Trading card companies are making bank this year: And Cards and Coffee wants in.

• Author: Alsever, Jennifer

THREE DECADES AGO, Jared Bringhurst ran home after school to set up a card table at the end of the driveway at his Salt Lake City home. At 12 years old, he had a key target audience: classmates on their way home from school who would walk by and inevitably shell out money to buy his plethora of sports trading cards. "I made $800 a month as a sixth-grader," says Bringhurst.

Various other entrepreneurial ventures filled the following years of his adulthood--ranging from a window replacement company to a financial services firm. Now at 41, Bringhurst has come full circle with his childhood hobby and business pursuits: he is selling trading cards to collectors as a co-owner of the new Cards and Coffee store that opened in downtown Salt Lake City this spring.

This time, however, he's playing in a much bigger market with a huge value play. Last year, a LeBron James rookie card sold for $1.8 million, shattering modern-day NBA records. A few months later, a Milwaukee Bucks' Giannis Antetokounmpo card sold for $1,812 million. In June, Tom Brady's rookie card sold for $3.1 million, the highest price paid for a football card in a public auction, breaking the $2.25 million record set in April for another Brady card.

Similarly, a Mickey Mantle baseball card fetched $5.2 million, while a Mike Trout 2009 Bowman Chrome autographed "Superfractor," a one-of-a-kind card, sold for nearly $4 million. A Babe Ruth 1914 Baltimore News sports card sold for $6 million, and two Michael Jordan PSA 10 gem mint rookie cards went for $738,000 a piece.

"This market is unlike anything I've ever seen," says Rich Mueller, editor of Sports Collector Daily, which tracks the collectible industry news. Mueller says there was a surge in demand for trading cards in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but nothing like today.

Credit the COVID pandemic. Middle-aged collectors suddenly stuck at home began looking through old cards, perhaps sharing their childhood hobby with their own kids, and then they began finding gems. Add to that the recent death of basketball star Kobe Bryant and the release of the Last Dance documentary about Michael Jordan and the 1990s reign of the Chicago Bulls.

Soon there became nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s cards. During the first few months of COVID, sales jumped 130 percent for basketball cards, 50 percent for baseball cards, and 47 percent for football cards, according to eBay.

People started sending their cards to grading companies to get the cards...