Before he left football to sell Pokémon cards, ex-NFL linebacker Blake Martinez made millions tackling people.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Over the course of his six-year professional career, Martinez amassed more than $28 million in earnings, even co-leading the league in tackles in 2017. Then, in 2021, he tore his ACL and was released from the New York Giants a year later.
While rehabbing, he found himself focusing more and more on the side hustle he picked up during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. And this past fall, when it came time to decide whether to fight for a spot on a new team — in his case, the Las Vegas Raiders — or double down on selling Pokémon cards, he made a surprising decision.
He chose the cards, launching his company Blake’s Breaks in July 2022 and committing to it full-time in November. Over the past seven months, it’s brought in more than $5 million in revenue on collectible reselling platform Whatnot, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
A quarter of that revenue gets reinvested back into Blake’s Breaks, Martinez says. The rest is take-home pay for himself and his 15 contract employees.
And while he acknowledges that his name recognition helps a little in the card-trading world, it’s not really how his company makes its money, he says.
“I think there’s more to my success than [my name],” Martinez tells CNBC Make It. “I used to be like the quarterback of the defense, I was calling plays. When I started this business, it felt like running a team again.”
Here’s how he built his company on the back of his professional sports career:
A business built on cards
At six years old, Martinez took the $15 he earned from weekly chores and bought Pokémon cards at the Circle K convenience store down the street, he says. He stored his thousand-plus cards in a binder, only taking them out to play with his friends while stuck at his sister’s gymnastics practices.
That binder sat at his mom’s house for years, and she eventually gave them away, Martinez says. He didn’t think about it again until 2020, when influencers like Logan Paul started reselling playing cards.
Martinez jumped on the trend that March, buying a couple of boxes of cards for $30,000 — “paying a premium to buy vintage packs to try to get my collection back,” he says. Then, he realized the cards “are not 99 cents anymore There are packs worth like $500,000.”
He started buying more boxes, paying tens of thousands of dollars for 36 packs of cards at a time. On live video streams on Whatnot — a platform in which he’d previously invested, back in 2019 — he opened the boxes for viewers and auctioned the cards off one by one.
Some cards sold for as little as $5. One sold for $672,000.
The ‘pivot point’ leading him to a new career
Martinez sustained the side hustle in between practices and games for about two years, occasionally advertising it during press conferences. He launched Blake’s Break as a brand in July 2022, hiring contractors to help ship the cards out, host more streams and run social media.
After the Giants released him in September, he signed with the Las Vegas Raiders. But instead of solely focusing on football, he found himself spending much of his time growing the company.
Martinez says he often gets the boxes graded before selling. Appraisers open one pack and assign it a dollar value, so Martinez can tell streamers what the box might be worth.
Blake Martinez
Martinez calls that realization his “pivot point.” A month into his tenure with the Raiders, he announced his retirement from football — and immediately started dedicating up to 80 hours per week on Blake’s Breaks.
He hired managers to lead small teams, and came up with the company’s revenue split with the help of consultants, he says. Today, the company primarily runs out of warehouses in Miami and Denver, with a third soon coming in New Jersey.
Those warehouses host screenings and hold inventory for eventual card buyers — primarily boys and men ages 8 to 40, though like Pokémon’s main demographic, his female consumer base is growing, Martinez says.
A pain-free way to make a living
Despite outsourcing data analytics, logistics and social media specialists, Martinez says he remains at the core of the business. He makes all hiring, buying and selling decisions himself, and hosts a couple of his business’s 60 streams per week.
Martinez has several short- and long-term goals planned. First, open warehouses in Canada and the U.K., and hit $10 million in annual revenue. Then, expand into trading comic books and hit $25 million in revenue.
His end goal to sell collectibles in all of Whatnot’s categories — the company’s website says there are more than 50 of them — adding them “one by one,” he says.
The ex-linebacker misses certain things about football. Martinez felt particularly nostalgic during the Super Bowl earlier this month, he says.
But it’s not enough to keep putting his body through the rigor of being a professional athlete, he adds — and there’s excitement in growing something new.
“Every single day when I wake up, my shoulder doesn’t hurt and my back doesn’t hurt anymore,” Martinez says. “When all that hurts are my fingers from opening, like, 1,000 packs of cards per day, I think, ‘I’m going to keep doing this.'”
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