Fueled By Baseball Card Boom, Whatnot Hits Financial Home Run

The genius who dubbed baseball cards “cardboard gold” was right on the money.

So says Armand Wilson, a 35-year-old Yankees fan whose one-of-a-kind title is Vice President of Categories & Expansion for the largest live-stream shopping network in both North America and Europe.

Called Whatnot because it sells a vast array of consumer goods, it is fueled by the boom in baseball cards.

One Sale Per Second

“A card is sold every second,” said Wilson, who oversees all of Whatnot’s categories. “Baseball as a standalone category is one of our biggest. It’s a huge part of our platform.”

Asked for specifics, he said Whatnot sellers generated $2 billion in live sales from January through September alone. More than 500 of them earned more than $1 million, he added, and some quit their jobs to stay with Whatnot full time.

Wilson joined the California-based company in 2019, when it was just selling Funko Pops. That has changed.

“There was a lot of fraud out there,” he said, referring to the firm’s creation. “The original idea was solving buyer pain in purchasing collectibles online.”

The Cards category followed the firm’s success with Funko Pops, according to Wilson. He said the average buyer collects 12 items a week. He himself collects sneakers, such as those worn by basketball star Michael Jordan.

“We want to be a place for everyone,” he said. “We bring people together in a scalable, unique way. We even replicated The National floor on our platform, getting thousands of sellers to go live and bring in cool inventory. We’re sellers and we solve a lot our problems for collectors.”

Attending ‘The National’

Whatnot has participated in The National, an enormous midsummer collectibles show, four times, including 2024.

“By getting a bunch of our sellers together, we showed off the power of our app,” he said of the exhibition. “It gave buyers a chance to see sellers live for the first time.”

Whatnot gets an 8 per cent commission on every sale but people who sell on the site sell twice as much as they do anywhere else, Wilson said.

“We try to provide a really great experience for buyers and sellers,” he explained. “We don’t think about competitors. We focus on our users.

“The last few years have been crazy. When I joined four years ago, we had less than 10 people. Now we have nearly 700 employees.

“Baseball cards have become more popular than ever. Whatnot has helped grow the hobby and make it more exciting. Sports cards – a combination of cards and on-line shopping – are a perfect product for that.”

Just how perfect?

Dealer Success Stories

Geoff Wilson of Cards HQ in suburban Atlanta has done $2.5 million in sales since opening his 14,000-square-foot operation near Truist Park, home of the Braves, earlier this year. The business features a large showroom and five studios for live selling on Whatnot.

In Boca Raton, a 25-year-old entrepreneur named Dakota Peters has also had considerable success on the Whatnot platform after giving up a career in commercial real estate.

“I just visited her shop and it’s really cool to see personally how much it’s grown,” said Armand Wilson, noting that her Latina background provides a unique experience for buyers. She has 30 employees and five active channels, Wilson said of Peters, whose top 400 shows have each generated $10,000 and averaged five hours per stream.

Customers have viewed her shows more than 10 million times since 2021, when she transformed her hobby of collecting and reselling cards on Instagram into a lucrative full-time gig on Whatnot.

The integrity of the product offered on the website is a major selling point.

Trust Is Vital

“Whatnot as a platform doesn’t authenticate the products sold by our sellers,” Wilson explained. “Whatnot sellers build and maintain trust in order to stay and grow. We have a support team that goes right to the customer if there are any issues.”

Whatnot banks on the vision of co-founders Grant LaFontaine and Logan Head, who are now chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively.

Although Culver City, CA is its headquarters, the firm has hubs across North America and Europe, with major markets in Great Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Australia as well as the United States and Canada.

For a five-year-old firm, the level of support is staggering. The 175,000 hours of live streams hosted each week are 800 times more than QVC’s weekly broadcast hours.

Company statistics also indicate sellers on Whatnot sell nine times more than sellers in other major marketplaces, that customers make 10 times more transactions than they do on other peer-to-peer marketplaces, and that viewers spend an average of more than 80 minutes a day watching live-streams.

In addition, customer retention on the Whatnot platform is a solid 62 per cent.

Whatnot followers cover a broad age spectrum, according to Armand Wilson. “It’s mostly adults but we have folks from different age groups,” he said. “I think it’s very common to see 20-year-olds just starting their collecting journey to much older people. Even my dad is involved and he’s 79.”

Baseball card collectors not only lust for cards of established stars, such as unanimous Most Valuable Players Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, but also for future heroes.

“People want to know who’s going to be the next big player,” Wilson explained.

Online Card-Breaking

Card-breaking, which he said has grown in popularity over the last two years, is a major feature of the Whatnot experience.

“People buy a box of cards with friends, divvy them up, and everyone gets a different pack,” Wilson said. “The breaker opens up a pack of cards and members of the group get individual cards. (National League Rookie of the Year) Paul Skenes was a huge card to get. It’s super exciting to watch.

“If you open the Whatnot app, there are hundreds of shows going on at any time – just like Cable-TV,” Wilson said. “Our sellers have auctions but some last only a minute. Quickness and excitement is a key component of what we do.

“We try bringing engagement to Whatnot. You can talk to the seller. The seller can call you by name. He knows what team you like and builds loyalty that way so you come back to the site.”

Thousands of people have.