I started a card shop to buy my son jet skis.

The suit and jacket

In October 2026 I took my family to Venice and stayed at the Danieli, a Four Seasons hotel. We stay at Four Seasons properties a lot. Getting the reservation took three days of follow-ups and an email to the general manager’s office before anyone from reservations wrote back.

Once we arrived, it felt to me like the staff didn’t really want to help us. We weren’t in a suit and jacket, and we didn’t look the part. Our room barely got serviced. At one point we didn’t even have body wash.

I’m not telling that story to complain. I’m telling it because it’s the story of my life in business, too. People decide who you are before you open your mouth. Most of the time they guess wrong. This site is about what happens when you stop caring about that.

The jet ski plan

Before cards, I owned a solar panel maintenance company. The card shop started as a lesson. I wanted to teach my son, Isaiah, and his friends Reece and Eli how to run a real business, and the deal was that the profits would buy them jet skis.

Our first store was about 400 square feet in Puck’s Alley, with barely any product on the shelves. Today Isaiah, Reece, and Eli are all part owners.

Learning the hard way

Cards were a brand-new industry for us, and we learned it along the way. The hardest part early on wasn’t selling. It was getting product from distributors.

Betting big

The business grew because we kept taking risks that felt too big at the time. We moved from 400 square feet to a 2,500-square-foot store on Ward. Then we went into mall locations.

The cost of trust

We’ve made a lot of mistakes. Honestly, pretty much everything. The most expensive ones came from trusting the wrong people. It cost us real money, and it made our circle a lot smaller.

Japan

Japan was a logical move before it was an exciting one. We were already importing a lot of product from Japan every month. Hawaii has a large Asian population, and a big share of our Pokémon sales is Japanese product and singles.

Doing business there is completely different. It took us almost two years to break into the market, because they really don’t like outsiders. Our store in Osaka opens in November 2026.

Beyond cards

We don’t just sell at shows. We run them. We host Hawaii Pop Con and the Aloha Card Show, and we take our booth on the road to The National, Fanatics Fest, and New York Comic Con.

We also produce our own exclusive variant comic covers, around 10 to 15 so far, drawn by well-known artists. One of them is Mitsuhiro Arita, the artist behind the original Base Set Charizard Pokémon card. We sell them in our stores, at shows, and online.

Built, not bought

Most card shops run on whatever software they can buy. We build our own, including a custom intake system for graded cards and a set of apps that run everything from inventory to events.

Here’s what that actually means:

• One inventory record for everything. Every card has one record that covers our stores, our Shopify site, and eBay. When a card sells on eBay, it disappears from the website and the store. Every change to stock goes through a single controlled path, so the counts stay right.
• Graded card intake. Staff scan a PSA or CGC slab, the system looks up the certificate, pulls price suggestions from several market sources, and a person approves the price before it’s listed. Raw singles, sealed product, sports, and comics each have their own intake lane.
• A buying system built for Japan. Our Japan app runs in Japanese and English and handles buying cards from the public under Japan’s secondhand-dealer law, including the seller records and ledger the law requires. It matches English and Japanese card names across a catalog of more than 60,000 Pokémon products.
• Grading as a service. Customers submit cards for PSA grading through our portal and track them online. Status updates automatically, and when fees are due they pay by scanning at our register.
• Labels from the cloud. Any of our apps can print barcode labels to the printers in any store, or at a show, without setting up each computer.
• Software for running conventions. For Hawaii Pop Con and the Aloha Card Show, vendors apply, book and pay for tables, and sign agreements online. A waitlist offers freed-up tables automatically, and we design the floor plan in the same system.
• Rewards. Customers earn points and move up tiers by shopping and showing up to events, all tied to their regular store account.

Today

Today we have four locations in Hawaii, a store opening in Osaka, two conventions, a line of exclusive comics, and more than thirty people on the team. It’s a multimillion-dollar business that started with a shop most people wouldn’t look at twice.

And the jet skis? We’re still working on it.