Inside the World of Icons.com: Authentic Sports Memorabilia, Messi Collectibles & Market Growth

Stop chasing cheap flips and start building generational wealth. The biggest secret in the $400 billion collectibles market is that the higher the price, the higher the demand. Icons.com CEO Dan Jamison joins us to reveal how they maximize the veblin effect to turn Lionel Messi's memorabilia into a scarcity masterclass, contrasting it with the valuation pitfalls of mass signed legends. All that and more in this episode of Right About Now. Leo signs a contracted small amount every year and supply and demand means the price goes up, but I prefer it that way. I'd rather kind of keep it controlled than mass. You can't make more money by doing more of it. We see Leo three or four times a year. Consium 16 times a year is handed fall off. It just doesn't work like that. We concentrate on every signature trying to create the most unique or special or interesting way of presenting it. Not just banging out commodity that just gets sold every time. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cash and checks? Well, it starts right about now. Hello, welcome to Radcast Network. We're going to talk some names that you don't know you should know. I'm really pleased to have Dan James. He is the CEO and co-owner of icons.com. What's up, Dan? Lovely to be here. It's a pleasure. The hobby and collectibles and all this stuff. We're here to talk the whole gamut. We want everybody's eyes open to all the collectibles are out there. All the companies are out there and we may or may not bring up one of the most popular athletes on the planet. That you guys happen to have the most memorabilia for as I understand it. Dan, what's going on at icons? We're always excited. We love what we do. We've been doing it for 26 years now. I took over a 16 years guess. It's not all down to me. We've been riding away since 1999. We always say we started about four months after Google. memorabilia has always been my passion. It's great to put the two things together. Why are we such collecting creatures? I have on my Instagram. It says, as a kid, I collected panini stickers and now I collect footballers. It literally is what I did as a kid. So I just love it. My wife always says, if little Dan and you were talking to him as a 10-year-old, and you were like, what do you be when you want to go grow up? And it would be like, I want to be a football player, obviously. And then, okay, next level down, what would you want to do? I want to run around the planet, meet my heroes and create amazing things that people love. It's one of those cultural things that connects people and it's somewhat some natural human behavior of wanting these relics and pieces of things that remind us of fandom and our fan support of athletes or teams or clubs. And there's something just intrinsically built into our DNA, it seems. Icons has been trading the world's games at work, but when you look at our figures, 98% of our sales are outside of the UK. So we sell to 120 countries around the world. It really is 24-7. It doesn't go dark. There's somebody somewhere is wanting a piece of their heroes. And it's a pleasure to bring it to a big world out there and there's a lot of sport to go around. Football, soccer. It's the number one sport in the world. Yeah, it's not in the United States where I'm from. What do you explain that phenomenon? Things history and tradition, you guys love your sports. They are amazing. They got saturation and coverage and amazing stars. I grew up watching Lawrence Taylor, smash people to death, Michael Jordan. They were my heroes. You've got good stuff to look at. Soccer is amazing and super popular and maybe its tipping point is coming. I visited the States when I started this kind of journey. I'm sort of talking about soccer and people are that interested. I'm in a restaurant. People come out from the kitchen and get really excited because I've got a Leo Messy shirt. The taxi drivers and the locals and the expats and the people who play soccer as kids. And it's all kind of bubbling under. I think it's got a critical mass net. Leo Messy, the MLS, World Cups coming. There's women's team is the best in the world. You've got a lot going for it and it's such a big country. There's the space for everyone. Talk a little bit about your background, Dan, and building eye movements. Walk us through that journey. Quite a journey. I started off in marketing. I worked in marketing for media brands. Working in all those areas, you got to sort of see each warden. The thing about brands which I love is like, basically I love them too. So if you have to market it, you're basically marketing to yourself. One of the things I wanted to show you, I was to junior in the office, in my marketing office for the observer guy, observer newspaper. And a fact came through which no one read old school faxes and it said, would you like to partner with Panini to recreate sticker albums from all the World Cups? And I'm like running into the boss's office going, we really need to do this. This is amazing. So many years ago with the people I work with we created the recreation of all the back catalogs of World Cup album. We can add in contemporary match reports, so the actual match reports from the time and you collected them each week and you put them in a binder and it was great. And in order to go to the Panini Italian vault, they had to go to the vault to check that the films were the same. So they