Hobby supplies history

[sirraffles]

Actually, the ones with the patterned cardboard insert and nylon screws came before the others. You are right, they were expensive. At first I packed them in individual boxes, then bags with a printed header. Of course, cards weren't worth all that much in the '70's and collectors had no experience with individual card holders. Oh, I can't count the times that I heard, "but that's as much as the card is worth!" I did end up selling maybe 30-40k of them over a few years. Next I did the fold overs, as a response to the price issue. I never did like them, in fact I hated them. I got out of making those as quickly as I could. Others started making them almost immediately and continued for some time.

The injection molded ones might have been a little earlier than '83. They snapped together and had a recessed spot for the card. I left enough space at the bottom for my "big idea"-hot stamping things like "Rookie Card" or "MVP". I sold quite a few of those.

By around '82 people had been making sheets for a long time but there was always a shortage as the hobby was growing quite quickly. I found an agent in Taiwan, at the time not an easy thing to do for a very small business, and imported a load of half a million sheets. They arrived in a cold December and were absolutely frozen solid. I had a huge pile of cases in the middle of the warehouse that took almost ten days to thaw out. You could see a really thick cloud of steam coming off them. Only in retrospect does it seem humorous to me...I'd invested almost all my cash into the scheme and had only a big pile of steaming .... to show for it. The sheets were forever damaged and were really, really terrible. I was going to throw them away but dealers were so desperate for sheets that they wanted them anyway. In the end I made a handsome profit selling frozen blocks of 100 sheets each. Those were the days!