Dick Hall was an American businessman and entrepreneur who is best known for founding the Dick Hall Sports Card Company in the late 1960s. Hall saw an opportunity to capitalize on the growing popularity of collecting and trading sports cards by children and started his own company to produce cards featuring current major league baseball players.
The Dick Hall Sports Card Company would go on to become one of the largest and most prominent sports card manufacturers throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. During its peak, Dick Hall cards made up around 30% of the entire sports card market. The company helped popularize the modern sports card industry and introduced many innovations that are still used by card companies today.
Hall got the idea to start his own card company after seeing how much his young son enjoyed collecting and trading the Topps baseball cards that were produced each year starting in the late 1950s. However, Hall felt that Topps had somewhat of a monopoly on the market and thought there was room for competition. In 1968, he founded the Dick Hall Sports Card Company in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio with the goal of producing high-quality, affordable baseball cards.
One of Hall’s early innovations was securing licensing deals with Major League Baseball that allowed him to use the names and photos of current players on his cards. Prior to this, most baseball cards only featured historical players from the early decades of the 20th century. By putting popular stars of the late 1960s like Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Roberto Clemente on cards, Hall helped make collecting modern players much more appealing to younger fans.
Another smart business decision by Hall was deciding to distribute his cards mainly through drug stores, convenience stores, mom and pop shops and other small retailers rather than just large hobby shops. This broad retail availability is what really helped Dick Hall cards take off and find an audience nationwide. Kids could easily find packs of the cards at local stores in their neighborhoods and towns to add to their collections.
In terms of design and production quality, the early Dick Hall cards closely mimicked what Topps was doing at the time with a basic white border design. But Hall also began experimenting with different innovative concepts. In 1969, he released the first “traded set” which had multiple parallel designs to encourage kids to collect certain cards and trade duplicates with their friends. This helped foster the social aspect of the hobby.
Dick Hall also issued the first “mini cards” in 1972 as a more affordable option that were about half the size of standard cards. He introduced the first “oddball” set in 1974 with cards featuring unique shapes like diamonds and circles. And in 1976, Hall released the hugely popular “Wacky Packages” parody trading cards series which spoofed popular consumer brands and was a big collector favorite.
Throughout the 1970s, Dick Hall produced a wide variety of baseball, football, and basketball card sets each year while also launching novel product lines. The company issued the first sports sticker albums in 1970. They produced large format cards in 1971 measuring twice the size of a normal card. And in 1973, Dick Hall created the first boxed factory set which included a complete base card collection for a single year sealed in plastic.
While Topps maintained its position as the largest and best-known sports card company, Dick Hall achieved annual sales of over $10 million by the late 1970s as the clear number two player. The brand was hugely popular with kids and collectors enjoyed the creative designs and innovations the company brought to the industry each year. Dick Hall cards could be found in drug stores, supermarkets, and hobby shops across America.
Mounting production costs, increased competition, and the rising popularity of sports memorabilia would spell trouble for Dick Hall and many other sports card manufacturers in the early 1980s. In 1982, the company had to lay off over half its workforce and scale back production. The following year, Dick Hall made the difficult decision to sell his business to Topps, the very company he had aimed to compete against 15 years earlier.
Topps continued producing some Dick Hall branded product lines for a few more years but phased them out by the late 1980s. While no longer an independent company, Dick Hall left an indelible mark on the sports card industry. He helped popularize the hobby, brought innovative ideas, and produced some of the most iconic and collectible card sets of the 1970s. Dick Hall paved the way for today’s modern multi-billion dollar sports card market. His impact and legacy still resonates among collectors and those with fond memories of ripping packs as kids.