actually took my genuine child, completed World Cup sets to sit there in the Panini vault to put them side by side and say, right, yep, this is what we're buying. They came back, we created it. I've loved it ever since. That is a cool collectible. That's a good one. Not many people can say that one. Yeah, at the end of it for a digital company that was the owner of the icons. Icons is in the basement and they're like, well, you're a strategist. What would you do with this company? At the time, it was the personal websites of footballers, which is brilliant idea, but it was about 20 years too early, where they could talk directly to their fans and you could get news and updates straight away. It's like, yeah, it kind of works. But they had a memory of really a shop on the side. That was the thing that was, had a USP and was tangible and you can really make something out of it. So basically, we redesigned it, we focused on the memorabilia, took more of it in-house and turned it into a retail brand, basically. And then, ultimately, they put me in charge, and then, ultimately, I bought it out with my, they were the founder, Edward Freeman, and we own it and run it today. Talk to me about the clubs and the teams and building the licensing agreements and all the nuts and bolts of that. The best clubs and the best brands are the best way to communicate with the customers, basically. So if you are aligning yourself with whoever's the best and the brightest in the game in the first place, that's perfect. So 2010, we became FIFA's first ever licensing for the World Cup. We've had that license ever since. Coming to America, Canada, and Mexico next year is just brilliant for us. We've kind of, it'll be our fifth World Cup, I think. And we've really learned how to do it now. We've been with the Champions League for 14 years now. So the official memorabilia brand over the Champions League. And then we start working with the clubs as well. We've worked with Liverpool and PSG, Man City, AC Milan. We currently work with Manchester United and Barcelona and through a partner Chelsea and Spurs and soon Newcastle. Basically working with the clubs, creating high quality memorabilia, selling it through their channels and talking to their supporters, reuniting them with their icons is brilliant for us. We love doing that. It's an excuse to expand our range of players that we sign, and then we get to find new audiences for our stuff all over the world. You've got a behind you, one of the most popular athletes on the planet, highly desirable in the memorabilia space worldwide. What an unbelievable player, what an unbelievable icon. Talk about that journey. We had the guy in Spain called Azuz, who was like sort of interconnected to footballers. He's literally like, there is a guy in Barcelona, you've got a sign. Come on over, you've got to get it. That's why we did a signing with him when he was 70. And you can already tell that this guy was going to be amazing. It's both luck and skill. We picked him and we hung up. We've ridden the curves all the way up to the top. But it's because we're partners with FIFA, I was lucky enough to bet the World Cup final. So I'm there in Qatar and me and my colleague are wearing messy shirts. And everyone around us is like, but you're English. Why would you be supporting Leo Messi? Didn't you have a war against the Argentinians? And I'm like, yeah, we had a hundred year war with a French. That's all right. We love both countries. Yeah, we're all friends now. It's fine. We love football together. The point was that we explained why we were so invested with Leo to everyone around us. Everyone in the crowd started getting into it with us. I'd say 80% of the crowd was supporting Argentina. And even the French people thought it was quite interesting. So by the end, as he wins, they're all hugging us and high-fiving us just going, what a ride this must be. Like, I've nearly had a heart attack because he won, he's losing, he won, he's losing. It's an unrepeatable, incredible moment where we've been the partner of the World Cup for whatever that was. 12, 13 years in the partner of Leo for 20 years. And then it comes together in one magical moment where it all literally, it seems like you're an overnight success. But that is like two decades of graph to get to that moment. And then he wins and you're like, I'm done. Mike Drop, that's it. How many jerseys of Messi's has icons sold over time? It roughly. Roughly, I'd say 50,000 in total over two decades. There's scarcity there, because I mean, there's having billion people on the planet. And you've done it for 20 years, and in only 50,000 out there, it's a rare thing to hold. It really brought it home when, unfortunately, Pele died. I'm speaking to people who have Pele contracts and I'm like, can I get some and some? Okay, maybe we swap some for Leo. The ratio is probably about eight to one in terms of value. Now, like, how can it be? Pele is the greatest player that ever lived, won three World Cups and so on. And I'm like, because you made him sign two million shirts, that's the difference you worked him for so long for so much that actually there is scarcity, but there's not that much scarcity in the world of it. He signed so many things for decades and decades and decades. Leo signs a contracted small amount every year and supply and demand means the price goes up. But I prefer it that way. I'd rather kind of keep it controlled than mass. You can't make more money by doing more