Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show

Lessons in Scarcity and Live Commerce from Australia's Biggest Trading Card Store | #617

• Nathan Bush • Episode 617

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 47:03

Grayson White, founder of Cherry Collectibles, has built Australia’s leading trading card business by doing something most ecommerce brands overlook: he turned shopping into entertainment and community into a growth engine.

What started as a side hustle to make an extra $100 a week quickly evolved into a category-defining business, spanning ecommerce, live shopping, and physical retail. But the journey wasn’t linear. It included shutting the business down, nearly walking away, and betting everything to go all in.

Today, we're discussing:

  • How Cherry Collectibles started from a $0 opportunity
  • Why supply and demand drives everything in collectibles
  • The rise of live shopping and “breaks” as entertainment commerce
  • Building trust in an emerging category
  • Why physical retail is back (and stronger than expected)
  • How to create a community that actually converts
  • The future of live commerce and content-led selling

Cherry is offering 10% off with code ‘ADDTOCART10’ for the first 100 users.

Connect with Grayson
Explore Cherry

Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter

Connect with Nathan Bush on LinkedIn

Join the Add To Cart Community 

Introduction

SPEAKER_01

There's a lot of risk, actually, you know, in the sense that it would have emptied and it did empty every bank account and loaded up every credit card. But you put a box of trading cards in front of them, give them a four or five minutes, and it reduces us all to kids again. A popular product we've we've generally sold out of within a week, and we can't restock because the Australian dollar is so weak. If you restock, your price sort of will bump 30, 40%, and that's a bitter pill to swallow for a consumer. Hi everyone, I'm Grayson from Cherry. And on this episode of Add to Cart, I share my origin story, why cards are cool again, and what you need to look for to make money out of trading cards.

SPEAKER_03

G'day and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, all Bushy, coming to you from the land of the terrible people here in lovely Brisbane, Australia. Now, a guy grows up in rural Tasmania, moves to Melbourne to chase a job in horse racing, gets laid off in the GFC, goes on a date with his now wife, buys a box of trading cards at a market, and spots a gap. Nobody at this time is seriously selling trading cards online in Australia. So he builds a website. Targets making one or$200 a week. He pays the rent, goes on a few more dates. 16 years later, that website is Cherry Collectibles, the most recognized trading card retailer in Australia, winner of the 2022 Beckett International Card Store of the Year award, running physical retail, e-commerce, live shopping events, and a community that has genuine, unprompted love for what Grayson's built. When Good Charlotte dropped into the store recently, Benji nearly caught Grayson out on a$10,000 pricing error and was decent enough to point it out. We hear that story early on in this episode. But it tells you something about the kind of place that Cherry is. My guest today is Grayson White, founder and director of Cherry Collectibles. I'll be up front. I'm not a card collector, or at least I wasn't until this chat. I spent time going deep on Cherry before this conversation. And after this conversation with Grayson, I ended up buying a box of NRL footy cards. First time I've done that since I was about 12. So embrace yourself, you could become a card collector after this episode. We've got so much for you in this episode, whether you are a card collector or not. This is a really interesting one because we talk about how supply works when you aren't actually in control of the supply and demand model. We talk about how you mix commerce and community together to drive brand loyalty at a crazy scale. And we get Grayson's take on where live shopping is heading, including his initial experiments with the platform, whatnot. A big thank you to Shopify and Clavio for backing Add to Cart and making conversations like this one possible. We couldn't do it without them. All right, this is Grayson White, the founder and director of Cherry Collectibles. Let's get into it.

SPEAKER_01

Grayson, welcome to Add to Cart. Thank you for having me, Nathan.

SPEAKER_03

Oh, so good to have you here. I'm really excited about our conversation today because I'm not a card collector, but I think that I might becoming one after spending some time on your site and having a look through your community. It's phenomenal.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you. I appreciate that. I hope you do. Every dollar counts, as they say. So uh no, it's fantastic when people discover us online.

SPEAKER_03

So cool. Did I see that you had Good Charlotte in the store last week? We did.

SPEAKER_01

How does that happen? I was alerted to Good Charlotte being in the store by one of my team running out back, dry reaching, in evidently excitement. And I'm like, is everything okay? And yeah, Good Charlotte's at the front. So that was an amazing moment. And Benji, who I dealt with mostly uh at this shop, was a really refreshing celebrity, really respectful, wanted to spend their own money and not just ask for heaps of freebies. Really passionate about the product. Yeah. Uh knew knew so much. Um, and even had the opportunity to get a very good deal from me because I incorrectly priced a card. And he said, I don't think that's the price. Oh, yeah. And so I checked it out and he was right. I was I was six thousand dollars off. Holy whoa, si how much was the card? The the card I said I think it's five and a half thousand Australian. He said, I think it's a bit more than that. So I looked it up. The last sale was ten thousand US dollars. That is wild. So thank you, good Charlotte, for not crushing me.

