Blast from the Past – Beckett Article on 2005 Purchase

Many times we get asked about the largest or most interesting deals that come across our purchasing team. Many people know us as one of the largest sellers of new trading card boxes and cases in the world, but our purchasing team (which is led by Reed) is also very involved in buying vintage products. Our team travels around the country throughout the year buying small and large deals, which can range from some older vintage singles to major purchases of unopened boxes and cases like the story below:

This article was originally published on beckett.com in November of 2005

Dave and Adam’s Boosts Inventory With $900,000 Purchase:

In terms of purchasing unopened cases of cards, Dave and Adam’s Card World has just gotten its hands on the equivalent of a royal flush.

Late last month the company wrote a $900,000 check to a father-son collecting team from New Mexico for more than 400 cases of 1970s and 1980s basketball, football and baseball cards, among other things.

“Back in the early 1980s, this gentleman in New Mexico had a friend who told him to buy cases of cards and put them away,” says Adam Martin, co-owner of Dave and Adam’s. “So, he would buy a case a wax, a case of fat packs, a case of racks and he would just put them away. He stopped doing that in 1985, but a friend told him he should buy each Fleer Basketball case to put away. He did, but when Fleer Basketball wasn’t doing well at the time, he severed ties with his adviser, because he felt he got bad advice.”

Included in the purchase are unopened cases of 1986-87, 1987-88 and 1988-89 Fleer Basketball. Or, as Dave and Adam’s is calling it, the “Trinity of Modern Basketball Cards.”

“In terms of 1986-87 Fleer Basketball, we haven’t seen a case in five years, much less bought one,” Martin says. “This gentleman bought 1986-87 Fleer basketball at $10 a box and he sold it to us for $8,300 a box. We paid $100,000 a case.”

The company paid $10,000 a case on 1987-88 and $5,000 a case on 1988-89. Also included were cases of 1977 Topps Baseball and 1984 Topps Football.

“This is the largest purchase we’ve ever made from a collector,” Martin says. “We should make a decent profit on it, but the seller was very savvy. He was very aware and he had done a lot of research. It took us about a month to put this deal to bed.”

Martin says that company officials were initially weary about the collector’s claim of having such a large stock of cases.

“He e-mailed like 40 pictures of this second-story garage he’d built onto his palatial home just to store these cards,” says Reed Kasaoka, head buyer for Dave and Adam’s. “This area was temperature-controlled with carpeted floors and a thumb-print-technology security system. Unreal.”

Although some items from the purchase are reserved for private buyers, Martin said that the baseball and basketball inventory is already up on the company’s Web site, dacardworld.com, and that the football inventory Kasaoka says the majority of the inventory will be for sale on their website, dacardworld.com, sometime during the next week.

“This deal means that a lot of investment-worthy cases that haven’t been seen in the marketplace for years — cases that we frankly thought just may not be available — are available,” Martin says.