How Topps expanding trading-card footprint in Japan

TOKYO — Steps away from Shibuya Crossing, known as the busiest crosswalk in the world, the Topps logo is branded across the entrance to a building bracketed by images of baseball cards featuring some of the most notable Chicago Cubs and Los Angeles Dodgers stars.

Ahead of the Tokyo Series between the teams, Topps launched an interactive trading-card experience to celebrate Japan’s baseball icons. Open through Sunday, the three-floor immersive experience brings fans through the card-collecting world, creating both a way to shine a spotlight on stars such as Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui and educating how Topps has built its passionate baseball card-collecting community.

Expanding beyond the U.S. is a key part of the evolution for Topps, which had its trading-card and collectibles division bought by Fanatics in 2022. Tapping into Asia and particularly Japan has been an emphasis for the company. Topps is in its fourth year of creating baseball products exclusive for the Japanese market.

“We’re trying to build the momentum, take a very long-term perspective on Japan,” Topps president of trading cards David Leiner said. “Generally speaking, the market here, you have a population of 130 million people, half of them love baseball, so long term we see this as a great market and a really great collector base.”

The top floor of the Topps pop-up features an exhibit dedicated to Shohei Ohtani that includes video highlights of his career and display cases of his cards donated by collectors plus two items the slugger contributed himself: a base from his 50-50 game in Miami last year and a bat he used in the World Series.

“The Japanese market was steadily building I think anyway, (Ohtani) just poured gasoline on the fire,” Leiner said. “Card collecting over here has been growing. Our sales were growing, Shohei,  I mean, his career has been great. … It’s really just propelled things. I think the levels we’re achieving now we would have achieved without Shohei, we’re getting there a lot faster.

“Baseball sees big opportunities across Asia, and we’re right there with them in lockstep.”

While Ohtani is a clear driving force for Topps in Japan, there are signs the impact goes beyond the superstar, aided by the infusion of Japanese talent in the majors over the last five years, led by the Cubs’ Shota Imanaga and Seiya Suzuki and the Dodgers’ Yoshinobu Yamamoto and now Roki Sasaki. Their presence in two of the largest U.S. media markets certainly doesn’t hurt either.

In 2021, Topps’ sales in Japan came in at $1.5 million, a figure that increased to $22.6 million in 2024, according to Topps Japan data. The company is expecting a 10-times increase in sales and collectors in the next five years, attributing that impending growth in part to an expansion of local hobby stores in Japan. Topps has plans for at least six Japanese-specific products this year among their popular Nippon Professional Baseball series, J1 League (the top professional soccer league in the country) and MLB products specific to the Japanese market in collaboration with Ohtani, who has an exclusive long-term deal with Topps.

Leiner believes Japan is an “easy” nine-figure market for revenue for Topps after the company hit more than $800 million in global baseball sales last year.

“What’s tricky about our market in general is the demand is well exceeding our supply, which is great for collectibles, but we allocate a lot of product,” Leiner said. “So we’ll allocate Japan, say, just making it up, we might allocate 250 cases, the demand might be 800, it might be 1,000, so what we’re trying to do is, when we grow the market, grow it properly, ensure that the product’s being opened, it’s being collected, it’s being consumed. We want to avoid any junk-wax era. We don’t want to oversupply a market.”

One difference Topps has noticed between Japanese baseball card collectors, and by extension in Asia, and the U.S. card-collecting market is they tend to buy and hold more products than American collectors, who buy and hold but also flip, rip and trade cards.

The potential in baseball-loving Japan is obviously appealing, and products such as Topps’ Tokyo Series special Series 1 release highlights how the company looks to tap into that area. They started working with Takashi Murakami on the special Tokyo Series box set about six months ago to have it ready to release in time.

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“We’re in early days here in Japan for where we can take the market so we’re really trying to build awareness here, educate collectors and a lot of what we’re doing here, these are entry-level price points as well,” Leiner said. “There’s definitely demand here for high-end $10,000 boxes and all that. But we think, ultimately, to be most successful and to really grow the market and to introduce new collectors, we’ve got to have some lower-level price points to get people to try it.”

Leiner, 42, has had an up-close look at Topps’ evolution over the last 15 years since joining the company initially as its director of finance. A Highland Park native, Leiner grew up a Cubs fan and remembers filling binders with cards, calling it an embedded part of childhood. Leiner’s love of baseball and sports cards led him to run a sports memorabilia and promotions company in high school through college at Indiana, ultimately exiting that business when he got a job in investment banking and private equity with Goldman Sachs.