How I Built And Sold A $500,000 Online Pokemon Store!

yo yo that's good how you doing I'm looking at an email are you looking at that email I already signed it you already signed it oh the nine months comes down to today give me a countdown all right all right five all right four three two one two years ago we were locked in our houses with nothing to do nowhere to go terrified and honestly really bored and while the stock market was plummeting a different kind of asset was on the rise remember Pokemon cards from the 90s well they're hot again the covid-19 pandemic has seen a Resurgence in the demand for Pokemon those cartoon monsters have been flying off the shelves you see while the world stopped moving forward for those few months many of us decided to go back back to a better time when we were kids playing with Pokemon cards thousands of people across the globe stumbled on their old Pokemon card collections got back into the Hobby and Pokemon exploded back into the mainstream vintage Pokemon cards skyrocketed in value reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars for a box and the world fell in love with Pokemon all over again two of those creators were like many of our fellow creators we had been huge Pokemon fans as kids and gotten back into the hobby when we got older we've been making content together for years and even filmed Pokemon pack opening videos as far back as 2016 when we used to live together last year I got this text from Jack eventually we locked onto the name copped cards and after a few weeks of reaching out to different people we knew in the industry we managed to secure our first supplier a retailer who agreed to sell to us at a slightly cheaper rate if we bought enough product and their definition of enough product was a lot about forty thousand dollars worth just to get started so you're telling me we gotta we gotta drop some money right now just a bit just a bit you know how are you feeling about it I think we should because like the long term there's no downside and I think that we'll have a hot start yeah like I think if you just get developed and we just purchase this for now get the ball rolling then we can like get other Distributors and we'll have like an audience all right man okay let them know let's do it pull the trigger all right we're doing it yeah let's do it somehow we came to the conclusion that yeah dropping 20 grand each on Pokemon cards was a good call and we placed the order now we have hundreds of boxes in jad's condo storage in Toronto a name and that's it so Jad and I were living five hours apart we just spent forty thousand dollars on a bunch of Pokemon cards and didn't really know how we were gonna sell them because we were in a lockdown our respective cities were shut down so even if we wanted to open a physical store no one would be able to come in and buy anything we knew we needed to go online to reach our customers now fortunately I've already done a few branding projects with this amazing designer based in Argentina so I hit her up with the project a mood board and a couple weeks later we had our final branding now we've got to build a website fortunately it's 2021 and the days of needing to completely code your own website are long behind us plus we're based in Ottawa the home of the world's number one e-commerce web platform Shopify and also my girlfriend had just finished building her own e-commerce business on Shopify a few months earlier so you're like a Shopify expert right yeah can you help me build a Shopify website cards no why not give up please what please okay just if I have questions uh can I ask you for answers fine okay I'll take you so Olivia showed me the basics and over the next couple of weeks I worked every day building out the cop cards website on April 20th 2021 I did our first test orders and two days later on April 22nd Chad hosted our first ever live breaking live stream on YouTube and we got five orders and we were amped yes sir how is it going everybody and welcome [Music] there we go welcome to the first ever live stream under cards I'm so ant to be back we started live streaming on YouTube hosting live breaks and kind of by accident during a pandemic we created a digital version of your local hobby shop so more and more of our longtime viewers started coming through the streams and shopping with us and it was amazing then a month in this happened holy yo oh my God oh my God one of our biggest stream supporters Rakesh placed an order for fifty seven hundred dollars it was insane we'd never expected something like that to happen but it ended up becoming our first special event live break we brought in our fellow Creator sneaker talk and together him and Jad opened 5700 worth of Pokemon cards and went Charizard honey looking for the most expensive card in the set which at the time was selling for hundreds of dollars per card maybe I should watch that soon yo we hit it let's go yes oh another one oh my god let's go oh my god oh my god let's go we hit it the Charizard V-Max now you might be wondering what is this live breaking thing that has people spending fifty seven hundred dollars on Pokemon cards typically when you purchase TCG products like Pokemon you would go into a store buy a pack or a box of some kind and open it yourself either at the store or at home which is fun but can be kind of lonely live breaking changed all of that in a live break the idea is that the breaker the person opening the cards opens them live online so it's kind of like watching a show but you're a part of the show there's a bunch of different live breaking formats but basically instead of opening packs on your own you're having someone else open them for you live with the community of like-minded people we started out at jad's condo in Toronto I managed the back end and Chad did all the heavy lifting for the first month or so and then he moved back to Ottawa and we built our own custom cop cards live streaming studio in my warehouse but things weren't all perfect right before he left Chad got coveted and it hit him hard he ended up in the hospital and it got scary I remember calling him almost every day expecting that he'd be feeling better but it just kept dragging on and on for what felt like weeks fortunately after the trip to the hospital they gave him some fluids and it seemed to give his body the Boost it needed to fight it off and though he was still weak and had lost like 15 pounds he somehow managed to pack all of his stuff along with hundreds of boxes of Pokemon cards into a U-Haul and travel back to Ottawa with his dad I remember him arriving at the warehouse probably around midnight looking exhausted we offloaded all the product out of the truck I sent him off to get some sleep and I spent the rest of the night bringing everything into the warehouse what he didn't know is that I had also been working on a little surprise for him but I knew he'd save that for another day okay okay three two one open yo what the heck is this [Music] yo what oh my and then turn around holy is this a new stream setup this is a whole new song oh oh my goodness you guys don't know the struggle this is beautiful we got you decked out with everything let me walk you through the experience that you have I'm gonna cry I'm gonna cry bro holy smoke as you know Jad had been streaming from his house and I knew we needed an upgrade so we built a custom Studio filled with all the bells and whistles along with some new custom copped card stream branding to really show everyone we were taking things seriously a few months after the move we even managed to connect with an actual Pokemon distributor to improve our product selection and pricing and since then we've just been chugging along we hired our first team member ybm one of our moderators who happened to live in Ottawa we hosted our first 24-hour live stream and of course have been pulling some heat for our live Breakers believe it or not we actually got bigger orders than the one Rakesh placed in our first month from some of our top Breakers who I've got to give a special shout out to we got wolves workout Sam here obamado KBS com1 full RJ Megan Fufu and many many more now uh just over a year after starting the business it's insane to say this but we have sold almost half a million dollars worth of product and we are merging with one of the largest hobby shops in the country that's right a few months ago hobbiesville reached out to us on IG to discuss working together and after lots of discussion back and forth Chad and I decided it was time to level up and today is the day we officially merge with hobbiesville where we're going to keep doing everything we've been doing with cop cards but just on a bigger scale with more products more resources and an even bigger community so if you want to stick around for the ride be sure to subscribe to this channel for another update check out hobbiesville on YouTube Tick Tock twitch and their website and who knows maybe in a couple years I'll be doing a part two where we talk about how we sold hobbiesville for eight figures I also need to take a quick minute to give a massive thank you to the cop cards family you guys have supported Chad and I on this journey for the past year and we have had such an amazing time and absolutely none of this would be possible without you guys so from the bottom of my heart thank you all right four three two one ah I clicked it [Music] it's done

Channel: ItsYeBoi

Views: 43,246

Keywords: itsyeboi, startup, business, shopify, shopify store, pokemon cards, pokemon store, small business

Id: FFnsGNBP4GA

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022