,Hobby Musings: Kevin Heffner, Historic Autographs Prepared for Eventful 2023 – For fans of premium autographs in their card boxes, Kevin Heffner and Historic Autographs are aiming to have you covered this year. As in years past, the company will be releasing products that feature ink from the most notable names in baseball history, as well as history in general. Beyond signatures, the company has some other pretty notable cards slated for release this year. To find out more, I had the chance to catch up with Mr. Heffner via Zoom.
Hobby Musings: Kevin Heffner, Historic Autographs Prepared for Eventful 2023 – Interview
Hobby Musings: Kevin Heffner, Historic Autographs Prepared for Eventful 2023 – Interview Transcript
Editor’s note: Some of the text has been edited from the original audio content. Interview was originally recorded on 1/25/2023.
KS: Hey, everyone, welcome to another edition of Hobby Musings. I’m Kelsey Schroyer, here with Kevin Heffner of Historic Autographs. Kevin, thank you for joining us.
KH: Thank you very much for having me, Kelsey.
KS: All right, Kevin, New Year, 2023. What do you have coming out this year?
KH: Well, this year we actually put out, you know, a product that came out today. It was a single-signed baseball product. It’s easy to put together. I know Tristar puts out a bunch of them. We’ve done them before in the past where we had just hall of Famers. But this product doesn’t have as many Hall of Famers. It has some, but it’s priced in accordance with that. David Ortiz went from $25 to $250 a signature. So, if I was to do a Hall of Fame only baseball product, the price would have been factory cost, $120. These, we put an MSRP of $49.99. They’re supposed to be affordable, because we’re in the midst of a recession, money is going to be tight.
So we’re trying to put out products that are much more affordable. We started the year off with that. I’m not going to say we’re not proud of it, but those aren’t the products that get me excited. Products that get me excited are going to be things like the Gilded Age, which comes out on February the 8th. The Gilded Age covers the Gilded Age, what some people call the Industrial Revolution. We generally use the years 1869 to 1912, and that’s the way we can get some other events in there. We have a card for the first football game in 1869, things like that. But it’s always about the relics, the inserts, and the ingenuity that we’re able to put in our products, because we can’t compete with the companies that have the licensing rights, because we can’t put in 50 Trout autograph red cards. You know what I mean? We can’t do that. We don’t put rookie cards in our products. You have a rookie that has a great year, and that card shoots up in value hundreds, thousands, even tens and hundreds of thousands for some of these guys.
We can’t do that. Our cards, our series, our products are always predicated on the value of our ingenuity. And one of the things is that we have to make sure we make sets. We make sets that we think are exciting, that flop. We make sets that we think are exciting, that people go crazy for. And it’s not our judgment that matters. It’s the collector’s judgment that matters if they’re going to really like something or not.
KS: So, you’re talking about the ingenuity you’re doing with Gilded Age. What would you say is the biggest ingenuity you’re introducing with this product?
KH: Well, this product, one of the biggest ones is we’re going to have a card. Like I said, it’s going to be this thick, and these are actually redemptions, because what we can’t do is put that card in a pack. But in that card, it has an actual piece from a very famous shipwreck of the SS Atlantic. It sank in 1873 off of Nova Scotia. The redemption card will look like that. That’s actually an image. Not an image, but a rendering of the SS Atlantic shipwreck. And we have provenance behind these pieces, and no other company has ever done something like this. And that’s where we come in. We want to be able to say, people haven’t done that. We want to try it. Now we could be right or wrong. We won’t know until it hits the market.
When I first did the DNA cards, Upper Deck had done it, but we did it differently. And our DNA cards are uniformly more accepted in the hobby now because we didn’t just do a few. We ended up doing Prime over last summer, which was a full set. And some of the names in there span like everything from Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, to the presidents, to Charles Dickens, to Queen Victoria, to Jimi Hendrix, to Kirk Cobain. It was different than what had come before. And so that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to be different. In Gilded Age, you can get what’s called a buyback, and everybody knows what they look like. That is a Gilded Age buyback card. This one is an Old Judge. Well, this is actually Sweet Caporal, but in the Old Judge style. There are Old Judge baseball cards, Allen and Ginter baseball cards, and Goodwin Champion baseball cards. We have several hundred T206s, well, several hundred T205, sixes, and sevens.