SPEAKER_03

What is he into? Are we talking basketball? Or like we don't want to give away because you've obviously got a relationship there.

SPEAKER_01

But no, he's in one uh he's into one piece trading cards, which could be seen as the you know, jumping on the bandwagon. One piece is extraordinarily popular right now. What is One Piece for for the dummet? It's a manga from Japan. Okay, and it's I think the longest-running manga that exists. I'm probably wrong on that. I apologize, but it's certainly up there and only recently has been translated into an English trading card game. But he's been collecting the vintage Japanese trading card version for many, many years. So definitely one of the OG One Piece trading card collectors.

SPEAKER_03

That's very cool. Is he the most famous celebrity you've had in the store?

SPEAKER_01

Jeez, I don't want to I don't I don't want to rank them.

SPEAKER_03

You want coming back by more$10,000 cards.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, we've been very lucky. There are a lot of, I mean, it's the same percentage as the normal population, I imagine. It's a beautiful thing when you realize that we're all the same. Because you kind of sit there and people that have established themselves as celebrities in a verte commas kind of feel different. But you put a box of trading cards in front of them, give them a four or five minutes, and it reduces us all to kids again. And I think that's one of the reasons why I enjoy it so much. Amazing. So tell me, how did you start, Cherry?

SPEAKER_03

Where where were the origins here?

Transitioning to Full-Time Trading Card Business

SPEAKER_01

Well, yeah, I so I did a whole bunch of different things. I grew up with racehorses. My dad's a Hall of Fame thoroughbred racing trainer, and my family had a very successful horse racing team here in Tasmania. Yep. And I moved to Melbourne to work in that industry, and unfortunately, I lost my job as soon as I kind of started it in the GFC. And I needed to, I guess, find a lifeline that I could prevent myself from having to go back to Tasmania with my tail between my legs. So I'd moved to Melbourne to chase that dream. I was on a date with a girl who's now my wife, Renee. Well done. And we went to this crazy little market in Melbourne, and I bought a box of trading cards with it was worth nothing, and I didn't have any money. And it had a jersey card in it. And if you're not familiar, that's a piece of a player's jersey that they they wear and a tiny little piece, and and it's sort of manufactured into the card. And when I was young, that card or that type of card was worth a lot of money. Or very rare, worth a lot of money. So I hopped online when I uh got back home. I'm looking to try and find the value of this card. I thought, geez, it must be expensive. There's none listed online. And it turns out that it wasn't listed because it was worth nothing. Uh but in the process of determining that I was still poor, I identified there wasn't anyone selling trading cards online in Australia, or certainly not that I could find in any serious footprint. So I suppose you would have had a lot of eBay around back then, would there? Yeah, eBay was big and I noticed there was like four or five boxes selling a week from one of the biggest sellers on there. And and so I just thought if I can build a website that maybe makes me one or two hundred dollars a week, well then you know, this um I I can go on dates and I can pay the rent, and that was the start of it. Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_03

And when was it that you realized that it was something bigger? So we're obviously painting a picture here because what you've built today is, you know, a physical storefront plus the the biggest trading card website in Australia, if not I don't know. You can tell me how big it is, but I thought you were gonna say the world then.

SPEAKER_01

I was gonna pull you up pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_03

It didn't go that far. It went through my head and I was like, hey, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold on. Tell me, when was it that you went actually this is a full-time career?

SPEAKER_01

In 2015, I spoke to my wife and said that there's a fair bit of risk in taking this on as a full-time venture. There's a lot of risk, actually, you know, in the sense that it would have emptied and it did empty every bank account and loaded up every credit card. So that's about as much risk as you can take in like a business sense. Yep, I guess. And I'd said if I if we slash in a commerce I'm on it now.

SPEAKER_03

As it this isn't your thing anymore. This is an odd.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. If we want to take this risk, we've got to do it now because if there's a kid, which there wasn't, there is now. If there's a kid, then I don't think I'll have the guts to take the risk. So 2015 is when we went full tilt, but it was only a year before that that I shut the business down entirely for I think three months. So what caused that? We went to the largest trading card show in the world and it was held in Cleveland, which have you been to Cleveland, Nathan? I haven't been to Cleveland. I thought you were going to say Vegas, but I wasn't expecting Cleveland. Occasionally they're in Vegas. It was in Cleveland, and I actually really like Cleveland. Cleveland's got a lot of similarities with places I grew up. But Cleveland's a really interesting place because 50-ish years ago it was the Mecca in the US. So it's extraordinary. One of the buildings in the center of the city is opulent, and I'm very like at 70 floors of just decadent architecture and you know marble desks that sort of are six feet high and elevators that are the sizes of churches and things like that. And I think it's lost half its population in the last 50 years. Literally. And the card show for someone who was looking to be cutting edge and what's the future of this look like was also confronting. It was early days in the trading card sort of revival, which was being led by Panini in a massive way.

