We recently connected with Scott Church and have shared our conversation below.
Scott, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard.
Most people have heard of Pokemon and Magic cards. What people don’t realize is that there are over 2,000 out of print collectible card games no longer in print. Game stores focus on the here and now. While CategoryOneGames focuses on the past.
CategoryOneGames works with the classic collectible card games (CCGs) of the past. Star Wars CCG, Star Trek CCG, and Lord of the Rings TCG all made by Decipher are some of the classic games in the industry that players and collectors still enjoy. WWE Raw Deal, Transformers TCG, VS System, OverPower, and so many other classic games are kept alive by fans who continue to make cards and put together events to keep these games alive.
CategoryOneGames serves these various gaming communities. Our goal is to keep these games alive and passed on to the next generation of fans. We work with various gaming communities to help them attract players and make the cards available for their communities to purchase. It also gives players a chance to sell or trade in their cards to either pick up additional cards that they need or to pay for things happening in their lives.
Many fans of these games build multiple decks to be able to share with friends or their kids. They have them available and do random drafts of the decks people can use to keep it fresh and exciting.
While most game stores focus on games currently in print, CategoryOneGames keeps these out of print games alive.
Scott, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My dad bought a bunch of Topps 1981 baseball card boxes the year I was born. He wanted to enjoy opening up with me when I was older. I was seven and heavily into baseball. One weekend, my dad went up into the attic and came down with these boxes of cards and we spent a few days opening and sorting all of these amazing baseball cards. We kept track of the cards we needed to finish our set. This led us to go to all the local sports card shops and sports card conventions around the Phoenix/Mesa area. We quickly moved from finishing the 1981 Topps set to buying basketball, football, and baseball cards that we could get our hands on.
I eventually moved from sports cards to comic cards, to comic books, to collectible toys, then to video games and in 1994 I got into card games with Magic the Gathering. I fell in love with card games. not only could I collect them, but I could play, compete, and travel to tournaments to win prizes and compete against the best players in various card games.
Once I started college I decided to put away all of my nerdy hobbies and just try to enjoy college. My parents got divorced right around the time I was getting married. I cleaned out the house I grew up in and started my marriage with all my old comics and cards in our living room. I decided to start selling them on eBay which led to realizing I needed a website. The demand for these card games that were no longer in print was more than I expected and sales were growing.
Fans of these games needed a reliable place to find the game that they enjoyed and a group of people they could enjoy them with.
With that thought in mind, CategoryOneGames was built. I started playing many of the games that we sell while they were in print and now I’m selling them after they went out of print. The fans of these games still want to enjoy them and now they have a place they can go to in order to pick up the items they want and know that items will be restocked and we will be supporting them in their hobby moving forward.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
With CategoryOneGames, we wanted customers to know when we list a card in a grade, the card will arrive in that grade. Many eBay sellers will say all of their items are Near Mint or in great condition, except they are not. They don’t understand the process of grading. Many sellers in this space don’t understand what it really takes to grade cards, what to look for when grading, and what condition breakdowns really look like.
Our site is known to be strict graders and customers know that their NM card is going to be NM or Mint. Lightly Played grades will often be other sellers Near Mint.
This has been one of the keys to building our reputation within the card gaming industry.
Can you talk to us about how your side-hustle turned into something more.
CategoryOneGames had always been a side business for me personally until COVID. The hobby industry saw a huge burst of new customers and people at home looking for things to do from 2020 through 2022. Sports cards, comic books, retro video games, card games, and every other hobby type of industry saw an increase in sales and interest. That hit our business as well. We saw a huge drop in our inventory and we could not get enough new products in for the demand for out of print games. That led me to leave my job at the time and move into working in the business full time. We moved from a small office to a larger office two now having two offices.
We are now a few years out and sales have remained strong. I’m now at a point where I need to figure out where our future growth looks like, can I hire to replace myself and find a different job for myself and move this back into a side job.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.categoryonegames.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/categoryonegames/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/categoryonegames/?ref=hl
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-church-a4a5b91b/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/CategoryOneGame
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/Category1Games
- Other: Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/1d5a7e33b820/categoryonegames TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@categoryonegames Blog: https://blog.categoryonegames.com/