Inside Burbank Sports Cards with Rob Veres

Every Saturday, thousands of collectors gather outside Burbank Sportscards at the intersection of Magnolia Boulevard and Hollywood Way. Beneath a towering mural of Shohei Ohtani sliding into home plate during his historic 50/50 season and a larger-than-life recreation of the iconic 2008-09 Topps “Basketball” Kobe Bryant and LeBron James card, collectors wait for the doors to open. Some arrive for the hourly raffles, clutching paper tickets while keeping one eye on the prize table. Others head directly toward the Daily Singles showcases, where hundreds of newly acquired premium singles appear each morning for 24-hours before moving through the store’s broader retail and online ecosystem. Nearby, families sort through thousands of low-cost cards inside Collector’s Court, a sprawling section designed for discovery rather than speculation, rightfully earning and named the Best Hobby Shop in the country at the inaugural Hobby Awards, hosted by Mantel.

By the time the doors close, roughly 1,700 people will have moved through the showroom. Five full-time buyers evaluate collections 5 days-a-week, feeding one of the largest continuous inventory intake systems in sports cards, a process fueled by an ongoing cycle of collections, trade-ins, submissions, and walk-in sellers. Yet to understand the scale and efficiency of Burbank Sportscards today, the story begins nearly 3,000 miles away from Southern California.

The story of Burbank Sportscards begins in 1974. Eight-year-old Rob Veres was collecting cards in Brockton, Massachusetts, trading with neighborhood kids and buying packs whenever he could. Three years later, his family moved west. The cards did not make the trip. By twelve, Veres had already found his way back into the hobby, delivering advertising flyers for a local coin and stamp shop before eventually moving behind the counter. While many future hobby entrepreneurs entered through fandom, Veres entered through operations. He learned how inventory moved, how customers behaved, and how a small business functioned day to day. At nineteen, he was running a business inside the store called Rob’s Cards & Collectibles. Three years later, in 1989, at twenty-two years old, he purchased the business with help from his father, Steve Veres.

When Veres’ mother joined the business, she helped answer phones, assist customers, and manage daily operations. She needed a practical way to answer phone inquiries, verify if a card was in stock, and locate specific inventory without relying on memory alone. Veres responded by creating what became known internally as “the Mother System”, a framework built around alphabetical indexing, color coding, and precise physical locations. If inventory could only be found when the owner was present, the business could never truly scale. Information had to live inside the system rather than inside a person’s head. This operational foundation became the core infrastructure that eventually allowed Burbank to scale into the global hobby mecca it is today.

With a repeatable internal system finally locking down the showroom floor, Veres was free to turn his attention outward to accumulate more inventory. For years, Veres traveled relentlessly to card shows, bought collections wherever opportunities emerged, and developed a reputation for seeing value where others saw volume. Every buying trip returned with more inventory. Over time, however, his objective changed. He no longer wanted to spend his career chasing inventory across the country; he wanted inventory to come to him. “I wanted to be the house,” he explains.

Trust became the mechanism that made that possible, and as Burbank’s reputation grew, massive acquisitions like the Hawaii and Larry Ching collections began arriving at the company’s doorstep. These massive influxes of cards reinforced a crucial lesson: the challenge was no longer owning inventory, but finding the right card at the right moment for the right customer. Burbank had accumulated millions of items, but the business faced a stark operational bottleneck—collectors could not buy inventory they could not see.

In 2013, while watching a late-night television commercial for a Fujitsu document scanner, Veres noticed something most viewers would have missed: business cards and sports cards were nearly identical in size. If the scanner could scan legal documents and business cards, it could most likely scan sports cards. After experimenting to confirm the scanner could process cards efficiently, Veres immediately purchased nine machines and built a dedicated scanning operation around them. For the first time, millions of cards could be systematically imaged, cataloged, and connected to searchable databases. What began as an improvised solution inside Burbank would eventually become standard imaging practice throughout the hobby.

Earlier in the 1990s and early 2000s, Veres was already teaching seminars on organization, merchandising, buying strategy, online sales, and operational efficiency. Dealers traveled from around the country to hear him speak. Around the same time, the internet was beginning to reshape commerce, and Veres saw an opportunity far larger than Southern California. He often described the vision as creating “the local card shop of the world,” a place where collectors could access inventory regardless of geography. Beckett eventually approached Burbank because it wanted to build a marketplace and needed organized inventory at scale to anchor it. Beckett possessed pricing data, traffic, and industry reach. Burbank possessed something equally valuable: inventory that could be found, photographed, and searched. The relationship led to Veres serving as Beckett’s Vice President of E-Commerce and helping shape some of the hobby’s earliest marketplace initiatives. When the 2013 scanning breakthrough arrived, it completely shattered these geographic limitations and attracted attention throughout the entire industry. The combination of organized inventory, scalable imaging, and marketplace distribution transformed the company into one of the hobby’s most powerful inventory engines. At its peak, Burbank became the ninth-largest seller on eBay across all categories globally, according to Veres.

Today, Burbank operates out of a 14,300-square-foot former Rite Aid, the largest location in company history and the culmination of multiple expansions over four decades. The building employs roughly 45 people and serves as the operational hub for an inventory exceeding 35 million cards, including approximately 2.4 million unique cards, one of the largest continuously active inventories in the hobby.