SPEAKER_03

Panini is a distributor.

SPEAKER_01

Panini is are the manufacturer of trading cards of predominantly for the like the last decade. They've lost a number of licenses in the last year or so to a company called Fanatics. Okay, yeah. What are Fanatics? And they're now responsible for the production of basketball cards and soon to be American football cards. But Panini were in the early stages of their exclusive license to manufacture. And they were just getting momentum and they were getting started. And so they were a shining light at this show, but the rest of the show was just trestle tables with like dust on them and dated attitudes. And dated attitudes. Yeah, and I on the plane on the way back, I was just talking to my wife and and just like, if that's the top of the mountain, I don't want to climb. Like that's not what I'm in it for. And yeah, it sort of just took the air out of the balloon. What was it about the dated attitudes? What kind of attitudes are you talking?

SPEAKER_03

Like, what was it that deflated you?

Building Trust and Community in Card Collecting

SPEAKER_01

Everything was negative. Okay. A lot of uh pushback against the change that Panini were trying to introduce. This, you know, hobbies going to the toilet and the wrong people are getting involved, and why are people doing live videos? And there wasn't a lot of support from the actual the community of sellers. And so there were a few, don't get me wrong, overall majority. It felt like it was gonna be a really hard push. Okay.

SPEAKER_03

I've got a room full of comic book guys from The Simpsons in my head.

SPEAKER_01

Yes.

SPEAKER_03

That's very much what it was. Okay. And so on the plane back, and you're like, I don't want to do this. What was it that inspired you again? Like, how did you go? Actually, I'm gonna go create a new mountain to climb.

SPEAKER_01

It was probably money, Nathan.

SPEAKER_03

It's probably got really poor to that, doesn't it? I probably got really poor really quickly. And at this point, do you have like a house full of cards? Because I could imagine you're going to collect cards regardless of whether you're doing it commercially or not, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yes. I don't have as many cards in my house as what people probably think, but it probably felt like I was missing a part of myself. I'd like I'd created a dream and and perhaps at the first real challenge to just fold just probably didn't feel right. It didn't sit right with me. And so in 2015, one of the things that I did was go to Hawaii for an industry summit where I met with the vice president of sales, a Panini, DJ Kazmazak, I think I that's how you say his name. Who is about as positive a human being as I've met. And he really just very, very succinctly put it out there that this is what was going to happen and that I needed to to focus and play my role and and understand that this is the vision. You got bullied back into it. He put together an incredible team, hired a guy called Billy Mayhor, who came from video games. Okay. And who understood growing global markets, which is music to the ears of someone who's in a global market isn't this tiny little emerging market and don't necessarily know what sort of support you've got, if your vision's aligned, if you're gonna get replaced the next time, you know, that a shiny new ball comes along. He understood it and he just and he just went to work and and grew it. And it was probably one of the first times that I'd really seen how quality leadership and an aligned vision will deliver a positive outcome. Won't necessarily deliver the outcome. Yeah. I think there's a huge amount of factors at play in terms of delivering the ultimate success, but it goes a long way to making it happen.

SPEAKER_03

And is that the secret in your trade? Because it's very different to other e-commerce businesses, is that gosh, we we either manufacture ourselves or we buy out of a big factory in China and you can kind of go, give me an order of a thousand and have them shipped here, they'll be here a few weeks later and we'll sell them or mark them up 100% and sell them. Whereas yours is very much a supply and demand game where I can imagine that you're not always in control. Are the relationships with the paninis, the fanatics, the most important part of your business?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, managing that is uh is really difficult. Supply is constantly the enemy, a popular product we've we've generally sold out of within a week. And we can't restock because the Australian dollar is so weak. If you restock, your price sort of will bump 30, 40%, and that's a bitter pill to swallow for a consumer. So supply is really difficult, and but then you know, a bad product or a product which is going to take time to develop, or it's a market that hasn't necessarily had a lot invested into it now, that you will get a lot of. Yeah. And that's a slow-moving stock on hand. So emerging markets are difficult, but I'm sure domestic markets have got their own challenges as well. So I think you know we've got a number of battles always on the go, but they're just probably just different battles.

SPEAKER_03

Booty prides itself on making some of the most comfortable underwear on the planet. Soft, breathable, no bothersome seems. But behind the scenes, their marketing stack, well, it was a lot less comfortable. As booty scaled across Australia, the UK, and the US, customer data was scattered across email tools, on-site forms, and paid platforms.

SPEAKER_02

Getting clear insights, let alone taking action, was slow, clunky, and as pleasant as a wedgie on a hot summer's day.

