Hobby Musings: Panini Director of Product Development, Brandon Kennedy
Hobby Musings: Panini Director of Product Development, Brandon Kennedy – Interview Transcript
Editor’s note: Interview filmed February 6, 2025. Some player trade statuses have changed by time of publication. 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 Panini’s Brandon Kennedy. Brandon, thanks for joining us.
BK: Thanks for having me, Kelsey, always a pleasure.
KS: Brandon, so we’re at the midway point of the NBA season, All-Star weekend going on this weekend. Panini always has a big presence at this. What do you have going on for this year?
BK: Certainly always. Fun and exciting time of the year. This year in San Francisco, the Panini crew will be setting up downtown, not too far from the stadium. We’ll be having our annual Prizm lounge set up starting, I believe late Thursday into Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Prizm lounge. It’s really just an opportunity for us to connect with our partners, our athletes and, various hobby shops and customers as well, and sort of bring them close to the All-Star experience.
We’ve got athletes that will make appearances at the Prizm Lounge, including a lot of our rising stars. That will be playing in the game on Friday night. That includes rookies from this past season as well as rookies, currently. So, a cool experience there. You get to see them behind the scenes, signing a lot of their cards, interacting with the fans, going through media stations at the Prizm Lounge. So, always a fun and exciting time there. Getting to bounce around and talk with all the different people that come in and out.
We’ll for the most part, we’ll be hanging out at the Prizm Lounge during the days. Of course, we’ve got the events, NBA events going on in the evening time. With that being on the West Coast a little bit earlier in the day, which leaves a little bit more time in the evening afterwards, after the games to return back to the Prizm Lounge and socialize a little bit more.
We’re always looking forward to this event. It’s always the highlight of the year for, I don’t want to speak for Panini, but for the basketball team in general. Personally speaking, my favorite event to go to during the All-Star weekend is the, Legends Brunch on Sunday morning. It’s an event that the Retired Players Association puts on and has a bunch of different guests that come in and speak. They do a lot of tributes for stuff that happened the past year. And it’s just a really cool event to be around. Just an awesome setting with tons of retired players, past greats and current greats as well. To just be a part of that is a really awesome experience that’s always the highlight that I look forward to.
But every day there’s something new and fun to look forward to. So, we anticipate it being a great time. San Francisco should be, should be a really, really, popular time in the city, with everything going on there as well. So, we’re looking forward to it.
KS: Focusing a little more on the current NBA. Trade deadline happened last week. Lots of big trades. Biggest shocker by far Is Luka going to the Lakers. From a trading card standpoint, what does him ending up in LA with LeBron do for his market?
BK: I think it’s a great thing for Luka’s market. Right? I think we’ve kind of already seen some early signs pointing to that in his rookie sales. Just an uptick right away, we’ve seen those despite being in a Dallas uniform. You know, anytime a player makes a move to a large market like the Los Angeles Lakers or Boston Celtics, it always brings positives, I feel like, to the players markets, and then you give them the opportunity to pair up with one of the best players in LeBron James. It’s hard to write a script better than that.
Being here in Dallas, we’re obviously sad to see him leave, but again it’s a new door opening for Luka and, we should certainly see some increased sales on the secondary market, especially once those Lakers uniform cards start to hit.
KS: So, I have to ask this. You mentioned Luka being in his Mavs uniform on his cards. When will we see cards of him in a Lakers uniform?
BK: So, as you know, Kelsey, we work pretty far out in advance with our schedules and our timelines. Right? So, with that being said, most of our 24/25 product has already gone through the pipeline and is either in process or, currently being printed. With that being said, there will be several 24/25 programs in the back half of the year that will highlight Luka and his Lakers uniform.
However, with that being said, our Instant team, run by Tracy Hackler, has already been working on the instant Luka card. Which by the time the video airs should already be up for sale on the website. And we’ll also look for other opportunities product by product to also highlight Luka and be able to get Luka into key sets as well as players like Anthony Davis. Player that would make sense getting an update or an extended card into certain sets. So, the team’s already looking at opportunities and ways to pull that off. But I would say early, early, Luka cards in Lakers uniform, you’ll be able to see and find on the Instant platform.
I would say expect to see physical cards out of packs for Luka and his Lakers uniform, probably towards the back half of this year, towards the NBA season. Just again, because of the timelines and everything that we’re working on.
KS: Oh, that makes sense. And now Luka wasn’t the only big name player to go. You mentioned Anthony Davis. Mark Williams also went to the Lakers, De’Aaron Fox goes to the Spurs. Zach LaVine the Kings. Who else do you think benefited from a card standpoint the most with their new landing spot?
BK: That’s a tough one, right? And the one that comes to mind was one of the ones that happened most recently, which was Dalton Knecht one of our athletes, exclusive athletes, that we have a deal with. Some people may say, well, he’s leaving a huge market in Los Angeles to go to a place like Charlotte. Well, Charlotte obviously is not a, a large enough market compared to Los Angeles. However, the opportunity for Dalton, going to Charlotte, especially right away to step up and have a larger role, I think could benefit him, in the short term.
