Nashcards Philly celebrates one year as MVPs of sports cards, Pokemon, grading submissions

    By James Short 

Kelsey, now residing in Nashville, hired them on, and Nashcards LLC was launched. In the beginning, around July 2020, Nashcards began as an online “middleman” PSA submission company. It was so popular, their servers crashed.

“There were no stores at that point. We take in cards from the public and middleman them to PSA, which is the number one grading company in the world,” Kelsey said. “I look at grading as a third-party input on the condition of the card. So, if you look at it that way, it tells you, especially with older stuff, the value of that card, which can vary if the card is beat up.”

For example, a 1968 Roberto Clemente “raw” is $10,000. A PSA grade of 8.0 boosts it to a $40,000 card. The best grading, 10.0, values the card at $300,000. Kelsey said it is really about the rookie cards in sports card collecting.

“Any (Hank) Aaron is worth some money. Any (Mickey) Mantle is a solid card. But you get to the rookies, a rookie Mantle is $10,000 no matter what. A Mantle PSA 10 rookie just sold for $20 million. The rookies are where the money’s at,” he said.

(That sound was the fast rush of husbands and dads running to find their baseball card collections in storage.)

    By James Short   

“You can value the cards by grading them,” he said. “There’s a pretty open market online to see what people have paid for cards, but PSA is a good indicator of what you can get out of your piece.”

Just as Bryce Harper’s bat electrifies the crowd, their business strategy ignited a fervor among collectors, making them the MVPs of PSA and more in a thriving industry.

“With the PSA grading, we are the fifth-largest submitter to PSA,” Kelsey said. “When people hear that, it’s pretty impressive. Right here in Trappe, we have one of the largest submitters to PSA.”

Doing submission business out of his Nashville home was fine at first, but more and more people started showing up at Kelsey’s door. It was time for office space, he said, but even those were hard to come by in the pandemic. So, they chose a retail spot in Nashville, which, if anything, would give the submission aspect a physical presence.

Kelsey opened his mothership location in November 2020 in Nashville. A second store in Memphis followed in May 2021. By mid-June 2021, Kelsey and the Westerfers were expanding their flagship location to a spot triple the size in Mt. Juliet.

“Rick and Jess had been working remote the entire time, and it got to the point where, especially for cash flow reasons, if you guys are sitting at home working on the computer all day, you might as well do it in the back of a shop. Because I grew up here, I thought Trappe would be a cool place to put the third location up.”

Stepping foot into the 1,100-square-foot Nashcards location at the Trappe Center shopping plaza at 130 W. Main St. is a collector Shangri-La – a big comfy couch, high tables and chairs to share trades and do business, cases of high-value baseball, basketball, football and hockey cards (mainly rookies or special cards) and one case full of select Pokemon cards.

Meanwhile, wall to wall is stocked with card boxes, memorabilia, card packs and more.

What really makes Nashcards stand out, however, is its knowledgeable and enthusiastic staff. In any one moment, one employee is smiling at the checkout register, another is going through inventory, Jess is either bringing in a case of bottled water for the customers and staff or aiding with submissions, Rick is handling business on the phone, and Kelsey is talking baseball to another new customer and promoting their upcoming card shows.

The company’s best seller is their own unique Nashpacks.

“It’s what they call a repack: It’s not licensed from one of the companies. We’re making it. We’ll get a collection of cards, maybe 100 different cards, and we’ll hide them or put them into individual packs and then you mix them up,” Kelsey said. “It’s a cool way to liquify a lot of your cards, but at the same time, customers love it because we don’t upmark our boxes like companies would, so the total value of the boxes would be the total value of the cards inside. It becomes a random lottery.”

    By James Short 

The addition of Pokemon to the stock has been big for Nashcards.

“Before I opened my first store, my son was six, and I used to make him rip packs with me with baseball. He’s never really into sports, but when someone came to my house and brought a Pokemon box, and I saw how my son reacted to it, I called Rick and Jess and said, ‘We need to do Pokemon in our stores.’ There is a lot of crossover with Pokemon and sports.”

Now, Pokemon creates a heavy volume of customers for Nashcards.

“I call Pokemon our bottom line. We have boxes of sports cards up there for $2,000, $3,000, and you get six cards, and not a lot are walking in and buying that. But you know everyday someone is going to come in here and buy Pokemon.”

 It is a bullpen of big business.

The sports card collectible industry saw a surge in the 1980s and 1990s, mainly, Kelsey said, because we did not have the internet yet, so companies like Topps and Fleer were able to dupe collectors.

“They printed millions and millions of the same cards, and then put out a book called ‘Beckett,’ and said they were worth this. It was very trendy at that point, but once the internet came around and people started realizing everyone had the same stuff, and that they could access it in many different ways, the whole market just crashed,” Kelsey said. “Because, again, it’s a surplus issue. They still have sealed boxes of 1991 Fleer in factories you can buy for $10-$15.”

In the 2000s, the card companies began offering exclusives with their card packs, like autographs, and serial numbers, and authentic pieces of memorabilia, like uniform swatches.

“It’s really what helped give tangible value to these pieces now, because there’s not millions of them,” he said. 

He said Covid made anything collectible an alternative asset.

“People wanted to put money in something little more tangible (than the stock market),” Kelsey said. “Baseball cards have outperformed the stock market since the early 1900s.”

While card values have gone down since Covid, foot traffic for the hobby remains strong. On Friday, the Trappe location had a steady flow of about 50 customers in an hour. All of the Nashcards locations offer comfort and a welcoming atmosphere to collectors.

The Trappe location has trade nights, where 30 to 40 youths are packed in the store, bringing their own cards to swap out and otherwise just hang out.

“It’s really become like an activity again, like when we were kids,” Kelsey said. “Fathers and sons, mothers and sons are coming in. It’s crazy of the amount of people that come through our door. It blows people away when they see how popular it is.”

Jess Westerfer said it does not matter what age a customer is – everyone gets a twinkle in their eye when they come in and see the player they like or the Pokemon character they like.

“That’s very cool to see that in everyone, and it really does excite you. The other thing is, these kids have so much knowledge and it’s amazing to see. We go to shows a lot, and I laugh, because, they have their cases and their cash, and it’s like their little own business that they’re traveling around with,” Westerfer said. “It ties the community together. It’s a generational thing.”

Kelsey and the Westerfers see an expansion of the Trappe location in the future and a possible fourth store.    

Meanwhile, you can find them at The National Card Convention in Cleveland, Ohio July 23 performing grading services, and the Fanatics Fest in New York City.

“Fanatics bought out the rights to baseball, basketball, football, and will be manufacturing most if not all the cards in the future. They haven’t made the move yet to the public, but they want to get people who aren’t into cards into a space to discover them,” Kelsey said.

Kelsey is encouraged that the hobby will only grow from this point forward.

“It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you do. You have this stack, you have something you collected with your dad. Everyone has a story about cards,” Kelsey said. “Whenever we meet someone at a bar or in a restaurant, whatever we’re doing, it’s like you’re getting a customer. They connect to you.”

Nashcards Philly is at 130 W. Main St., Trappe. It is open Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Call them at 484-973-6587.

Follow Nashcards on Facebook and on Instagram and visit their website for more.