A Sports Memorabilia Startup Let Fans Own a Piece of History. Then the Business Vanished

Happy Friday, welcome back to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story! Collectable looked like the perfect pandemic-era business. The startup promised everyday sports fans something long reserved for the wealthy: ownership of iconic memorabilia. Instead of spending millions on a rare Mickey Mantle card or a Wilt Chamberlain jersey, customers could buy fractional shares, much like owning stock in a company. Collectors got bragging rights, investors got exposure to a booming market, and Collectable positioned itself as the bridge between nostalgia and alternative assets.

During the pandemic collectibles frenzy, sports-card values soared, stimulus money flowed, and hobbyists looked for new places to park their cash. Customers poured money into fractional stakes of blue-chip memorabilia, believing the assets would appreciate over time. Eventually, the market cooled, and by 2023 Collectable was bleeding money.

Veteran journalist Dave Howard spins a yarn about a change in ownership and a series of operational problems that led investors to raise alarms. Users say they lost visibility into their holdings and struggled to determine what happened to the memorabilia backing their investments. For some, what started as a bet on sports history became a lesson in the risks of investing in unconventional assets.

In this story, you’ll discover

Collectable offered fractional shares of iconic memorabilia. When a new owner took the reins, users say their investments disappeared—along with the assets.

Growing up in northern Ohio in the 1970s and ‘80s, Matt Arnold became a passionate fan of the Cleveland Indians. But what he loved almost as much, starting at about age 5, was baseball cards. It was a family passion. His father, John, had emerged from his own childhood with a collection that dated to the early 1950s featuring a couple of Sandy Koufax cards and a Roberto Clemente rookie card. Both generations of Arnolds hunkered over the kitchen table together, studying the cards and thumbing through Beckett price guides to check their value.  

When adolescence arrived, Arnold’s interests pivoted to girls and sports, and the collection was tucked away. But when Covid-19 struck, he caught a radio show one day about the booming value of sports card collections. “I thought, wow, I have some of those,” Arnold recalls. “We could take a look at this again.”  

Two things happened next. One was that Arnold plunged into his basement and found himself whisked, time-machine style, back to a sepia-toned chapter of his childhood, and the cards mattered again in a way he’s able to describe but not fully explain. The other was that as a principal in his family’s food and beverage business, he now understood how marketplaces work, and he began buying cards to flip at a profit. 

In the fall of 2020, Arnold discovered Collectable Sports Assets, a company born of a simple but alluring notion: The thrill of owning a piece of sports history shouldn’t belong solely to the ultra-wealthy. The company offered regular fans like Arnold the chance to own a piece of some of the crown jewels of the realm: blue-chip sports cards and memorabilia that would normally be priced out of his range by orders of magnitude, like Wilt Chamberlain’s high school uniform and rookie-year NBA jersey, a Tiger Woods putter, or a LeBron James-Carmelo Anthony dual autograph card. 

The operative word there is “piece.” Collectable offered fractional shares of the items, the same way regular car enthusiasts had started purchasing tiny pieces of ultra-high-end sports cars on a platform called Rally several years earlier. Beyond the thrill of ownership, the idea was that the iconic treasures would gain value over time, and investors would share in the uptick.  

Collectable’s timing looked fortuitous: Its launch in September 2020 was received by millions of locked-down Americans who were flush with stimulus checks and hungry to grow their hobbies. Some sports cards that were worth $1,000 at the start of 2020 spiked in value 10 times over within a year.  

To Arnold, Collectable chimed with everything he’d learned about sports cards. “I just knew that to really get the good returns you needed to be in the best assets,” he says. He began buying small pieces of a 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle card—one graded 8.0 out of 10 by Professional Sports Authenticator, the leading third-party company that verifies cards’ authenticity and rates their physical condition. There was sentimentality involved—his father had owned a 1953 Mantle, but none from the legend’s all-valuable earlier year. 

But it was hard to ignore the investment potential, too. In 2022, a 1952 Mickey Mantle card with a grade of 9.5 sold for a record-shattering $12.6 million. 

He eventually invested about $100,000 on Collectable, including around $75,000 on the Mantle card alone—good for a 8.5 percent ownership stake. The site was registered with the SEC, which assuaged any reservations about its legitimacy. Collectable averred that all assets were fully insured and stored in “best-of-class bank-caliber vaults with state-of-the-art security monitoring and rigorous access control.” 

In the best case, Arnold figured that with continued investment, he could eventually make a play at owning the Mantle outright. “That was always the goal,” he says.  

Then, starting in 2023 the market soured, and the Collectable experience as Arnold knew it gradually curdled into something unrecognizable. Not only did his dream of owning the Mantle vaporize, but his entire investment may have vanished as well.

Collectable started as a sports-auction data aggregator in 2014, and when the company’s founders, David Yoken and Jason Epstein, decided on the fractional-ownership scheme several years later, they hired Ezra Levine, who came from the hedge-fund world as well as a sports industry startup, to become CEO and help pivot the business model. (Neither of the founders could be reached for comment.) 

The business would now earn money in several ways. First, when Collectable consigned an item, it added a small sourcing fee. Second, the company took an ownership stake (typically 3 to 10 percent), which it would then cash out when the item was later sold.  

To understand the startup’s appeal—and its legal complexities—it helps to grasp the mechanics of fractional ownership in Collectable’s context. The company used a legal structure known as Regulation A, a Securities and Exchange Commission framework that allows businesses to raise money from ordinary investors by offering securities to the public. Collectable treated each piece of sports memorabilia as its own miniature IPO, legally structured as a “series” within a Delaware LLC. Collectable consigned an item, established a price, then sold fractional shares through an SEC-regulated offering. Once the offering closed, the shares were tradable on a secondary market platform that Collectable managed.

The company’s early days were exciting. “We were able to consign unbelievable assets,” Levine says. Collectable amassed nearly 240 separate item offerings between 2020 and the end of 2022 and raised $6 million from investors. More than 90,000 people registered to purchase shares by the end of 2022, more than 10,000 of whom participated in at least one offering.

But even early on, the business model faced structural headwinds that proved formidable. Every offering required SEC qualification, a process that typically took about six weeks and could cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal and accounting fees. Each sale required filings, and each material change in the company mandated disclosure. Compliance costs quickly mounted, and under President Biden, the SEC—at a time when crypto and NFTs were booming—viewed creative investment vehicles with great skepticism. The time to garner approval for an IPO stretched from six weeks to upwards of six months, which was a problem because trading card prices tend to fluctuate, Levine says.  

A former employee of Collectable, who declined to be named, confirmed this frustration with Inc. “The SEC is not a fast-moving organization on its best day,” he says. “So it was a lot for a government bureaucrat to pour through, and sometimes it would take many extra weeks to get feedback, and they routinely went past their deadlines.” 

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