Hi Andy,
I know you are a vintage guy at heart, but it is obviously a diminishing market share, if you are wearing your VP hat. There will never be more vintage cards, obviously (although I bet there are loads of raw Boomer sets out there to be uncovered in the next decade).
TCG is where it's at in terms of grading volume, and volume pays the bills. Maybe the pendulum will swing back to sports someday. But vintage is a tiny share of your sports volume. I would love to see more of a footprint for CGC in vintage, but I wonder to what extent it is a priority, or can be prioritized given you are grading 350k TCG cards per month!
So, just wondering--is there an official CGC position / mission / plan as it pertains to vintage card grading? Is there any upside to gaining vintage share when everything else comes in more organicaly?
Thanks in advance!
I think there is upside in gaining market share in vintage. Sports as a whole is a priority for CGC and vintage sports is one aspect of that.
TCG may be the flavor of the day, but TCG is not the entire card market. One of the reasons why we want to grow vintage and sports in general is that we want to be able to offer a complete service, meaning we have expertise in all areas of cards. We do not want to specialize in just one area. Many collectors and dealers are involved with a range of material. We want to be the trusted expert that can authenticate and grade all of your cards, whether your sub box has all TCG, or a mix of TCG, non-sports and sport and vintage. It is frustrating when you have cards returned to you because that grading company cannot do that type of material.
We have teams that only work on TCG, and teams that only do sports and there are teams that do non-sports. So we can focus on specific areas without compromising other areas like TCG.
And while I can't argue that there is a finite number of vintage cards left to grade, that finite number is still quite large. Think about just T206 cards. Theres no doubt that there were millions printed. A large number have survived. We see T206 cards on a near daily basis today. I saw T-cards on a daily basis going back to early 2000s and we are still grading raw T-cards!
