The toy-adjacent trading card business continues to grow as hobby shops, specialty retailers, and mass retailers across the country embrace the pack-cracking culture.
Now, following recent deals with VeeFriends and Paramount, Fanatics Collectibles’ zerocool is amping up its position in the non-sport trading cards space by inking multiyear partnership deals with Netflix, Legendary Entertainment, and filmmaker Kevin Smith.
“In 2021 alone, the trading card market more than doubled, and over the last two years, the value of culture and entertainment cards has appreciated faster than the overall card market,” says Fanatics Collectibles’ Chief Vision Officer Josh Luber. “We believe there is a massive market opportunity to grow the culture card space, and zerocool is trailblazing the category by partnering with the most relevant brands and franchises to create premium products that are accessible to all fans and collectors.”
On the cusp of the new year, zerocool will release a premium Stranger Things trading card set through its direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform along with sets that will be available at mass retail. Fanatics plans to include a “coveted collectible” in each box.
Next year, the Dune universe returns to the trading card category for the first time since 1984 ahead of the November release of Dune: Part Two. Legendary named zerocool as the official trading card partner for the Dune franchise through 2025.
In the more immediate future, an exclusive zerocool trading card set will be available at dates on Kevin Smith’s Convenience Tour for his upcoming film, Clerks III this fall. Additionally, zerocool plans a full consumer product offering for Clerks III that will be sold online tied with the film’s theatrical release via Fathom Events and Lionsgate on Sept. 13 and 15.
If there was any doubt about just how hot the trading card market is right now, a recent update from The NPD Group states that in the first four months of 2022, the collectibles subcategory of toys experienced 28% growth with sports trading cards fueling a large portion of the uptick.