Another thing to keep in mind with Dalton is a lot of his rookie cards, as I’ve just mentioned, will be coming out in Lakers uniforms. I think it’ll be interesting to see how his values are affected from his early season Lakers uniform to his, you know, end of the season rookie cards that are getting released. Especially if he plays well and continues to step up and takes advantage of that opportunity there in Charlotte.
As you mentioned, De’Aaron Fox in San Antonio. I think that’s a great opportunity for him pairing up with Victor Wembanyama, a great young athletic team there. I think it kind of gives De’Aaron Fox a different look at the court. Kind of opens up a little bit more with him. With Wembanyama playing more out on the perimeter. I think it really unleashes Fox a little bit more. I was joking with my friends, and I said I think I’m going to like this San Antonio version of Fox. All in all, I think a lot of these trades have presented great opportunities for these players at the end of the day. Especially some of these young guys looking to end up in good situations. But I’d say Knecht and Fox are going to be the two that will be the most interesting from a card standpoint.
KS: All right Brandon, I’ll get you out of here on this. You talked about the 24/25 cards. What is coming in the pipeline soon, and what should collectors be looking forward to the most with them?
BK: Yeah, Kelsey, we’ve got a lot, a lot of stuff in the pipeline coming up. It’s going to seem, a bit here, like, things are going to be piling up on each other, and that may be the case, but, we hope collectors are ready for it because, as you know, we’ve still got a couple of 23/24 releases left to finish off the Victor Wembanyama, Amen Thompson rookie class. Those are two of our heaviest hitters in Immaculate Collection and Flawless. We’re tracking in the right direction on those two. Both of them should be very solid as we’ve seen solid success with our other high end programs for the 23/24 season. We look to get those ones out the door soon, to be finished up with the 23/24 calendar. So, we can fully shift our focus on the 24/25 calendar.
As we’ve seen, Hoops has made its release. Our first Officially Licensed 24/25 release with NBA marks. I know we had Prizm Draft Picks come out before then with some of the rookies, but Hoops was the first one with NBA marks. And then after that we’ve got Prizm working right now. We should see Prizm drop right around the same time as we saw it drop last year right around All-Star weekend. Donruss is currently working as well through various skus. We got Court Kings in the pipeline. And then we’ll see the return of Totally Certified.
Totally Certified is one that the basketball team is very excited about. We worked with our design team to kind of bring back the technologies that were used in the 14/15 and 15/16 releases. Both of which have turned out to be very sought after parallels on the secondary market for collectors. So, really excited about what our production team was able to pull off there with Totally Certified. Hopefully collectors are able to appreciate that one coming back into the portfolio.
Origins is another one that’s getting pretty close to shipping out. So as I mentioned, a lot of stuff in the pipeline, a lot of stuff will be coming out here pretty quickly. And again, we hope collectors are ready to go for it.
A few other things I just kind of wanted to cover and hit on. Some highlights for us. This 24/25 release calendar. Obviously last year we had the Tim Duncan news. That was huge news in the industry.
We just followed that up this year with an exclusive Derrick Rose partnership. Derrick Rose hasn’t signed trading cards, as we know, in a long, long time. And it was a deal that we had been working on for quite a while and we couldn’t be more excited for it to finally come to fruition. To be able to partner and work with Derrick is going to be a very exciting partnership in the fact that we haven’t been able to include him in a lot of our key autograph sets that have been developed over the last ten, 15 years. So, I think collectors, especially international collectors, will really be excited to be able to chase a lot of those higher end Derrick Rose autograph cards that never been made available to the consumers.
A few other product updates really quick that I just want to end on. Throw a few tidbits out there for collectors to get excited about. Revolution is a program that we expanded upon this year. We took a look at our release calendar for the season, and we removed a few programs strategically. And with that, we have some components, some brand tenants that, you know, we had to look at, and decide where those were going to be placed, were they were going to be used at. So, Revolution was a program that we thought Kabooms made sense in. So, we’ve moved in the Kaboom inserts to both hobby and retail, for the Revolution program. So, as we know, Kabooms are one of our most popular inserts. This is a great collecting opportunity for consumers on both the hobby and the retail side, to chase those kaboom inserts.
We’re moving Color Blast into Mosaic this year. Spectra was a brand that was one that we were not moving forward with on the basketball side for this last year so, we decided to move Color Blast into Mosaic. We thought it was a program that would benefit by having that one added to it.
And lastly, Donruss Optic is going to have some Downtown cards in it as well. That’s one thing that we’ve always been asked on the basketball side is football has Donruss and Donruss Optic downtowns, why doesn’t basketball have them? So, we’ve decided as a team to go ahead and get those added in there. So, a lot of product moves that we’re very excited about. We feel like we’ll bring a lot of value and a lot of chase to the ones that we’re putting out here. But again, there’s still a lot more things we’re really excited about and, that will be coming out in the following weeks as we get closer to some of these products dropping.
KS: That all sounds great! I can’t wait to see everything come out. Brandon, thank you so much for joining us.
BK: Always Kelsey, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Hobby Musings: Panini Director of Product Development, Brandon Kennedy
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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