Over the last few days, Topps has been teasing their new online exclusive product called Topps Now, which is an on demand printed set commemorating daily moments from the previous day’s MLB action. This is really the first time a physical product has been branded around timely printing of recent results from Baseball, and it could be very interesting to see how it plays out.
Being that Topps Now has the ability to print cards that celebrate items as they happen, it could be a very interesting way to special content onto the market as quickly as possible. If you think back, players like Yasiel Puig and company stormed onto the scene, and had very few cards to support the enormous demand of their production on the field.
To counter this situation, Topps is pledging to print the cards within 3-5 business days and ship quickly, which could ensure that extra value is maintained for cards of players who dont have any on the market, or do something huge on the field. If Clayton Kershaw pitches a perfect game, the card that is made for the event could end up being valuable above the $9.99 Topps is charging.
The only thing is that certain cards are going to be higher run, as there seems to be no limit on how many are printed with each release. Topps has said they are going to announce the runs as they have them, which could mean that a low count version can have some added success on the secondary market.
To be honest, this type of content has been available for years in a digital format, and some of the cards have quite high prices on eBay. Since Topps has had such huge success with Bunt, its not surprising that they want to get these built on a physical side of things as well.
The only piece of this that is still in question has to do with awareness. How many people are going to know about the set, care about the set, or even want the set. Same question can be asked about individual pieces. I think that Topps just wants to make sure that Topps Now remains somewhat of a collectors item, even if the final product eventually gets stale. Going to be very interesting to see how this all plays out.
I have to say, for me, its worth a look right now.
I find it fascinating and really cool. I’ll be excited to follow it. 10 bucks seems a little steep for 1 card – so while you’re right that there’s no limit to what they’ll print, the price itself is limiting.
This is sort of a rebirth of eTopps. And the cost is close to the same with shipping.
It’s going to be dependent on shipping costs. Shipping on the Harper and Story cards was free, but I see that, ordinarily, shipping is like $10 a card or something. The product won’t succeed at that shipping price, which is insane. Shipping costs are what killed eTopps. Now Topps has a warehouse full of other people’s eTopps cards and those people have a whole bunch of cards that they technically own but can’t actually get their hands on. Topps needs to get real about shipping costs because there are certainly people willing to pay $10 for a card (or $30 for 5), but not $10 for a card AND $10 to ship it.