SPEAKER_03

So they simplified everything and unified their channels in Clavio. With one view of the customer, Booty could finally understand how people browse, abandon, and buy, and then trigger personalized messages across email, on-site, page, and SMS without adding more tools or manual work. The result? An 87 times ROI from Clavio year to date, a 10% lift in retention year on year, and a 34% increase in high intent customers in just 90 days. Turns out, when your marketing platform is as comfortable as your product growth feels a whole lot better. If your stack is causing friction, head to Clavio.com forward slash AU and see how brands like Booty are scaling comfortably. Do you have any say, so in in terms of packs and boxes in what they're selling for here? Are you allowed to, so say you do have those popular packs, you're allowed to put the prices up to meet that demand, or is that set by others?

Growing the Trading Card Market

SPEAKER_01

Theoretically, we could price whatever we wanted to. There's no regulation around that. And that's one of the exciting things about this category. Yeah. It's all secondary market kind of prices or market pricing. Fundamentally, we've always pegged our price with the global market. So if Box of Cars was$100 on a US site, we'd try to be$100 here, which we probably could have got away with charging a lot more, a little bit like I think you pay more for Apples here. Yeah. Yeah, Apple phones here, because you know they're harder to get here. The supply demand calculation is different. We yeah, so we could have got away with that. But I think that in growing the market over here, access from less than market price through to market price is what enabled a number of people to start collecting. And I think also enabled a number of people to start businesses selling collectibles and growing the pie was always one of our strategic objectives.

SPEAKER_03

Do you mean in terms of growing the pie in terms of making card collecting more desirable?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, because I think early on it was, you know, a lot of it my selling was live selling, and live selling is putting yourself out there.

SPEAKER_03

And I want to ask you so many questions about live selling, but well, I was live selling in 2009.

SPEAKER_01

We were one of the first live sellers of sports cards or cards, and I heard live shopping pilot was you know originated in 2016. So we were doing that very much at the start, and if we just focused on creating like a giant marketplace, then we would have been billionaires. But when I was live selling, one of the things that became very clear to me is that the one person, person A, might like me, but person B thinks I'm a dickhead. And so sometimes dickheads are good for ratings. Perhaps. But I was like, you know, I I can't be the only person selling cards. Yeah. So there needs to be a genuine growth of that market. But if it's done in a way that is too broad, then the market price will just fall to the floor here. No one will be able to invest in their businesses, and we will end up just purely being a a you know, reseller uh eBay sort of market. And I'd watched a special that really resonated with me on Australian story many years before, gentleman by the name of Peter Andrew, who Peter Andrews? Who was working on it was a type of farming, I think it was like natural sequence farming. And he was trying to repair drought stricken areas of Australia, and he defied the common logic around how you would go about that by focusing on accumulating all of the water in one space and enabling the land and the and the vegetation of that area to become, I guess, really well hydrated, and then enabling the streams, etc., to form again off that and rather than having these huge spaces with tiny trickles of water through them and not sufficient to grow the vegetation. And that's how growing an emerging market felt to me, whether or not it was trading cards holistically or whether or not it was growing soccer trading cards, which Panini did extraordinarily well because when we got our first lot of soccer trading cards, it was there was no one who wanted soccer trading cards. They were very hard to sell. So if there'd been 10 people trying to sell them and they were all making no money, they probably all would have been sold, but there wouldn't have been any shops and there wouldn't have been any jobs and there wouldn't have been any trips to training courses and etc. And you don't get any sort of growth in the industry. And right now, because of a lot of those choices from Panini and and hopefully from what we did as well, there is a thriving community of sellers.

SPEAKER_03

It feels like trust is a big part of your business because it's you're not only doing trust for cherry, but you're doing trust for the sector.

SPEAKER_01

Well, yeah, certainly in that initial stage, right now, I think the kids have grown up and left the house. I don't need to do a huge amount anymore. Dad's on the couch now.

SPEAKER_03

You're done.

The Future of Trading Cards and Events

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, but there was a huge amount of trust. And just recently, in the last two weeks, we've activated for the NFL, the AEW wrestling, and most recently Live Golf in Adelaide. And Live Golf, an emerging market of trading cards, and they've just recently launched uh, I think up to their third set of trading cards. Okay. And it's that that trust they opened themselves up. They allowed us, treated us really well hospitality wise, and we subsequently invested a lot in making the whole event over there work with trading cards. Were you on the Party hole. They let us under the party hole for a little bit and uh it was astonishing. And that is the best sporting event, maybe event that I've ever been to. Wow.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

It's usually into a lot given, you know, everywhere that you play, like MBA, NFL, soccer.

