Before he left football to sell Pokémon cards, ex-NFL linebacker Blake Martinez made millions tackling people.
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…
Read the full article here
