SINGAPORE: For Fariheen Faroukh, his love affair with trading cards began when he was a teenager.
He then came across a card autographed by former Chelsea midfielder Frank Lampard, which he was able to sell on eBay for “a few hundred dollars”.Despite that initial sale, Mr Fariheen - then a sales director - remained largely a collector until 2019, when he decided to take a sabbatical from work and turned to selling cards from his collection to make money.
More than a thousand cards - ranging from football to Pokemon ones - are listed in the store, with prices ranging from US$9 for a card of English footballer Ben Watson to more than US$100,000 for an autographed card of basketball star Michael Jordan.“I kind of like what Lebron represents, culturally and socially, and also how amazing a player he is,” said Mr Fariheen.
According to the online marketplace, sales for basketball and Pokemon cards in the United States increased 373 per cent and 574 per cent respectively.The boom has been driven in part by the COVID-19 pandemic, as movement restrictions prompted people to look for ways to spend or make money online, said Mr Fariheen.
Children who played the Pokemon games or watched the cartoons are now adults with disposable income to spend on their hobbies, he noted. The collectible card craze has been further spurred by celebrities, noted entrepreneur Mark Tan. These personalities include athletes and influencers such as YouTuber Logan Paul, who started opening packs of collectible cards in online videos and is known for sharing his fondness for Pokemon.
His work affords him a lot of downtime, he said, allowing him to run Team Killer Shop, a store in Geylang selling trading card games as well as selling football cards online. A limited-edition card of the 20-year-old striker for Bundesliga side Borussia Dortmund sold for US$124,230 earlier this month.
Mr Tan said there is a larger local market for Pokemon cards, pointing to the queues at the franchise’s store at Jewel Changi Airport and estimating that there may be about 50,000 Pokemon collectors in Singapore.