SPEAKER_01

Amazing. Truly amazing that they've been able to grow that from I think if most people were asked if they wanted to go to a golf event, like they would just wouldn't go. And this event has 120,000 people. I'd say that at least 40% of them were girls under the age of 25. Wild, isn't it? Who would have thought? Like this is you'd swear to God that they'd they'd hired them. But they've achieved. What kind of world are we living in? And we we moved 10 times the amount that they've moved at any other event. Wow. And that was about, you know, we had the full, you know, not the full team. We had a big team over there. We had, you know, I think a really solid product offer. We had great content. We, you know, we had that promoted across numerous channels, including, you know, Whatnot helped us out. A fantastic platform to help people and help people sell cards or anything really. And yeah, it was a tremendous success. But that kind of trust is where we play now. And that's helping those licenses connect with their fans in emerging markets, which is one of the powerful things that trading cards can do.

SPEAKER_03

Do you find that your community, because you are that trusted source in Australia, you're the biggest, you're so well known now in the card collector space. Do you find that you're able to introduce your audience to new interests within cards? So, like take a rugby league audience and take them over and get them interested in live golf cards. Does it work like that? Or are people very steadfast in what they collect?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I can give you an example from today. We select trading cards who are the number one manufacturer of trading cards here in Australia, launched their new NRL licensed trading cards, and we've sold 1,600% more NRL trading cards than we've sold ever before. Wow. So that is the combination of a good product and a good relationship and an engaged audience who, you know, they they know the experience they're going to get with Cherry. And the moment that stocks become available, they have smashed it and they're already reselling them on eBay. I've already seen them for about 40% more on eBay, which is absolutely fantastic. Nothing is better for our business than being cleared out of something, waking up, being cleared out of it, because while that mindset of you know supply and demand is really strong and people are doing that actively, this space is healthy.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, you've got a bit of buzz going.

SPEAKER_01

You have to.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

That's the name of this game.

SPEAKER_03

Do you have any problems with fraud? Like I'm casting my mind to like sneaker drops and stuff where people are putting in cues and trying to get validation and things like that. Is that a problem for you?

SPEAKER_01

No, less so that we get chargebacks, galore, and early doors, it costs it cost me a huge amount of money. But Shopify's got some fantastic tools now to prevent that, and as does American Express, PayPal. So we catch most of them now, but it does blow me away the level of that type of fraud and the lack of interest that our you know legal space has in wanting to deal with it.

SPEAKER_03

It's really on the merchant, isn't it, to stop it, to start?

SPEAKER_01

It's definitely on the merchant to stop it, but I don't understand where the due diligence is of our authorities to to stop the crime.

SPEAKER_03

It's just I know it's this faceless crime, isn't it? That's happening every day. And obviously we had the big blow-up, which rightly so, of the rising crime in stores recently, and that's absolutely needs attention. But I do feel there's a lot of e-commerce measures doing it really hard and spending a lot of time and almost keeping their business being conservative because you have to be, and potentially knocking back sales that could be genuine sales because you've got to play it safe sometimes because no one's gonna save you if you let them through.

SPEAKER_01

Well, we would have we'd have six figures of fraud, of chargebacks. I mean, I haven't done that math. It certainly was six figures, it might be a little bit less, I'm not sure. A year. And like it it's a concept of if I was stealing like$2,000 or trying to steal$2,000 off you, Nathan, that if I tried to take it out of your pocket, the police would probably be all over me. But if because I do it on my computer, they're not interested at all.

SPEAKER_03

Like it doesn't what are the um main things that you do to prevent fraud, like from a process perspective? What are the most important steps for you?

SPEAKER_01

Well, we use all of the tools that Shopify makes available to us, and then we have Shopify Flow automatically flagging, and then we have of that stuff that gets flagged, it goes through my chief operating officer and my head of operations, depending on the the level of that flag. And they make a decision if it's legit or not, you know, based on a couple of very good tells that we've worked out. But there's still a couple, uh every now and then there's one, and you're just not sure.

SPEAKER_03

Because I could imagine you'd have some pretty big transaction values that you're weighing up, whether it's legit or not, and saying no to a big transaction can often be just as heartbreaking, right?

Understanding Live Shopping and Breaks

SPEAKER_01

Well, we had we had a five-figure one where the person was happy to leave their passport with us, and they still went with the chargeback.

SPEAKER_03

So tell me about I really want to talk about live shopping, but before we get to that, tell me about breaks. I educated myself a little bit in breaks coming from the non-card collector world, discovering breaks and discovering how big they are and how much of an event it is. I just had a thousand ideas of how we could potentially take this out of just cards and apply it to a broader retailer e-commerce sense. But to start with, can you just explain the concept of brakes and how you bring your community together over them?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, historically they've always been called breaks. We've shifted to calling them live shopping to sort of align more with the modern terminology that the wider community is probably beginning to get familiar with. But essentially they began around 2008, 2009 when there were products in the marketplace that were too expensive to justify one person buying them, or they certainly weren't selling through with any velocity with one person buying them. And as such, people started to see good value in taking a$1,000 item and dividing it by the 30 possible teams. So you might buy the Los Angeles Lakers because you collect Los Angeles, and I buy the Chicago Bulls because I like Derrick Rose. And then in that product, when it gets open live on camera to a community of people that are chatting and familiar with each other and taking the piss out of each other, then you would get any of the uh Lakers cards that came out, and I would get any of the Chicago Bulls cards that came out, and if there were no Lakers cards, you get nothing. And it just it caught fire. People that wanted the cards loved it, people that wanted the theatre loved it, people that wanted to just talk shit loved it. So there was a real it was a beautiful community, a really fun time in my life where how I kind of saw the future of trading cards being this really kind of live IRL experience was realized. And you know, I love my staff. I've got an incredible team. I'm so extraordinarily lucky. But it there's something beautiful as well about every single cent being yours and every decision being yours, and every mistake being yours too, because you make a lot of those. So that was a really beautiful time. And breaks or live shopping just grew and grew and grew, and now there's so many different ways to do it. And just recently, obviously Whatnot, which is yeah, I think like a$12 billion company now. Huge. There's not that many in Australia using it, though, is there? There's a fair few now. I only launched a year ago. It's by far the world's Alibar is the world's largest live shopping. Yep. But it's Alibar's kind of like the DFO. Whatnot is like your specific, it's like you're going there for collectibles, whether that's collectible clothes or collectible toys or cards. It's a very specialized store and it is built for performance. It just works. Yeah. It is gonna make, I'm not too sure what the average age is of your listeners, but for the ones that are under 20, I think it's gonna make a lot of them millionaires. It's not playing around. It's you just it does the work and you just need to find what the what the product is that you drop in, and whether that's you collect a Lego, you're gonna put minifigures on it, or you know, you collected DVDs and you're gonna you know put those on there or whatever uh clothes, you collect band t-shirts, you found a place you can buy those out of Japan, like boom, boom, boom, and yeah, you're gonna have seriously good results.

Live Shopping As Events And Content

SPEAKER_03

And so obviously a very different mindset from e-com where you can list your products up and hope they sell. And once the inventory hits zero, your job's done. On live shopping, how do you approach that from uh even a scheduling or a planning perspective? Do you consider it kind of like episodes or shows, or do you just kind of go events? Like how do you kind of think about that differently to kind of build hype for these events on Warden?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, to answer your question, Nathan, but you know, not well. We're at a point where we are a slow-moving ship compared to you know, kids are hopping on that platform and they're just dominating it from the moment they hop on. We go through the whole process of creating a strategic objective, you know, getting the people behind that, not overburdening the people that are already in that space. Like there's a whole process that is involved in developing something like that. And there's certainly uh people out there that are doing phenomenally. They should be events. Every show should have an event, a really clear call to action to them. And to an extent we're getting better at that. My team are extraordinarily good at YouTube, which is where we kind of made our money and our community. That's where they live. And bringing those into that whatnot environment is something that we're learning every day and we're getting better at and we're investing in. But like you say, the moment it's like walking into a shopping center, and what you need to do is have a really nice storefront.

SPEAKER_03

And there's a real skill, isn't there, to being a TVSN type personality in the modern world compared to being a content creator and influencer where you can go back and edit your stuff, like to keep people entertained constantly and to fold in product and sales messages at the same time as keeping it entertaining. What have you learned around live shopping, especially through all your events, to make it not only entertaining, but to actually move product at the same time?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, well, that's really something that's difficult and you need to work with it delicately. Our marketing approach has always been that we've never wanted to come across as a catalogue. We treat our community as an engaged and a group of collectors who want to escape the grind of whatever they're doing for work and be able to still take part, whether or not they want to be the person who's just making jokes in the stream or they want to be the person who just observes what people get. And so we really focus on that, and then every now and then we've got an offer, we'll fold in an offer for them that we think is something that is either going to be a good value to them or uh something that's going to be really interesting for everyone who's watching. And I think that when you've got that trust, they will activate. Yep. So for example, today, the Select NRL trading cards launch, when we do put up a post or we do put up a show and we say, hey guys, world premiere of Select NRL trading cards, we find that our community go, they trust us that we're not just you know trying to move them widgets for the sake of moving them widgets, and they're not going to get another email that says, Hey, do you want more widgets? Like that's just not how we operate.

SPEAKER_03

The market is shifting. Costs are climbing, and the pressure to do more with less is very real. But when resources are tight, you can rely on Shopify, the platform that's consistently first with new capabilities. Shopify invests significantly in RD and drops more than 150 updates every year, evolving with you and absorbing complexity so that you can focus on what moves your business forward. From AI-powered insights to the world's best converting checkout, Shopify is designed for the next era of commerce, helping you sell more, scale faster, and future-proof your brand. Build for what is next with Shopify. Visit Shopify for Enterprise to learn more. I suppose too. You've got limited release and constant drops and timed releases really working in your favour for that content, isn't it? It's a lot harder when you're selling core products that are the same year in, year out. And you've also got passion, right? People are passionate about what you do.