KS: Wait a minute. T206. Does that mean Honus Wagner is in this set, in this product?
KH: No, Wagner is not going to be in there. We can’t make a product that’s affordable with him in it. And that’s again, that puts us at a disadvantage from these other companies, which can put out, you know, a 1-of-5 red version of an autograph of, say, a LeBron. Not LeBron because he’s with Upper Deck, but you know what I mean? Like, yeah, they can make it so that they are creating value where value hadn’t existed. And that’s not a bad thing. But you get a hot rookie and you get his one-of-one Prizm card or superfactor or whatever, that’ a card that can instantly be worth six figures. For me, to put something in that’s worth six figures, that means it had to have at least six figures to start. And that’s going to skew the price of our products. And we really want our products to go to everyone.
KS: So you talk about that having what you’re putting on your product. The value kind of is the value, because the grand majority of the subjects have been deceased. The market’s kind of set. With that being said, one of the things you made your company’s kind of reputation on was historic baseball autographs. Your Babe Ruths, your Ty Cobbs, even guys like Harry Heilmann. With the boom in the market over the last couple of years though, an autograph that may have been worth, let’s say, $3,000 in 2019 is now worth even more. What have you been seeing with that in terms of, shall we say, increased value or new value with your cards, especially for those harder to get autographs?
KH: Well, think about it like this. In this industry being probably the smallest trading card company out there, or one of the smallest, I am basically a one-legged man in an a$$-kicking contest. I have to fight, and then I got one hand tied behind my back. All I can do is the best I can do. I know that sounds cliche, but really my company, it’s about the way we put things out. It’s about the fact that I back our products 100%. I buy my wax back from people if I see them under selling it. I want people to know that what we put out, we truly believe in. So when I come out with products like Kings. Kings, everybody knows it’s going to be good stuff in there. And unlike a lot of these other companies, when we put those things out, we add value because it’s part of our Kings series and we put it out in a Beckett holder. And when they know it’s coming, they know that they’ve spent money on it. So even if they open up an expensive box, then it only has, say, a Muhammad Ali autograph. Well, if you look for Mohammed Ali, you can find him $100 and a quarter, $150 if you look. I mean, a lot of people are trying to get more, but when you see them in our holder and a Kings holder, the grandeur and beauty of the card, they consistently get double that price. And so all we can do is our reputation matters. And if our reputation is strong when we put those autographs in, even if I have to pay, I don’t get everything cheap. Everybody can find out what I paid, because you can see the items out there. I’m the one bidding on it. And so I have to be able to make it so that people prefer an Historic Autograph with a solid reputation behind it, in a Beckett holder with a solid reputation behind, and that it’s worth more than just a regular cut in a Becket holder. And that’s, I think, one of the good things that our company does is, we do add value to these things.
I want to do Kings again, but for me to make Kings, there are so many other autographs that I’m just priced out on. But I will get to a product that is going to be King-esque, but so much more. And if I can complete it by the end of the year, Kelsey, you’re going to love that product. When I get to it, I just want to go over a couple of products that are coming out that are going to be done pretty soon, and then I’ll get to the real big ticket stuff.
Of the products that I was talking about, we have Gilded Age coming out. We’re very proud of Gilded Age. We think Gilded Age because it has buybacks because it has the one-of-one sketch cards that we do. Our artists are fantastic. They seem to get decent money. Some of our cards sell for more than the Star Wars one-of-one sketch cards. And I was just amazed by that. I was baffled. But our artists, I give them carte blanche to put on the card what they want to put on.But in there, you’re also going to be getting these shipwreck relics and the autograph shipwreck relics from the SS Atlantic shipwreck relics, that’s going to be in Gilded Age.
KS: What is the relic piece? What does the relic piece come from?
KH: The relic piece is a piece of earthenware, which was what plates were made out of back then. They were made out of China or earthenware. Earthenware was the lower class. That’s what normal people ate off of. They didn’t eat off of bone china. There was something like 100,000 pounds of earthenware when it went down. It was in the hull, and these pieces washed up on shore on this small island in Nova Scotia and have been collected by an expert. And then I got the pieces, and I’m putting them in these cards.
