ATLANTA — Trade nights are always busy, but this one has become a little different.
As collectors flood through the doors on an early Saturday afternoon, a local legend sits inside waiting to greet hundreds of longtime fans.
For this shop, Atlanta’s CardsHQ, the guest is Hall of Fame pitcher and Braves icon John Smoltz.
Later in the day, the NBA’s most recent No. 1 overall pick, Atlanta Hawks wing Zaccharie Risacher, will stop by to meet fans and rip packs of cards.
Even for a shop such as CardsHQ, which opened in early 2024 as one of the largest hobby stores in the world, this trade night is big. The roughly 1,300 customers who will cycle through are about twice as many as the store hosts on a typical Saturday, and while this event is especially large, hundreds of shops across the country are experiencing their own buzz at the exact same moment.
With four events completed, counting the most recent last Saturday, Topps Rip Night has become a hobby holiday.
Like all trading card manufacturers, Topps has made plenty of mistakes in recent years, but Rip Night isn’t one of them.
In fact, there’s reason to believe Rip Night might be the single most objectively positive and important development from a card manufacturer in the Fanatics era, and it’s only gotten better with each event.
Collectors largely balked at Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin’s declaration he hoped his company would “10x” the hobby following its acquisition of Topps’ trading card business in 2022. Rubin later admitted his math was more of a “big audacious number,” but the spirit of his goal has remained, and Rip Night has been a keystone.
Though Fanatics has been best known for its staggering online business — the company generated $8.1 billion in total revenue in 2024, according to Sportico — a large portion of the trading card world has revolved around its hobby shops.
Healthy shops means a healthy hobby, and though brick-and-mortar locations weren’t what originally made Fanatics successful, they could be what makes or breaks the collectibles division.
“When we kicked off Rip Night in September of 2023, we had the primary goal to simply celebrate the hobby, and we felt like Rip Night would be a great way to inspire and unite the collecting community,” Fanatics Collectibles chief commercial officer Avery Jessup told cllct. “It didn’t matter if you were an experienced collector or a novice collector, it was an opportunity for us to partner with our shops to showcase and promote how great the hobby is.”
Showcase they have.
So far, Rip Night has been extremely effective at driving collectors, new and old, to participating shops, and the event has only grown since its debut.
Rip Night 1 saw a little more than 200 shops participate across the United States with Fanatics delivering 13 athletes and guests. An estimated 25,000 collectors attended that first event.
On Feb. 22, the 615 participating shops for Rip Night 4 were nearly triple the number for the debut event. With roughly 700 Topps-partnered shops globally, more than 80% of stores participated earlier this month.
Fanatics also increased the number of athletes and other guests to 114, its most ever. According to Jessup, 60 unique stores received an athlete for the first time on Rip Night 4.
There has been global expansion, too.
After featuring exclusively U.S.-based stores for the first two events, Rip Night 3 expanded to 10 countries, and Rip Night 4 featured 17. In total, the number of participating collectors has tripled from the first event to roughly 75,000.
Even for a shop like CardsHQ, which had always planned to host major events, Rip Night has become an important part of its role as a hub within its local collecting community.
“I think hosting events is critically important to a card shop’s success,” CardsHQ owner and Sports Card Investor founder Geoff Wilson told cllct. “One reason why we made CardsHQ so big was so that we have a ton of room to host large events. And it’s really paying off — when we host an event like Topps Rip Night, we often see our sales double or triple what they would be on a typical non-event day.”
For a number of shops, Rip Night is the single most lucrative day of the year. According to Jessup, 37% of participating stores reported Rip Night 4 as their single best sales day ever.
“We never focused on Rip Night being a commercially-driven activity, that was never part of the success metrics, and it’s still not,” Jessup said. “But it’s exciting to see how the intersection of community and engagement, with collectors delivers strong revenue success for a lot of the shops that participate.”
The success for local shops rolls up into success for Fanatics, of course.
Sportico reported last month Topps’ trading card and entertainment division had grown from $368 million in sales in 2020 to $1.6 billion in 2024.
In a recent CNBC interview, Rubin said he expected that $1.6 billion figure to grow to more than $2 billion in 2025 and $3 billion in 2026, when exclusive rights agreements with the NBA, NFL and English Premier League are finally active.
Rights for the EPL will begin in June, rights for the NBA and NBAPA are expected in October, and rights for the NFL and NFLPA are expected in early 2026. Fanatics made its explosive entry into the hobby by winning those NBA and NFL licenses, which have long been held by competitor Panini America, before it ever acquired Topps.
Rip Night has also caused a certain amount of competition among local shops. Better stores often host better events and the best events drive, in many cases, the most revenue.
In theory, competition among shops should improve all involved. Rising tides, as they say.
Through Rip Night 4, many of the shops most heavily featured across social media have included those coveted athlete appearances.
CardsHQ, for example, previously hosted former National League MVP Chipper Jones and Grammy-nominated rapper Meek Mill. Rubin himself has also stopped by Atlanta’s largest shop.
Fanatics has made attempts to deliver as many athletes to as many stores as possible, but is always limited by where athletes are on those dates.
Some shops have made due. Or in the case of Southern California’s Honey Hole Collectibles, thrived without.
The first Honey Hole location opened in Escondido, Calif., in 2020. The company added a second location in Temecula in 2023, and a third location recently opened in San Diego.
As many store owners compete against each other, Honey Hole had to figure out a way to be effective without cannibalizing its own customer base.
For Rip Night 4, Honey Hole used a poker run to give collectors a reason to visit all three locations. If collectors secured poker chips at Temecula, San Diego and finally Escondido, where the flagship Rip Night event was held, they were entered into a raffle to win Opening Day tickets for the San Diego Padres.
In total, roughly 800 people visited a Honey Hole location for Rip Night, and more than 70 visited all three locations throughout the day. It’s a massive investment, even for a three-shop company, but Rip Night has become too good of an event to sit out.
“It’s great if you’re an independent card store owner, but it’s a different challenge if you own multiple stores that may share some of the same customers,” Honey Hole co-founder Chris Trimble told cllct.
“We realized we have a unique challenge — if we throw an event at one location but not the other, we kind of mess with our customers — so we decided to throw an event that is still within the best interest of our business but also keeps within the best interest of Rip Night.”
“We wanted to give back to the hobby, right?” Trimble added. “It’s not so much the financial reward of selling, but it’s really these customers who have patronized us for this long. How do we give back to them?”
According to Jessup, what started as a simple celebration has morphed into more of a “phenomenon celebrating the hobby on a global scale.”
The global part will be the key aspect moving forward.
Topps and Fanatics have invested heavily into improving partnered shops domestically — offering up report cards has helped on a number of fronts — and its recent expansion abroad with the opening of its first international hobby shop in London later this spring shows the company’s commitment to reaching new communities.
Massive Rip Night events in international locations, such as MINT LAB TOKYO, which has hosted more than 1,000 collectors for a single Rip Night, shows the appetite is there, Fanatics just needs to facilitate.
“If we were to cross the 100,000 collector market it would be a massive win for Rip Night 5,” Jessup said. “I think if we did upwards of 20, 22 countries, I think it would be really exciting. We’re going to take the feedback from our shops to see how we can improve and then circle as a team to figure out how we can make it bigger.”
All the marketing dollars and card innovations have obviously played a massive part in expanding the number of collectors during the Fanatics era.
But Rip Night has also shown that things can sometimes be very simple.
Just throw a party, invite some friends and trade some cards.
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct.