When Brent Montgomery was in the sixth grade, his entrepreneurial career officially began with trips to Costco, where he bought five-cent fireball candies and resold them at school for a quarter.
By 14, that entrepreneurial spirit morphed with a love of collecting as he sold baseball cards and attended local shows, where he had a leg-up against the older vendors since he didn’t have a job and could spend as much time as he wanted reading up on the latest prospects. How else could he find out about a guy like Gregg Jefferies ahead of other people?
After a quick stint in college (he was asked to leave), Montgomery added a third passion to the mix: Journalism. He interned for the NBC affiliate in San Antonio.
“All of a sudden, I thought I had the coolest job in the world,“ Montgomery told cllct.
He returned to school for a degree in journalism. “I fell in love with the intersection of business and storytelling,” Montgomery said.
After college, he moved to Brooklyn (“before it was cool”), where he worked on various TV shows like “The Bachelor” and “Wife Swap.”
Soon, he’d pitched a few shows — successfully selling a couple — when he was on a trip to Las Vegas for bachelor party. Always with an eye out for new characters and ideas, he quickly decided he needed to return to Vegas and scout out a new show. He asked his sister-in-law, who was running his development and casting team, to find a big set of characters for his next show, ideally based in Sin City. She returned excited, wanting to introduce him to Rick Harrison and his family, who ran a Pawn Shop.
It wasn’t love at first sight.
Montgomery went out to shoot with the family, but could tell they were nervous. But eventually, he saw the charm, especially in Harrison, who was not only knowledgable, but could connect with average viewers.
“The coolest thing ever was that they actually knew this stuff — Rick specifically, I mean, the guy's got a photographic memory,” Montgomery said. “He can speak about everything from Picassos to Super Bowl rings to historical weapons. And he does it in a fun and pithy way.
"You want to find characters who you want to have a beer with, and Rick and his dad and his son and Chumley were certainly those kind of guys.”
Harrison had been pitching the show for years by the time Montgomery came along.
“For years, people told me no one wants to watch a show about four bald guys in a pawn shop, and I just knew they were wrong,” Harrison said. “People always love history stories. They called me a Wikipedia because I really am that nerd.”
Harrison had to drag his father out to that first shoot because for years, he’d told him there was no way they could have a TV show.
“My entire thinking in my head was, if I get a reality show, it'll be really good for business. I never thought I was going to create a whole new genre of TV,” Harrison said.
They shot a pilot for the History Channel, which aired in 2009. Twenty-one seasons and more than 600 episodes later, “Pawn Stars” is one of the most popular and enduring shows on television.
A show, based around a series of collectibles and the stories behind them, was a runaway hit. The world had been asked whether the collectibles world could be mainstream and answered with a resounding “yes,” voting with their TV sets and in the Nielsen ratings.
The success of the show was no shock to Harrison, who understood the universality of collecting at a deep level. “Everybody collects something, everything from purses to little knick-knacks around the house to this, that and the other. You might not even realize you collect something,” Harrison said.
He also recognized something special in Montgomery and his business acumen. “By doing Pawn Stars and just marketing himself well, and figuring out what the public wants. He literally just turned it into a money making monster. He's kind of brilliant.”
When it rains, it pours. And for Montgomery, the man who took a bet on the weird, supposedly niche show about a family running a pawn shop in Las Vegas, he felt like the world opened for him.
Next came “American Restoration,” a show about restoring pieces of Americana. Then, “Counting Cars,” a spin-off series with Harrison and the gang fixing old cars.
Clearly, Montgomery had identified his niche: Showcasing items, experts and the stories behind them.
Montgomery’s success allowed him to sell his business, largely consisting of the “Pawn Stars” brand for a reported $360 million in 2014, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Later, he founded Wheelhouse Entertainment, a unique fusion of a production company, venture-capital fund and content studio.
If “Pawn Stars” was evidence the masses craved this type of storytelling, Wheelhouse was Montgomery pushing all his chips in.
One of Wheelhouse’s production studios, Spoke Studios, produced the Netflix hit show “King of Collectibles,” which follows Goldin Auctions founder Ken Goldin and his team as they scout items around the world for their auctions and peel back the curtain on the day-to-day. Wheelhouse also led a $15 million funding round for collectibles investment platform Rally, which was since featured on “Pawn Stars.”
During COVID, mutual friend Jimmy Kimmel introduced Montgomery to Reddit co-founder and founder of VC firm 776 Alexis Ohanian. Both lifelong collectors, a bond was quick to form.
Together, the two combined their talents — Montgomery’s experience producing and sniffing out incredible stories and Ohanian’s résumé as a master community builder from his time at Reddit.
“Brent and I met and start talking about how we could partner that we saw a broader, mainstream appetite for content revolving around collectibles,” Ohanian said.
Montgomery remembers the two of them figuring they should fuse their talents. “Why don't we do something that we're both passionate about ... which is collectibles?”
Soon, a new idea was born: Mantel, a social-media platform for collectors. They brought on Evan Parker, former GM of The Athletic to run the business and launched in February.
“They reached out to me. It was a six-page deck, basically, with just some ideas. And then we got started, the three of us and their teams, trying to figure out how to turn it into a business,” Parker said.
Montgomery’s willingness to bring his industry clout and go full bore into the collectibles world speaks volumes of the endless trove of stories and content possibilities awaiting untapped in the space. This vision is one of his superpowers, according to Ohanian.
“Brent's ability to spot and nurture emerging trends in content creation is often overlooked. He has a knack for identifying what will capture the public's imagination before it becomes mainstream. This foresight has allowed him to consistently stay ahead of the curve in a rapidly evolving media landscape," Ohanian said.
Mantel hopes to tap into the same mass appeal as “Pawn Stars,” but with a “tech-savvy twist,” Ohanian added.
Working with Montgomery has shown him how collectibles can go beyond the items themselves and deep into the stories, passions and people behind them. Parker understands this as well as anyone.
“Everybody feels like they're in it together. It's called the hobby, right? Like, how many hobbies exist on Earth, but the people in the sports card memorabilia space believe that theirs is ‘the hobby,’ and I think that that's pretty telling in the way that people sort of approach the space,” Parker said.
Montgomery’s take on the industry is contagious, imbued with a strong sense of community.
“That's the passion of collecting," he said. "It doesn't matter if it's stamps or cards or Beanie Babies. It's what really brings communities together.”
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.