General Forum

Thought it would be interesting to hear the stories from people that have had direct contact with producing sports cards in an organization or actually printing the cards. Love to hear interesting stories like this and probably will lead to fantastic insight and conversation.

There's one person i know of but he'll tell you about it himself :).

Agreed. Plenty of stories, I'm sure, as well.

Who? Me?

To be honest, I don't know who else, except that one guy who was a photographer for Pacific(?).

I was hoping there were others. And I think he was more than a photographer for Pacific.

I never have worked for one, but I have meet a couple of guys that worked for Collector's Edge when they went belly up.    It appears a lot of stuff went out the back door.   I did see a couple of John Elway cards that were really odd.   

OK, I guess it's just me. I worked for Star Company from 1986 to 1993. Started out just collating sets at home (with my parents as well), to doing some stuff for the boss at his house (as the company was run out of his garage for the first few years of its existence).

Eventually, there was a warehouse in NJ, but I only went there to pick up stuff to collate.

Then Star moved to FL, and so did me and my family. That was in late 89, early 90. While there, we started doing even more than simply collating sets. We started packing them in boxes to be shipped out.

We were getting complaints about the damage that was happening in the plastic snap boxes, so I was actually the one who researched various page outlets, received samples and prices, and worked out a deal with Rotman's to use their pages for the "series" sets. The owner was the one who then decided on the custom binders for each series. (I have my sets in them, and I do admit, I think they were the best things we ever did.)

When the sports licensing was starting to get out of control, the owner tried other means of making cards. Since it was the early 90s, cards were being made for everything under the sun. We tried our hand at some non-sports stuff, Miss Hawaiian Tropic, Miss USA/Miss Teen USA, and the ever-popular Hooters Calendar Girls. Because these were going to be actual foil packs, to be available everywhere, not just distributed to hobby dealers like the other sets were, we took our stuff with us to the 1992 NACS convention in Atlanta (NACS = North American Convenience Stores). There, we brought a few of the models who appeared in our sets to sign special promos made just for the show. (This is where I got to meet Morena Corwin, Heidi Tenety, and Lynn Austin.)

I only met one of the baseball players on our cards, and it was from working there, but not because he was on our cards. He had been a minor league player and he delivered our lunch to us. Asked if we did minor league cards and asked if we did the team he was with. We had. And you'll have to fogive me for not remembering the name.

By the time we got to the non-sports sets, we were finally doing typesetting on the computer. This allowed me to finally help in that area. I did many of the first Hooters set backs (and yes, I was the one responsible for the typo of the word "measurements" on one of the cards!). The models filled out forms that had basic questions on it and we used those to create the backs. Some of the models did not fill out their "measurements" (got it right now), so we guessed on those from the pictures we had (compared them to the others where they gave the measurements. And yes, the one who has on the back of her card "Her measurements are "perfect"." actually wrote on her form "perfect". I wasn't going to argue with her or try to say otherwise.

Seeing the typesetting process before the computer days was eye-opening. There is a reason the computer term is "cut and paste" - we literally cut things and pasted them down. That's how the sheets were done. Full size, stuff pasted and taped everywhere. I think there's a Will Clark set where you can see the edge of the tape on one of the photos (they were slides that were used).

As I mentioned in other threads, we had quite the surplus of overruns. The printers would cut the cards, and rubber band them in stacks of about 150-250 cards (depending on the printer - we used many - we never did our own printing). So we of course ordered more because we knew the top and bottom 5-10 cards would be waste. (Being that I was a collector myself before starting there, when we collated the sets, we were very particular to pull off anything that was not 100% mint.) Additionally, the 100-card sheets were laid out (10 x 10) so that the promo cards for the 9-card sets were on the same row as the 9 cards. This meant that even though only 1 promo was released for every 5 sets released, we printed 80% more promo cards than needed (beyond the known waste). Because of the abundance of these, and the fact that they were either completely blank backed or mostly blank, we kept stacks of these on our desks and near phones throughout the warehouse/office for taking notes. Yep, we wrote on the backs of cards I saw selling in SCD at the time for $50, $75, even $100 a piece. I used to laugh at that. 

In addition to those overruns, sometimes, not everything sold. I mentioned this in another recent thread, we were actually paid to rip these extras in half (and we actually returned them to the warehouse because we had huge dumpsters there, and the owner didn't want them sitting at our curb). Gold sets, Silver sets, minor league sets, Court Kings sets, maybe even some Nova sets, you name it, we most likely ripped it.

Eventually, business started taking a downturn. money was tight for the company. We could no longer ask for amount we had been getting for collating, packing, and sealing the boxes (we basically did the entire operation at our home, I slapped the UPS COD labels on at the warehouse). My hours started getting cut at the warehouse (I went from 24 hours a week to 9 to 6). After a couple times of us not getting the previously-promised price for the job, we decided it would be best for us to part ways, and so in July 1993, we did.

I tried to keep it fairly brief, but touch on most of what I did. There are some other things here and there that I did. I am always willing to answer any specifics, if I have those answers. Feel free to ask anything you want.