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A small card of a player who in 2000 arrived in the NFL as a complete unknown would years later become the most important player in the history of the league.
Tom Brady entered the new century and new decade with the New England Patriots. No one had him on their radar, but that card that years later, a 2000 Bowman Chrome Refractor, would be sold and give rise to a multimillion-dollar business.
In an interview that Chris Costa gave to Essentially Sports, he explained how from that moment the idea was born to create the company CardVault alongside the player with the most Super Bowl wins in the history of the league.
Chris Costa's path to creating CardVault
In the conversation he had with the outlet, Costa made it clear how his journey began as a child with a collection of sports cards, something that would later lead him to open a business dedicated to that world.
I've collected since I was a young kid."..."I got back in around 2017, and I was looking for specific baseball players. It was always baseball for me, at least when I got back in... When I went from chasing for my own collection, and I started looking at this thing as an investment, it was the Tom Brady market. And that's what's so crazy about this whole thing is, when I started really buying, selling, and trading Tom's rookie [cards], and it was specifically the 2000 Bowman Chrome Refractor, we realized this was a business... Tom is a big reason this turned into a business for me as a collector.
Costa noted in the EssentiallySports Exclusive interview.
Costa is a native of Massachusetts and a big fan of the New England Patriots. In 2017 he decided to start collecting cards that might carry more value, and that was when he began searching for Tom Brady's rookie cards.
With the first card, the Bowman Chrome Refractor, he began to realize it was a great business. That item was sold for $498,000.
Tom Brady's cards became Costa's big success
With Tom Brady's extraordinary career in the NFL, the market for cards bearing his image became a large and profitable business. Some time later, Costa had the chance to move from being a fan to becoming a partner of the player himself.
With Brady acquiring 50 percent of the company, everything changed for the better and revenue soared. It went from being a local shop to becoming a nationwide franchise.
The cities where the store is located are:
- TD Garden, Boston
- The American Dream Mall in New Jersey
- Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas
- San Francisco, in front of Oracle Park
- Foxborough, at Patriot Place next to Gillette Stadium
- New York, in SoHo and East Hampton
- Chicago, near Wrigley Field
- Sacramento, downtown
- Mashantucket, at Foxwoods Resort Casino
Did we think Tom would be a really great partner, and did we think Tom would be kind of that accelerant...?"..."Sure. But there was and would be no partnership if Tom wasn't and wasn't clearly going to be an active member of our partnership and part of the operating team.
Costa wanted the seven-time Super Bowl winner to be deeply involved in running the company and to become fully invested in it.
His level of involvement in our business and how much he cares and how dialed in he is to our day-to-day operation is the biggest shock to all of us."...It's not that we didn't expect it. We knew, and Tom has had a reputation for being 100 percent in on anything he commits to, but we're talking every day.
He told Essentially Sports in the interview.
The business has proven extremely successful, and that is due in large part to Brady and his total involvement.