DoubleHOLO is capitalizing on the marketplace for collectibles
"DoubleHOLO's vision is to build the market infrastructure and financial rails to power the trading card economy," the founder, Kacey Lombard explained.
Pokemon cards are all the rage right now. Walk into any Target or Walmart, and the card packs are flying off the shelves (if they even physically make it there before selling out online). The resurgence of the collectible card market has buyers and sellers in a frenzy – some people are even buying, trading, and selling as their full-time job. In some cases, teh profit margins are that high.
Kacey Lombard knows the market all too well. He has a Pokémon card collection worth tens of thousands of dollars – which he claims used to be much more before he sold a handful of high-value cards to kickstart his business, DoubleHOLO.
Childhood collecting turned into adult money
“When I got back into collecting in college, my mom dug up my old collection in the attic from when I was a kid,” he said. “It ended up being really valuable.”
Just like the stock market, the value of a card changes day-to-day and sometimes even minute-to-minute. Several of the cards in Lombard’s childhood collection were from the Wizards of the Coast (Watsi) era, which was the first printing company for Pokémon cards before it swapped over to print at the Pokémon Company International.
As a general rule: the older the card, the rarer the print, the better the shape – the higher the value.
“I started buying and selling as a side hobby, but it progressed into a very real business. I had my own website and Shopify store and was traveling across the country to card conventions to shop, trade, and sell in-person,” Lombard shared. “My best month was close to $100,000 in revenue.”
As you can tell, Lombard wasn’t playing around. His passion far surpassed hobbyist collecting.
A marketplace of problems
During that time, Lombard became keenly aware of some of the most frustrating hiccups in the business. On the side, he started coding software for a marketplace around instant liquidity for buyers and sellers in the collectible space. Once Lombard thought he built something special, he lowered the transaction fees to >5% (a rate far below eBay’s <13%) to encourage new users on his platform.
And he gets a fair amount of traction – but much of it comes from Google discovery of a specific purchase, versus browsing on the DoubleHOLO site.
Yet, people still love eBay. It’s the industry giant. There are high volumes of transactions. There’s price discovery. Long story short – Lombard said eBay is just really good at what it does. Plus, other competitors, like Fanatics, are also highly skilled at what they do.
“A marketplace may be how we started, but we are actually focusing on other aspects of our business now,” he said.
The thesis of DoubleHOLO: Cards are becoming an alternative asset class
“These cards have become financialized, and some people have turned into trading card investors. There’s institutional money moving into this sector,” Lombard said. “We imagine in the future you could invest in cards like you would a traditional portfolio.”
But there’s currently no infrastructure to support this thesis. So, Lombard wants to pave the way with DoubleHOLO.
“DoubleHOLO’s vision is to build the market infrastructure and financial rails to power the trading card economy,” he explained.
So, the first product offering, following the initial marketplace launch, is a subscription-based data intelligence platform to track trends and notify buyers and sellers of price fluctuations within the collectibles market.
Lombard compared the product to Robinhood or Bloomberg for trading cards – and hopefully, eventually, the broader collectibles market (comic books, watches, sneakers, etc.).
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