of it. We see Leo three or four times a year. Consume 16 times a year is handed fall off. It just doesn't work like that. But we concentrate on every signature trying to create the most unique or special or interesting way of presenting it, not just banging out commodity that just gets sold every time. The jersey behind you, what is that from? That is the 2022 World Cup winning shirt. It's a rep, because it's not the actual thing. What's special about it is it's dedicated to me and my two sons. So it's the first time I've actually got Leo to write something to my kids. That's why it's special. The Diego one is also dedicated to me. So that's why they make it into the office. But I'm a Liverpool fan. All my best stuff is red. And I like Barcelona and that's all red and blue. I had a flat, my girlfriend moved in, now my wife. And she's like, your red stuff just gives me a headache. You got to take it down. So I put it in the garage. And then five years later when we moved, all my dedicated products have been destroyed by sort of damp and mold and it's a good job. I'm in the memorabilia industry and I can see those people again. My first ever major signing was Diego Maradona. Working with Diego for sort of 10, 15 years. The story fast forwards to three years ago I think. Diego is in Buenos Aires and he's got an icons, exclusive worldwide contract, but it's COVID. So we have to send all the things to it. And it's people are like, yeah, yeah, we got it. It's fine. It's great. Obviously you've got to send the money now. We're like, okay, that would yeah go a long time. We'll send them the money. We'll trust him. Daniel's going to send it back. First shipment comes back five weeks later and it's brilliant. We sell it. It's astonishing and we've done some amazing things and we got signing videos and it's fantastic. We do it again. Send all the money, send all the products. And then we hear that Diego's gone into hospital because he had a brain operation I think beforehand. And then 10 days later he passes. And I get a phone call going, Diego's gone. And I'm like, oh my god, that's horrendous. But where's our stuff? And they're like, we'll have to check. It's kind of crazy around here at the moment. And they come back about 10 minutes later with and just sit down. We're going to tell you what's happened. And it's like in between his operation and his unfortunate death. He was convalescing and he signed our stuff because he'd had a long term relationship with us. And it was all signed in in his house. And during the bedroom, people were like, right, we're going to put it in the office and lock it up and make sure no one takes it or anything goes. And all his people worked incredibly hard and made it all happen. We eventually got it out of Argentina. We arrived in the UK and then we got an email saying that British Airways had lost it. That was not good. This is with two days to go before Christmas. And then we're like, look, can you just go and have a look again around Heathrow for trying to find it for us. And they came back a day later. We found it. It's all right. And then they sent it on a van and the van was delayed and we're like, oh my god, where is it? And the van had broken down and they're on a highway and they had to send another van. This thing eventually arrives on Christmas Eve in our office. The people that work in icons are straight, honest, work hard, do what they say. And that goes a really long way in sport. Betty goes a long way in trading cards and memorabilia. If you do what you say, turn up, pay your bills and have long-term relationships, that's a low bar, but that gets you so far. Because there's so many people with short-termist views, ripping people off, not doing the right thing and all those sorts of things. But I have one final point. We love America so much that we've opened up in America. We flew in, we've sorted out legal company. In 48 hours, hired someone who got a distribution of warehouse. So we're now, we've got an basin in Illinois and we've got an American website. We take dollars, can ship it overnight into America. We want to bring all great stuff to the American market. That's awesome. So you hear that? Overnight, America Dollars in the US. Is there a specific, you cannot be found at icons.com. Yeah, if you go to icons.com, it'll know you're America. So you'll get this special stuff. You can imagine we're now buying shirts off an addicts, taking it to Leo's house, getting Leo to sign it, shipping it to Illinois, getting it framed. It really is made in the USA. That's amazing, that's awesome. Because he is in Miami. Icons is worldwide and now in the US, along with Messi directly. So Leo and Icon bringing soccer, memorabilia and all the like here. It's been really fun and cool talking with you. Appreciate how gracious you are with your time and I really love what you're doing. James, really appreciate it. Thanks to everyone. Hey guys, you to find us will have links to icons.com. Get out there. I know we got a lot of soccer fans. They're out there. We know you are and with World Cup. Messi's here. Icons here. It'll be expanding more and more throughout the states. We're worldwide, baby. So we appreciate you for listening. We appreciate Dan for coming on. We'll see you next time. This has been right about now with Ryan Alfred, a Radcast Network production. Visit RyanisRight.com for full audio and video versions of the show. Order one choir about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.