NORTON SHORES, Mich. — There is nothing outside that suggests the machines sitting inside this gray, nondescript building in an industrial office center could disrupt the trading card industry.
Sign your name on the clipboard just past the entrance. Walk by a long table with pizza boxes next to a refrigerator and it all feels pretty normal. It’s not until you turn the corner and see millions of dollars worth of machinery in an open space flanked by a giant American flag on the wall that it starts to feel different. When you’re asked not to take certain pictures or video because of the required privacy of inventory nearby, yeah, that’s when everything changes.
There could be airplane parts. Pieces of a satellite. Rocketry. Military ballistics. And on a recent Friday afternoon, an unopened Mega Box of 2023 Donruss Optic Football cards with Anthony Richardson and Brock Purdy on the front, bought at a Detroit-area Meijer for $60.
The goal? To use the technology at Industrial Inspection and Consulting to see what’s inside without breaking the plastic wrapping that traditionally indicates an unsealed, untouched and unexamined package of cards.
For most of its history, buying and selling packs and boxes of trading cards was a game of chance with neither the buyer nor the seller knowing the results.
“The product is designed to be a mystery,” said Keith Irwin, the general manager of Industrial Inspection and Consulting.
And if it wants to stay that way?
“They’ll need to find new packaging solutions,” he said.
IIC went from a company focusing primarily on industrial X-rays and CT scans within the medical and aerospace fields to potentially taking the cover off the trading card industry without taking the cover off any product at all. And in the process, they say, their company — with no prior connections to the trading card industry — has earned thousands of satisfied customers in the collectibles space. All electing for a sneak peek at their cards before tearing the packs or boxes open, circumventing the mystery that has long been a central element of these products.
The service caters to high-end products manufactured by Topps, Panini and Upper Deck, with the technology best suited to reveal cards in densely packed configurations. Take a 2023 Panini Flawless Football First Off The Line case for instance. Each case comes with two boxes. Each box comes with one pack of 10 cards. At $15,000 a case, it certainly makes economic sense that collectors are willing to pay IIC the going rate of $650 per case of that product to get a CT scan and see whether there’s something inside that they want, or to keep the package sealed and sell it on to someone else.
The economics are easy. But the ethical dilemma isn’t for this group of non-collectors in western Michigan whose industrial scanning start-up has received a financial windfall from those in the hobby willing to pay for a preview.
“We’ve had to wrestle with that as a team and some of us think differently about it,” Irwin said. “So some of us say ‘It is what it is. We can do it (scan products).’ And others say, ‘This feels like we’re participating in something that is very much in a gray area.’ And we still wrestle with it. I think where we land is that we are data people and we’re very good at what we do. And if we’re not doing it, then somebody else will.”
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