you know participate and the amount of hits that we're getting on facebook the amount of messages the um you know the posts that we put up or getting seen by thousands and thousands of people so i hope we're prepared for what we could get i i don't know you know but we're gonna we're gonna do our best i guess you know if we run out of if we run out of stuff to give away i guess that's a good thing because we're taking an awful lot of stuff with us so all right mel lundgren of bel air sports cards and again you can go to facebook and up where you search just type in belair sports cards and his facebook page will come up now i had one last question to circle back when when you and gary veered off a little bit and started talking about football cards hockey card soccer is is the fact that the perception is that baseball cards are the most collected cards does that has that affected the cost of baseball cards versus these other sports cards and maybe some younger collectors are saying hey i'm priced out of baseball i'm going to start with football or basketball it actually it actually works just the opposite baseball's still the most affordable and the other sport like i said baseball is the most affordable yeah go ahead baseball is the most affordable because it's it's in the most supply okay there's still the best supply for baseball it still comes down to the the the supply and demand factor okay i mean not to there are expensive baseball cards don't get me don't get me wrong but we have price points from maybe forty dollars a box to five thousand dollars a box where football might start at 250 300 a box and go to ten thousand dollars a box and so it's it just it just changes it you know right now because of what's available and what is the what's going to change now that tops has been has lost the baseball card business fanatics is taking right when does that start does that start with this year's cards um well no because we order usually order your product like six months in advance so we had already placed our orders and everything for a lot of our 2022 products before yeah they were just recently yeah they were actually just purchased about two weeks ago fanatics actually closed the deal and purchase tops i'm not privy to you know all the things that are going on behind the scenes but i think that it's going to be a good marriage or a good unison with both of them i think um tops is the traditional name i think all the die hard collectors are thrilled that the tops name and the tops brand might still be out there i know what's coming in in february is it still is all the boxes are still all marquee tops it's still tops wrapping and packaging whether that changes over the course of time i mean i guess we'll see in time but right now all indications are that the tops branding is staying on the cards and is there any impact the lockout is having on the card business the ability to shoot the cards and all that it will later it will later in the year when they start to do stuff for 2023 and the last half of the 2022 stuff traditionally all the voters were taken like all the 22 a lot of the 22 photos were taken at the end of the during the 21 season because they take the picture of the player in 21 they put his stats and everything on the back of the card then it gets printed and just gets distributed in 2022. so that's pretty much already done but yes a lockout in the past when there's been a baseball lockout it has affected the um the card market some i don't know how it's going to do right now with things are so different um social media is such a big player in people communicating about cards and doing stuff i mean i know the some of the older some of the lockouts a year ago years ago there wasn't social media you know there wasn't there was dial-ups and there was you know things were a lot different so and as long as there's other sports going on i think people what will happen is they'll just gravitate they can't buy a baseball card for right now they'll they'll buy some other card you know they'll buy football or basketball or they'll find something but you know the purest still are going to want their baseball and they don't want there to be any interruptions so gary you got a last question or so and we'll wrap it up yeah i got one final one so mel you know you talk about buying your cards you know from suppliers distributors etc manufacturers you know let's say there's a guy out there he's in his 40s he started collecting baseball cards when he was a kid 10 years old he's been doing it for you know he hadn't been doing that whole time but he's got cards still from when he was 10 years old now they're 30 years old from the 80s let's say from the 70s he's got a he's got a closet full of them mine are right behind me whatever it is so do you ever set appointments with people who may want to part with their collection yeah we um our store is pretty busy during the day that we usually don't you know if anybody calls our process right now is if you're interested in selling to us we're interested in seeing what you have the first thing we the first thing we do is we we ask a few feeler questions like what era are the cards from traditionally cards from 85 to 95 have little or no value those are the ones those are the ones i have now yeah that's not a hundred percent across the board true because an 86 michael jordan rookie card's worth a lot of money and uh you know a ken griffey jr upper deck card and stuff is worth some money but the majority of the that was when there was an implosion of products and different brands were coming on board and they they basically over produced the cards and it watered down i still have boxes a 1989 90 91 brand new boxes in the store to sell and i hope a lot of them still so that you know but to get back to your question yes i mean first thing if someone says well i got a bunch of cards from the 60s and 70s we're making an appointment over the phone with them if um they say they don't know for sure what they have we ask them to send pictures to our email and then we check it out you know we get an idea of what they have and then we'll communicate with them back and forth and then if they're you know sometimes people hit us up on facebook to sell cards we get a lot of facebook requests with somebody saying hey here's some pictures of what i have you know would you would you guys be interested and then you know if they send pictures you know i try to keep i try to limit people from coming into the store carrying in their their eight totes full of cards with their 35 notebook binders that are falling apart and we don't have the time to spend with them because we're too busy so we try to we try to you know make appointments do things at our non-peak times and in that way it's fair it's better for the customer and it's better for us so one more one more quick question for people who do have cards that are in the 80s and 90s just like you said that aren't really worth that much because they were overproduced will they ever be worth anything will they be worth something in 20 years from now well i think that you know again again that was a broad statement i made i think i would my my uh suggestion to anybody that that had cards from that time frame is learn how to use ebay sold go on ebay go on ebay and don't look at ebay listings because you and i can list the card for ten thousand dollars and it's just a fish we're just fishing we're just seeing if somebody wants to bite at it but go to ebay sold see what see type in 1986 jose canseco and see what your top trader card sells for what it's sold for that's real market value so that's the way you know now certain guys like derek jeter's cards just recently took a little uptick because he went into the hall of fame so usually the time from a usually the time period between when a player retires and if they end up going into the hall that that six months leading up to the hall of fame induction is usually the last time that things go up you know traditionally now somebody like tom brady somebody like ben roethlisberger you know some of these quarterbacks you know if aaron rodgers ever retires though their cards are again there is there aren't as many of them made so because there aren't as many of them made sometimes their values go up a little bit more okay now before we let you go it brings me it brings me full circle to my one question if i've talked to one friend of mine i've talked to 20 friends of mine who would say darn it i had all these cards back in the late 50s and 60s and my mother threw them out or something yeah had mom had mom not thrown them out the cards wouldn't be worth that much correct no i don't i don't know i mean you got some icons you know it all comes back to production numbers i mean we will never get to know really how many 1952 tops mickey mantles were made right but i can guarantee you that they were they're nowhere near the production numbers of the cars being made today yeah and then you take in that demand factor they would be worth something i mean you know but it's all everything's about condition and you know and then i can still be so i can still be upset with my mother absolutely yes all right all right hey mel this has been fascinating again the store the bricks and mortar locations belair sports cards and they've got the big event coming up february 3rd through the 5th card mania at the harford mall and why don't you tell people how to find that mel when they go to the hartford mall all right well if you if you walk into hartford mall i mean they'll have a couple little directories with you know where places are it's it's on the main straightaway um you know it's it's on the main straightaway it's on it's right next to friendlies i mean there's so many different mall entrances just fine friendlies we're going to be right next to it so all right again it's thursday night from one to win thursday thursday night six to nine friday four to nine and saturday 11 to 7. all right sounds good and again if you want to look up the facebook page for mel's business belair sports cards just go to facebook and search belair sports cards mel we really appreciate your coming in he's getting so much light on this all right well thanks a lot guys really appreciate it was fun hanging out thank you guys yep thanks

2022-02-04 14:42

Other news