Josh Luber
speaker
555 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 22 Jul
Josh Luber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And so, you know, and by the way, that's what a trading card is. A trading card is a blank canvas. It can be Wemby or it could be the backup shortstop for the twins. And the value of that is dependent on who is on that blank canvas. So I always thought there was all this you could do with Bearbrick, but they are a very Japanese company. They've stayed very much in their ways.
They've done the same thing for 25 years. And so I thought, I was like, you have this iconic brand, you know, maybe I could sort of, and you know what? They just really weren't interested in having that conversation. So great. So then we had to figure out how do we create our own blank canvas. I left Fanatics Collectibles in October of 22, and we spent eight months designing the shape.
A ghost, like a bare brick, is a blank canvas. There's no face, there's no gender. The ghost itself is not a character. It's about how it takes to skins. And it took a while to get to a shape that wasn't too much of a character, but also really took well at the skin.
Um, so yeah, so I, I absolutely, you know, considered it, but like, this is the better path to, and you, and you get to start all this from scratch, right? You get to build a company from scratch, taking everything we've learned. And you can look at 25 years of Medicom, things they've done well, things they've done, done poor, and you don't have to correct it. You can just start new.
So that's pretty great too.
Well, also under the category of funding the company yourself and not having to answer to investors or billionaire MBA owners is we started making Ghosts in August of 23. Wow. So we spent a year, all we did is make goes to give them away. So we ran a company with 10 employees making products in China and all we did was give it away. So under the money part of this.
And I thought that was important from a brand standpoint, from building the credibility within the industry of partners who might wanna work with us. And we finally started selling Ghosts in August of 24. We've done four releases so far. We've actually done three. The fourth one is currently ongoing. And this was the first one.
Everything, all the Ghosts, same three sizes, bare brick, which is you have a... I have a... This is actually a gift for you. This is a sample of 100%. This is one of the first 3D printed samples. It looks like drugs. It's not drugs. So this is 100%. This is usually for blind boxes, and we can talk more about that.
But this size, which we call the 100%, the 400%, which is this size, and then the 1,000%, which is about 28 inches tall, And here, this is for you. Thank you. These basically don't exist, by the way. These were internal samples. Only one has been sold. We sold it at VCon live with the VFriends guys and went for $510. Nice. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.
and then so the third size is 28 inches so the three they released all this size which is 11 inches all sold on stock excuse me on ghost right as a blind Dutch auction which means that we don't set the price the market sets the price this one there were 20 units sold sold for $1,026 a piece the second one which was with Rocky's Matcha which is a local matcha company here in LA there were 20 excuse me 30 units
It sold for $500 with a clearing price. And the third was Eastside Golf, which there were 30, and that one sold for $300. And so this is what we do. We get to make ghosts, and the flagship and the core is this size, 11 inches. But then as we evolve on, the 100% size, the blind boxes, that will really be the future of the company. What is a blind box? So blind boxes are trading cards.
You open a pack, you open a box, you don't know what you're going to get inside. um this is the first time that i'm showing the wnba blind box uh we have licenses with the nba with the wnba uh with um uh major league baseball and all three players associations and this is the wnba blind box is going to come out in december There are 16 players.
Here's a checklist that I'm not showing on camera, but it includes people like Caitlin Clark and Asia Wilson. And then it has parallels that have all different color crowns, the same way that, say, Prism works, where you have your base color and then you have gold numbered to 10 and you have black one of one and all the different things. I mean, we get to take everything.
everything we learned about scarcity and collectability and creating brand and creating demand and trading cards and apply it to just a different blank canvas. We didn't make any of this up. All we do is just copy how the stuff works great over here and apply it over here.
So we're fortunate to have the licenses with these three leagues because of my history at FinanX Collectibles creating the trading cards there. And when this comes out in December, we think this is going to be a big deal. We're going to have, well, We think this is going to be a big deal. So we'll see what happens. We've got to actually run the company and grow it. I think I have.
I think I have one of the others here to show you. This is because we're in L.A. This is the first time I'm showing Lisa Leslie. Oh, cool. There's a Lisa Leslie ghost. So there's 12 stars. There's three retired players, legends. And then there's one actually famous fan that we'll surprise people with later. But anyway, so this is Lisa Leslie, the first star. of one that we're sharing here.
That's really cool.
You sound exactly like James Earl Jones right at this moment. They got the golden arches. We got the golden arches.
Well, let's just talk about the company first of all. I think too much is put on the sort of obligation to have that. If there's not something actually that's core to the founder or the company itself, it's pretty obvious when it's just sort of tacked on at the end.
were part of Dan Gilbert's organization in Detroit. We live the revitalization of Detroit. Everything that we did was Detroit focused. Still today at the bottom of StockX website, it says, you know, made in Detroit or whatever the language is, right?
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