Now, only the redemptions will show up in the packs because they’re so thick. But we have the cards made, and they’re right now being trimmed because of the thickness of the card and the special fronts that we have on them so that the piece doesn’t fall out. They have to be trimmed very carefully. so I don’t have one to show you right now, but I will have them by the time of the release. So once people get them, they send me in the redemption. They’ll get one of those cards.
KS: So, Kevin, with products like this, we’ve seen kind of cards that have tragic circumstances around them. You’ve done something like that with steps like the Mob. We’ve seen other companies do them. Now, you kind of get two segments of the hobby. You get one that’s I don’t want to say appreciative, but kind of embraces the cards, because either this is what they collect, or they just like seeing something different. You also get some people who are like, why would you make a card that kind of embraces this tragedy like this? Now, if it’s the latter, what would you say to that?
KH: Well, I used this when I was discussing another product with my staff called Flight, because I said, within the product, we need to have very famous air tragedies. They need to be in the product itself. And the reason is because of this. If you were 100 years old today, and you look back over the last 100 years and were asked, what events do you remember exactly where you were when they happened? Somebody from then would probably tell you, Pearl Harbor. Everybody remembers where they were. Maybe not when Pearl Harbor happened, but they remember when the speech came out and what happened when they heard what happened at Pearl Harbor. You’d have to say the Kennedy assassination. You’d say the landing of the moon in 69. The Challenger. I mean, I remember I was in the lunch room at my high school when the Challenger went down. We were watching it. Our school was lucky enough to have televisions, and we watched it. And then you would say, 9/11. Four of those five are air tragedies. Four of those five are immense tragedies.
Now, I will say this. My company will never put out a card that talks about 9/11. It’s just one of the most raw things to me, it’s a personal thing. And since I own most of the company, I get to say that we’ll never do it. I was thinking about putting in hero cards for people that I know personally that were there. Family members that lost family members, but I don’t ever want to make money off of that. I used 9/11 in this because we remember where we were when tragic things happen more often than when great things happen. And the thing is, people collect that. My Mob product, when we put the first one out in 2016, it was warmly greeted. People that wanted it, bought it. Now, the little base sets that were $10 originally are $40, because now they know it’s out there. People do like that kind of, you know, macabre strange. We put out a product called Chaos that had serial killers in it, and we caught beef, because I put it out in March 2020 20, and it had a COVID card in it. That was before COVID struck, but I had put it in, and they said I was making money off of COVID, and I said, no, this is two months later. I put this product out before COVID So I had people give me a little bit of pullback on it. But now people sell it as the COVID rookie, and it gets, like, $20. You come to acceptance. The Mob is the second most requested product. When people say, when are you putting this product out? Civil War is number one. We put out three Civil War products. They still ask for more. The Mob is number two. The Mob is over POTUS. People ask for The Mob more than they ask for POTUS again.
KS: Go figure right?
KH: Well, yeah, but you know what’s funny? We have The Mob coming this year, and The Mob product we have coming out this year is going to be bigger, better, and bolder. We have stuff from Al Capone. I have personal effects of Al Capone that are going to be put in cards. I have stuff from Meyer Lansky. We do have autographs, of course, tons of autographs.
KS: Are there Al Capone autographs in the product? Can you even get those?
KH: No, that Is the one thing I do not have in the product. Again, that skews the box price. Al Capone autographs are eight to ten thousand. And don’t get me wrong, I tried to buy some. Once they went over a certain number, I couldn’t warrant putting them in. But I do have 300 different mobsters that are going to be in there in autograph for. Smaller people.
KS: So, for the autographs, what do you typically get them on? Legal documents?
KH: No, believe it or not, mostly prison letters. Letters written from prison to people. Carmine “The Snake” Persico ran one of the five families, and he was in jail for the rest of his life. And, you know, there were letters that he signed. Now they’re only signed Carmine, not Carmine Persico, but still his signature. Word relic cards are actually going to be like little chunks. It’s just not going to be one word or two words. It’s going to be like a two inch by one inch square from the letter. But we did that kind of stuff. So, The Mob is coming, and The Mob should be fun. And like I said, I get so many requests for it, I had to do it again. But that ties into that whole thing you were saying. You would think it would be more the occult or the outskirts, the outliers, but it’s not. People seem to tend to like that more.
Check back next week for Part 2 of our interview with Kevin Heffner.
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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