Score one for Bartolo Colon, Aaron Judge and Tyler Austin, at least as far as TOPPS is concerned. The trio have been among the best-selling for TOPPS NOW™, the on-demand card platform the company launched with MLB this year, a platform which has been a huge success.
On Tuesday Topps announced they had surpassed 300,000 cards sold thus far, exceeding the expectations of the program and helping to re-engage thousands of fans, especially millennials, with the TOPPS brand and the joys of collecting now in an on-demand environment for the first time. Fans order an unlimited amount of cards in 24 hours, which TOPPS can produce on demand. The cards are then delivered in a few days, where in past years fans had to wait until the next year’s set to collect the images.
“We have been able to use TOPPS NOW to provide fans with a great emotional keepsake while the memory is top of mind in a long baseball season,” said Jeff Heckman, Director, New Product Development & eCommerce Marketplace, TOPPS said in a statement. “By furnishing fans with a real-time, state of the art platform for actual cards, we have been able to both create a new market without alienating the traditional collector. The best thing is we have just scratched the surface with this technology, and have even more unique things planned for the playoffs and World Series, when fandom is at its highest.”
All 30 teams have received more than one card, with the Chicago Cubs (38 cards), Boston Red Sox (36), and the New York Yankees (28) having the most. The top players have been David Ortiz with eight cards, and Ichiro and Chicago’s Kris Bryant with six each. TOPPS has also sold over 1,000 sets of Chicago Cubs postseason sets on preorder, without a game being played yet.
Ichiro Suzuki’s 3,000th hit holds the one day sales record of over 11,550 cards sold, with the Mets’ Colon second with over 8,000 cards delivered following the All-Star pitcher’s home run against the San Diego Padres in May. Judge and Austin have the 3rd most cards sold at over 5,000 when they hit back-to-back home runs in their first MLB plate appearances.
For all the details and the latest cards, check out Topps.com.