Hobby Musings: Inside Parkside’s IndyCar License – Interview
Hobby Musings: Inside Parkside’s IndyCar License – Interview Transcript
Editor’s note: Some text has been changed from original audio for grammar and clarity.
KS: Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Hobby Musings. I’m Kelsey Schroyer joined today by Matt Peek of Parkside Cards. Matt, thank you for joining us.
MP: Thank you very much for having me again. Thank you.
KS: So, look pretty exciting new license and new products you have coming out. What more can you tell me about them?
MP: Yeah, it’s a whirlwind. We’re starting with IndyCar. It should start, if it hasn’t already started to appear on shelves, it should be appearing on shelves now. It is a license that we chased for a while, and we’re really quite honored and excited to be presenting the first IndyCar trading card product, I think, in a bit over 10 years, or maybe a little bit less with some smaller offerings, but the first full-scale Indy product in quite a while. We’re chasing a whole bunch of other fun stuff. We’re partnered with the NWSL still. Making some great women’s soccer card product. The US women’s soccer team has got another really rad set coming out. I mean, you invited me here, so I figure you should ask questions. Otherwise, I’m just going to gush about all the cool stuff I think we’re doing.
KS: You mentioned IndyCar hasn’t really had a major offering in nearly a decade. Why did you push so hard to get it?
MP: It is hands-down one of the most American sports there is. The Indianapolis 500 is just apple pie. With this amazing popularity that we’re seeing in F1, it felt very necessary to acknowledge the open -wheel racing competition where the drivers are actually the stars and not the cars. It’s night and day with what F1 and what Indy are. Those are the contributing factors that make you chase a license and really feel strongly about what you’re about to do.
IndyCar’s got a century of history that’s just really cool. There are some really great cards that people have shown us that are really small regional one-offs from the IndyCar history that I think are going inspire some of the product we’ll be making of this in the coming years. It just seemed like Indy not having a trading card product was a void that not only deserved to be taken care of, but the right thing to do. Good, fun place to be too.
KS: So, looking at the Indy, you’ve got autographs in the product and the main product. Who are some of the bigger names you think collectors should be looking out for in them?
MP: Alex Palou is the champion recently. Josef Newgarden. There’s a lot of youngsters. It’s hard because, I don’t know that you have your international superstars, like F1 or NASCAR even. I think you have superstars that people are going to learn to appreciate. Again, the cool thing about Indy is that any given race, anybody can get to the finish line before everybody else.
So, I think what I’m going to say as the safe answer is that you should endeavor to have one of everybody. Maybe look at the Indy NXT autographs, which are a little bit shorter print. Those are the youngsters that are probably on the path to being full-fledged IndyCar drivers in the next year or two. There’s a guy with the greatest possible name in racing history in Sting Ray Robb. So, I think everybody should absolutely feel like they need to put that card into their collection.
There’s a young lady who races in Indy NXT, Jamie Chadwick. She’s kind of a rock star. I think if she gets a good opportunity to cement her status in IndyCar, she’ll seize it. That’s probably a great card to put into your collection. So, I’m going to play devil’s advocate and say buy some product and maybe chase a little bit of everything.
I will also say there might be some secret autograph cards we haven’t really told too many people about that fall almost as case hits. I won’t say they’re case hits in the hobby. But they, they fall pretty, pretty often with, you know, full team autographs and some pretty cool stuff.
KS: All right, Matt, looking at the IndyCar product, you talked about how it’s been a while, how you’ve been chasing it so hard. What was kind of the biggest challenge in putting it together?
MP: The biggest thing in any new license is really just waiting until you find the right person internal at the entity, the league, that feels the same kind of passion or excitement about getting a product made. It’s labor on league side like we can’t possibly comprehend. And so right out of the gate, it’s just who wants to do the work on their end? Once you find that person, it’s gangbusters. The pedal was to the floor, we were moving. That’s just the longest part of the process, really.
KS: Shifting gears to soccer, which is kind of what you’ve made your name on here in recent history. What else do you have coming out for soccer this year?
MP: Our relationship with the NWSL is strong. We’ve got an amazing Volume 1 coming out. We’re really excited about it. It’s going to be pretty much exactly what the fans expect from us. A nice base set with some quick parallels, promising prospects, on-card signatures. Just something that we feel confident in cranking out on the regular. It’s our flagship soccer product.
We are working on our first fully chrome product, if you will. We did a teaser in Volume 2 last year called Pacific, and we are going to release a full-scale product of that this year that we’re super jazzed about. I can’t wait for people to start to see what kind of creative fun we get to have in that, medium if you will, or that trading card substrate.
U.S. Soccer’s rad. We’re partnered with them on the women’s national team side. We’re finalizing a recap of last year with some first U.S. soccer cards of Olivia Moultrie, Jaedyn Shaw, that we’re really excited about. Really cool signatures that are going to be available in that. It’ll be a DTC product, just because it’s a smaller quantity, but it’ll be one in every two is going to have a signature if it all goes to plan, so knock on wood right there.
We’re chasing down more stuff. We’re working with some USL. teams to do some team sets while we’re chasing to see if the USL might want to do a full-scale product. We really buy into what the multiple divisions of U.S. Soccer can be, especially, how these lower tier teams are really cranking out some insanely, insanely strong talent. We’re optimistic about the ecosystem of U.S. soccer in that regard and bringing collectibles into that space. We actually just did a team set for a MASL team, the Empire Strykers. We think that’s going really well, it’ sort of fun. It is the 100th anniversary of the Negro Leagues World Series. Maybe we’ll… revisit our relationship with the Negro League Baseball Museum.
KS: Oh, wow.
MP: There’s a lot that we’re working on at any given time. We’re excited about trying to roll it out as fast as is humanly possible. We try to tell everybody that we do everything intentionally. Our game plan is to never sort of just throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks. I feel like we’ve been in the hobby now long enough that the majority of the time when we do release a product, people know that it’s something we’re passionate about, something we want to see them share that passion with us. We’re just one foot, one step at a time, and we’re having a great time doing it all.
KS: Now that all sounds really good. I can’t wait to see them hit the shelves, you know, see what else you come out with this year. Thank you so much for joining us today.
MP: Dude, thank you for having me. Sorry that I broke the technical side of this interview. Just really quick, shout out to GTS.
Hobby Musings: Inside Parkside’s IndyCar License – More Resources
Kelsey’s ability to bring hobby coverage to the mainstream sports fan has been a true asset. GTS is happy to feature his thoughts on collecting in Hobby Musings. The opinions expressed are his and do not necessarily reflect those of GTS Distribution.
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