Something about the adult collector economy is quietly interesting. It does not make a lot of noise. It grows in empty rooms, during lunch breaks, and between shifts. It can also change into something that no one, not even the person who started it, saw coming.
The bigger picture helps explain why. The live selling platform Whatnot says that adult collectors have made the toy and collectibles market in the UK alone a £1 billion business. It became 40% more common for people to sell toys on the platform in 2024. That’s no longer a niche. There’s a market there. And inside that market, people who used to just love Pokémon cards as kids are becoming more sure of themselves. They now buy and sell them with the same seriousness that some people use for wine or fine art.
After giving it some thought, the appeal is easy to see. There is a real sense of nostalgia around Pokémon for a whole generation of people now in their thirties and forties who grew up playing the card game and trading with friends in schoolyards. As Aqib Malik of Card Galaxy puts it, these people are “coming into adult money.” Every year, someone starts making a full salary and can suddenly afford the cards they could never get when they were a kid. That demand stays the same. It’s almost built in.
The ordinary beginning of the story of the Scottish postal worker makes it interesting, and the story is worth telling. You have a day job, you really enjoy the hobby, and you’ve decided to start selling things on the side. There isn’t a big business plan. Not any venture capital. You only need cards, knowledge, and time to build up. Many things in this space may have origin stories like this one, which might surprise people from outside the space. People who grew up in the collectibles world tend to do well in it.
How serious sellers work these days tells us a lot about where this market has gone. The game has changed a lot because of platforms like Whatnot. What used to happen in game shops that aren’t on most high streets anymore is now done through live selling, which means streaming card openings in real time and auctioning off individual cards to viewers. This has created a community around the experience. It has a social aspect to it that can’t be replicated by just shopping online. Watching someone open a pack live while a hundred other people react at the same time makes for a shared moment. That’s not nothing. That’s why people come back.
The cards themselves have also grown into real assets. There are only fifteen of these 1999 Snap Pokémon cards left in the world. One of them just sold for $28,000. For $37,500, a sealed Japanese base set booster box was sold. This was like getting a first edition of the whole game. A Holy Grail 1998 Pikachu Illustrator Card is on eBay right now and has a price tag of $4 million. These are no longer numbers for fun. The grading system used by groups like PSA, which rates cards from one to ten based on condition, has given the used market a sense of legitimacy that makes investing in used items seem normal and not strange.
When you think about all of this, what stays with you is how much of it is based on real feelings. People really want it because they really miss the old times. People show up every week to watch streams, hunt cards, and share the excitement when a rare card shows up in a pack. The community is real. Not fake excitement, or at least not when it’s at its best. It seems like the people who are doing this well know the difference and are very careful to protect it.
The Scottish postal worker who slowly built something from a side job knew early on something that many people still don’t think much about: things that people loved as kids and haven’t stopped loving are worth paying attention to.