SPEAKER_01

I always hate on how on social platforms you always get tagged with the at everyone. Yeah. It drives me nuts. At everyone. I'm selling something.

SPEAKER_03

Come here. I've got something to sell you. Do you repurpose any of your live shopping as content that you put through your socials, or is your view that live content is live content and that's where it lives? And once it's done, it's done.

SPEAKER_01

We do definitely we repurpose like big moments. People have hit six-figure cards on our shows and capturing that moment. That must be wild. It is pretty wild, yeah. If not just for so they can share it with their friends and family who I'm sure think that you know that they're an idiot and that they've wasting their money and that they've probably just dreamt that it's happened, just for them to share it again. So we do repurpose that, but we don't put a lot of time and money into, you know, do you want to re-watch the show again? The the production value isn't there for them to want to re-watch it again. But I do think that within the next ten years there'll be a TVSN type broadcast of live shopping for more mainstream TV, TikTok shop. It's obviously successful. My daughter's eight. She's probably gonna not watch mainstream TV. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03

No, my daughter's nine, and YouTube shorts are the devil for me.

SPEAKER_01

Just trying to keep her off like thank the government for banning them. Yeah, I don't know where it goes, but I think that there'll be uh traditional media live shopping that isn't in you know a mobile phone aspect ratio that's high production quality and celebrities opening and collecting, and I think that's next down the line.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. You've got such an amazing audience. Like everything that I researched and I went to some forums and some Reddit things to kind of hear what people are saying about you, and there's just genuine love.

SPEAKER_01

And I apologize for that.

Serving Different Collector Communities

SPEAKER_03

It's it's incredible. Like most most resellers would love to build the kind of brand love and community that you've built over time. Do you see the cherry community as one community? Do you try and personalize things for your audience? Because obviously you've got different passions and interests, but you've also got different levels of engagement, people who might want to come in and shit talk on live live chats, some who might just want to pick up the cards when they're released and enjoy it in their own time. Do you try and personalize the experience for your customers, or is it more of a we're all in this together, we're all card collectors?

SPEAKER_01

It's an interesting question. The communities are very different. So the community that collects magic, the gathering trading cards, is nothing at all like the community that collects one piece trading cards, let alone the community that collects baseball trading cards. So one of the things that we are doing is we're expanding our point of sale space this year, which is going to be really exciting. It'll be at least two to three times larger. And that will enable us to accommodate more types of customers. And we're focusing on services. So that will have better customer experiences for those different types of customers. But the reality is that they need different spaces. They some like it noisy, some like it quiet, some want to sit, some want to be sold. So to just spin back around on that, one of the difficulties was that our trading cards became cool again during COVID and they really exploded in COVID, which was lucky because you know a lot of people were finding it really difficult. And whereas I lost everything in the GFC, I kind of made it all back in COVID. The expectation, and I think a lot of e-commerce stores sold for massive overs during COVID, but the expectation was that everyone was going to stop going to stores. Like that was just why would you ever go to a store again? And so we kind of like took all of our investment out of point of sale and started trying to work out how we make online look and feel better. Then the first thing that happened, the moment they opened the gates again, everyone just flocked to the shop. So we're getting like 40% year-on-year growth point of sale. And that was just not expected at all. And you know, my team have been absolutely annihilated, working their ass off, trying to manage like, you know, lines of three, four people deep every day. So because of that unexpected customer behavior, we've probably lost touch a little bit with our community and exactly how to best provide for them. And so that is a big focus of 2026, is you know, making our spaces, whether it be online, but certainly in store, better suit those different types of people.

SPEAKER_03

Because I could imagine your spaces almost become like that social outlet, that social space, that third space for a lot of people, not just a place to pick up your cards.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, 100%. Like the people either people live in the chat, people live in the store. Like it's the same vases and they know your name. Like it's not like cheers, but they know your name and they they sit there and they giggle. Like I'm always frustrated. They just sit there and they giggle at me. Are you buying something or you're just gonna laugh at me all day? Yeah. Well, why is he why is he so upset? So yeah, no, but it's but it's great fun. And actually, when I started Cherry, my my like back of a napkin featured essentially a live camera the whole time. And I anticipated that people worldwide would be able to essentially IRL the store and sort of feel like they were apart from wherever they were. That never eventuated because of the lack of cameras, the dangers of me saying something inappropriate or one of my customers saying something inappropriate. And so we never went down that track, but I think that that is that'll be on the cards somewhere soon, if not already. And I think it'll be a beautiful thing.

What To Collect And How Cards Appreciate

SPEAKER_03

So I've got to ask you, what are you collecting? What's the hot card at the moment? What's what's going?