Most businesses race to put inventory online as quickly as possible. Burbank does the opposite. On record days, more than 170 walk-in sellers pass through the doors, feeding a system where roughly 500 newly acquired premium singles enter the Daily Singles showcases each morning. This premium inventory flows into one of sixteen Exclusive Showcases positioned throughout the showroom, receiving a twenty-four-hour head start before ever appearing online. By giving local collectors the first opportunity to purchase, roughly half of the premium showroom inventory sells before ever reaching broader online distribution.

Burbank has massively expanded its digital footprint through an exclusive partnership with Fanatics. Through this distribution network, Burbank supplies roughly 2.3 million cards to the Fanatics ecosystem, powering the individual graded slab inventory sold across official MLB, NFL, and NBA team store websites. Yet, even with the sweeping commercial reach of the Fanatics engine, Burbank’s proprietary website and mobile app continue to serve as the primary drivers of business revenue. Veres describes this omni-channel strategy as building a moat around the building. The achievement is not accumulation. The achievement is liquidity.

By the time Rob Veres had built one of the largest inventory engines in the hobby, many of the operational challenges had already been solved. Cards could be acquired, organized, photographed, listed, and distributed. The machine worked. Yet one challenge remained. The hobby had become easier to access, but it had not necessarily become easier to understand. While Sammy Veres built a career as a remote IT project manager at AT&T, her father continued building something very different inside Burbank Sportscards, the in-person experience. He often reminded her there would always be a place for her at the shop. Within 2 weeks of that conversation, Sammy left her remote job to join the family business, a move that was not a passive inheritance but an active, deliberate decision.

At first, Sammy imagined herself working behind the scenes. Rob had other ideas. He wanted her in front of the camera. She resisted, worried she lacked the hobby knowledge to speak with authority. Instead, that fresh perspective became an unexpected advantage. Unlike her father, Sammy entered the hobby as a beginner. She stepped into the role of a translator for curious newcomers, helping explain a complex industry to people encountering it for the first time.

The team eventually recognized that the challenge was not creating content. The challenge was documenting an in-store experience that routinely refused to cooperate with rigid content calendars. A major collection would arrive unannounced. A celebrity would walk through the front door. A customer would pull a life-changing card. To capture that energy, Rob began walking the floor with his phone in hand, documenting fresh inventory, buying activity, and the constant movement that defined the store. Collectors were not simply watching cards. They were watching activity.

The approach created a powerful flywheel. Burbank’s Instagram audience grew from roughly 70,000 followers to approximately 125,000, backed by more than 5,000,000 monthly views. Yet the most meaningful metric was not digital. Sammy began recognizing usernames as they walked through the front door. Followers became visitors. Visitors became customers. Customers became sellers. The audience was no longer simply observing the business. It had become part of the operating system, transforming Burbank from a place that creates customers into a self-replenishing community.

This massive online footprint generated its own gravity back on the showroom floor. On any given week, a collector browsing showcases might stand a few feet away from professional athletes, WWE stars, or celebrities like Jason Sudeikis and comedian Jeff Garlin, who is launching a hobby-focused podcast with Veres. People show up because the digital flywheel has reinforced Burbank as a place where the hobby naturally gathers. Yet, the shop’s influence has extended far beyond its digital and physical borders. The building itself has evolved into a local landmark, capturing the attention of commuters who may never have intended to visit a card shop at all.

Instead of heading for the showcases, these new visitors come for the exterior walls. Local muralist Alex Gonzalez transformed the building’s exterior into a massive public canvas, anchored by a 27-foot-tall spray-painted image of Shohei Ohtani sliding into home plate during his historic 50-50 season. It was Sally Veres, Rob’s wife, who first recognized the opportunity. Working alongside Sammy Veres and Marketing Director Daniel Baghdasarian, she helped bring that vision to life. Situated on the corner of Magnolia Boulevard and Hollywood Way, the building occupies one of the busiest intersections in the city, passed by thousands of drivers each day. The walls felt empty, and she believed the building needed an identity that matched the energy of what was happening inside. She helped bring that vision to life, eventually connecting with Gonzalez despite knowing Rob had little appetite for another major expense during an already significant, capital-intensive renovation.

The artwork proved magnetic. Crowds of tourists routinely stop for photos outside without ever stepping foot in the shop, turning the building into a neighborhood attraction. The building is no longer functioning solely as a card shop. It has officially become a landmark.

However, success creates new problems at the expense and cost of scale. As sports cards have become more valuable, hobby shop break-ins have become increasingly sophisticated. Veres responded the same way he has approached every major obstacle throughout the company’s history: by building a rigid system. Today, armed security personnel are present every hour the store is open, backed by an exclusive partnership with the Burbank Police Department to establish an immediate, direct line for instant call-and-response times.

For Veres, the question was no longer how to protect cards; it was how to protect the collector experience itself. To fight off high prices and encourage actual collecting, Burbank employs an unusual release-day policy: customers who agree to have the plastic seal cut at the counter can purchase new products at standard MSRP. However, if a buyer chooses to keep the box completely sealed, they must pay the higher secondary market rate. The goal is not to maximize the value of the box for short-term profits; the goal is to maximize the number of collectors who actually get to experience what’s inside it.

The ultimate expression of that environment comes to life right across the showroom floor. In an era where nearly every card can be purchased online, people still board airplanes to visit a former Rite Aid in Southern California. The technology matters, and the scale matters, but those things are ultimately supporting something larger: trust. Trust that showing up will be worth the trip. It’s about building a third-place people want to belong.