Hobby Musings: Inside the Creation of 2024 Pulse Baseball – Interview
Hobby Musings: Inside the Creation of 2024 Pulse Baseball – Interview Transcript
Editor’s note: Some text has been altered from original audio for grammar and clarity.
KS: Hey everyone, welcome to another edition of Hobby Musings. I’m Kelsey Schroyer. Joined today by Pulse’s Cory Hollingsworth. Cory, thank you for joining us.
CH: Thank you so much, happy to be here.
KS: Pulse Baseball is coming out to market. What can you tell me about it?
CH: We’re super excited. It’s our inaugural release. It’s the first time that we’re hitting the market with our product. Features 60 of the top prospects in baseball. We’ve got Evan Carter, Junior Caminero, Coby Mayo, Zac Veen, Brock Wilkin. Lots of different players from most of the clubs in Major League Baseball. We’re really excited that everything is on-card autographs. Every box delivers at least one autograph that’s 99 or less, as well as a couple of parallels per box. We’re super excited to have this at the market.
KS: So, what inspired you to start this product up?
CH: So, the owner of our company, he actually is really involved with a bunch of brick-and-mortar stores. He was like, I really want to start something that is a new unlicensed brand and something that’s going to focus on on-card autographs and print quality. So, he reached out to me and he’s like, hey, I know that you had been with Panini for a long time and have seen the market and seen the way that cards are made. Do you want to come in and help? And so, I came in and I was able to get it going and sure enough, many months later, Pulse Baseball is out on the market.
And what’s really exciting to me is just being able to focus on, again, these things that I think are of extra value to collectors in focusing on on-card autographs, focusing on print quality and good parallel structures. I’d say that it’s a little bit of a hybrid mix where it’s still got that classic feel from previous, like I’d say, easy one-box opens or one-pack, one-box opens, but it’s still also catered just for an easy rip today with three autographs, two parallels, two base in each box.
KS: You talk about the on-card autographs, the other features. What was most important to you to absolutely make sure was included in this product?
CG: That’s a great question. You know, to me, it really was the on-card. I mean, seeing the value of obviously being an unlicensed brand, we know that there’s obviously going to be a lot of different things against us, and that’s fine. But to me, being able to open up a pack right away and see a top prospect like Enrique Bradfield, you get this great on-card autograph right here. You can see it looks really, really great. Or deliver hot value with Junior Caminero, who is one of the top prospects in baseball, hopefully getting called up any minute now. And for me, just having a nice, simple design, a simple product that collectors can resonate with very easily and just understand what they’re going to open.
KS: So, you’ve worked in the card industry a while now. People on the team have as well. In starting the new brand, starting this new product, what was the biggest challenge getting it off the ground?
CH: There were a few different things. I’d say, coming from my past with another manufacturer, there’s an entire process in place. Everything was already set from decades of working in the card industry. So, kind of coming in from scratch and saying, okay, this is what was done in the past. What can this manufacturer do? What can this printer do? How do we guarantee that we have the best quality that we can? How do we maximize our time, our efforts? We’ve had great relationships with the printer who we’re working with, and this printer works directly with all the major card companies as well. So that was a really a great blessing for us.
I’d say one of the other challenges is just the simple things of doing on-card autographs, coordinating packages. Making sure that they came out in a timely manner, making sure that all the labels are right, making sure that everything went as well as we could. We did two trips out to Arizona and Florida during spring training to make sure that we had signing sessions with some of the top players that we could. Just doing all the logistics of that. Those were really big challenges, I’d say, just as we were getting going, just making sure that all of our ducks were in a row to get all that lined up.
KS: So, you just showed us some of the top prospect autographs who are in this set. How did you decide on the final checklist for the product?
CH: We took a look at the top prospects in baseball. So obviously, you dial into the top 100. You take a look at the top five prospects for each organization and kind of dial it down from there. And it’s like, okay, how can we deliver value? And who can we add in here who will, have that nice combination of value today, value tomorrow? Since we’ve started this process, which I think has been now a seven-month process at this point, we’ve had multiple players get called up. We’ve had multiple players get promoted. We’ve had a couple of players go straight from Double-A straight into the majors, which has been really exciting. We actually just filmed a content piece with Spencer Schwellenbach, who just debuted for the Braves, which has been really exciting. He was stoked to see our cards.
I’d say that when it came down to figuring out who we want in this first project, it was that kind of a balance of, hey, we know that Evan Carter is super popular right now. We know that Caminero is super popular right now, but who else is going to be impacting the market in three, four, five, six months? Somebody like Coby Mayo, we got in and he’s one of Baltimore’s hottest prospects, and we’re waiting for him to get called up any minute now. And then, seeing people like Drew Thorpe get called up and a lot of different guys who we had who I’d say were, you know, hey, these are going to be great people to have, all of a sudden now become really important parts of this checklist.
KS: All right, I’ll get you out of here on this question. So, this product’s been settled and put to bed. What do you have coming out in the future for new products?
CH: Yeah, thank you for asking that. So, we have a football product that’s coming out that’s going to be all rookie on-card autographs as well, featuring, I think it’s 62 or 60 of the top prospects in college football at the moment. We also have more baseball products that are going to be coming out later this year. And next year, we’re actually going to be ramping up, and there’s going to be a lot more releases coming out. So mostly across baseball and football verticals, but there could be some other things in store.
KS: That all sounds really great. I can’t wait to see these cards and hold them in hand. Corey, thank you so much for joining us today.
CH: Thank you so much, I really appreciate it.
Hobby Musings: Inside the Creation of 2024 Pulse Baseball
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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