SPEAKER_01

Well, I collect Marvel trading cards. And so right now I've been collecting there's a set that Upper Deck released a year or so ago called Marvel Platinum, and it's got a beautiful gold variation that I've been collecting. There's only 10 of each card in the world. Yeah, it's sort of something that I kind of is an outlet, I guess you'd call it. And that's been a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_03

But I can imagine it must be half of you. You must just want to start new collections all the time as you see them come in.

SPEAKER_01

It's an interesting one because when you get a product, you have to kind of make a quick call on do I need more of this? How well is this gonna sell? Particularly how quickly will I need to move down on this if if I don't think it's gonna perform well, because if you get caught holding it and you know it goes below cost too quickly, a product recently, which I won't slight the product, but it it dropped below cost before it landed. And you kind of gotta make those assessments, and particularly because maybe the market doesn't like it now. There's one product that uh I bought 40 cases of for like around$400 a case. So there's 10 boxes in a case, and now they're$20,000 a case. And so I bought 40 of them because no one liked it at all. So that was actually the first thing that I collected, which was called Marvel Gems. So there's opportunities, a lot of gut feel. I'll give you listeners a quick guide to making money on trading cards. Historically, anything that's had a gold variation to 10 or less, and that gold looks beautiful, works long term. So, generally speaking, products that have got gold variations that look good, go up in price, but occasionally they drop down and they're under. And I've found that there've been success stories long term. There's a Pokemon release recently that had a gold variation of Charizard in it called Phantasmal Flames. And it is the arguably the least popular of the recent Pokemon sets. But mark my words, in 10 years' time, no one will care. And that'll be a gold Charizard, and that product will be worth way more than its contemporaries. So yeah, that's gold.

SPEAKER_03

Gold. Who would have thought? Go buy gold cards.

SPEAKER_01

Or gold, either way. I think you still do pretty well. It's not as fun buying blocks of gold, and that's why Cherry's been successful, Nathan.

SPEAKER_03

Right, that's right. Grayson, this has been absolutely fascinating. I don't think I've had a guest, and I don't like to compare a guest, but I don't think I've had a guest I've enjoyed researching more than what you're doing at Cherry. Obviously, you've got a fascinating product, but the passion and the way that you engage your community, I think we can learn so much from that as retailers in general, regardless of what we're selling. And your observations around where we're heading with live shopping, I think is something we all need to sit up and take notice of as well, because shopping is entertainment. And, you know, we've got to entertain, we've got to bring people on the journey. And you're just doing it so well at Sherry. So thank you so much for sharing your insights and your journey so far. Very inspirational. Loved it. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01

Thank you very much for letting me have an opportunity to hopefully teach your audience a little bit about trading cards.

SPEAKER_03

What struck me most about that conversation wasn't the card market itself, although honestly, I just wanted to go and collect cards for the rest of my life. It was how deliberately Grayson has thought about restraint, pricing at a market when he could have gone higher, not flooding the market with too many sellers, holding back on channels until the trust is there. There's a real strategic patience and respect for customers on how Grayson's built cherry that I really, really respected in that conversation. Here are three things that I'm gonna take away that I think anyone can apply to their e-commerce business. Number one, price for the market you want, not the margin you can get. Grayson deliberately kept Cherry's prices at global market rates when he could have charged more in many instances. He was focused on growing the category, get more people collecting, and get that investment in the pie, which is now paying dividends every time a new drop lands. As we heard, the excitement is growing. So if you're thinking about pricing purely from a margin decision or a new customer acquisition, this is worth thinking about. Number two, live shopping. How can we not talk about live shopping? But it's got to be thought about as an event, not just a channel. People need a clear reason to show up for a drop, a reveal, a moment, a connection. Without that, you're just shoving shopping into video. Grayson's team, as we heard, are doing some great events, but still getting better. And he'll be the first to admit there's plenty still to learn, but the results are right and the trend is going the right direction around live shopping. And the third thing I think anyone can take out of this is around fraud. Grayson talked about it as a pain point, but that Shopify Flow are doing some real work for him around fraud prevention. And if you're not using it, you probably should be. Cherry was absorbing six figures a year in chargebacks, which is absolutely huge before they built a proper system. Automated flagging through flow, then a human review layer for anything that looked borderline, two people making the call on uncertain transactions. When you're dealing with six figures, it was so important that they build a system. That combination is what brought the losses down. Now it won't catch everything, but it catches most of it for Cherry. You need to make sure that you've got the right tech and the right systems in place to catch your fraud. Because as Grayson said, no one else is going to do it for you. Now, if this episode has left you thinking about community, live commerce, or building a brand that people actually love, or you just want another place to trade your trading cards, come over and continue that conversation with over 600 e-commerce operators over in the Add to Cart community. It's free to join over on Adducart.com.au. Thanks again to Grayson White for being so generous with his time and his thinking today. What an amazing story. Got me pumped for my trading cards to arrive. And thank you for listening. If you're not subscribed yet, hit that button so you don't miss what's coming up. We'll have some crapping interviews. I'll see you next week.