The dominoes are starting to fall. After devastating news that Marx Cards burned collectors for over $1,000,000 in cards last week … we’re starting to see cracks in other sports card businesses that burst onto the scene over the past 2 years.
Semi-popular sports card marketplace StarStock put out the dreaded “restructuring … but your cards are safe tweet” yesterday after cancelling some breaks & firing staff.
Sure wouldn’t make me feel great about inventory I might have with the company.
It started with the company stating it wouldn’t accept any raw (ungraded) trading card submissions.
Then the company revealed it had to cancel a break with PSA that cost $1,600 per spot. Apparently the company was going to issue refunds … but Sports Card Radio could not confirm refunds had been sent.
The company claims the live breaks schedule will resume on Monday, but it remains unclear who within the company will administer the breaks.
While being backlogged 2-3 months on raw trading cards sounds like a good problem to have, the company will likely frustrate customers in the process of uploading those to the site. Not to mention the values have likely tanked on most of these cards.
This user on Twitter seemed to believe StarStock was using “being backed up on raw card submissions” to hide the fact the company was having cash flow issues. It doesn’t make sense that a company with several months of work to process raw trading cards would fire most of its staff.
Nice Summary (from StarStock Facebook page) of why StarStock was likely doomed already – and the latest downfall in demand for trading cards could send this company into hibernation:
Users of StarStock are wondering what the future of the sports card reseller platform have. The company raised $8M in April 2021 (essentially when valuations of most trading cards peaked). Personally I feel its likely the company has burned through most of it without showing much progress …. so investors told them to go lean (fire everybody) and see if they can prove themselves to investors again.
Rumors are that 55 of 61 people were fired … meaning Sports Card Radio has almost as much staff as Starstock does. Sure wouldn’t make me very confident about this companies ability to work through the backlog, ship cards to customers – or maintain a business worth supporting.
Personally I’d request all cards from StartStock – this sounds like a sinking ship.
