Topps

:For the meat company, see Topps Meat Company. The Topps Company, Inc., manufactures chewing gum, candy and collectibles. Based in New York, New York, it is best known as a leading producer of baseball cards, football cards, basketball cards, hockey cards, and other sports and non-sports themed trading cards.

Company history

Topps itself was founded in 1938, but the company can trace its roots back to an earlier firm, American Leaf Tobacco. Founded in 1890 by Morris Shorin, the American Leaf Tobacco Co. imported tobacco to the United States and sold it to other tobacco companies. (American Leaf Tobacco should not be confused with the American Tobacco Company, which monopolized U.S.-grown tobacco during this period.)

American Leaf Tobacco encountered difficulties during World War I, as it was cut off from Turkish supplies of tobacco, and later as a result of the Great Depression. Shorin's sons, Abram, Ira, Philip, and Joseph, decided to focus on a new product but take advantage of the company's existing distribution channels. To do this, they relaunched the company as Topps, with the name meant to indicate that it would be "tops" in its field. The chosen field was the manufacture of chewing gum, selected after going into the produce business was considered and rejected.

At the time, chewing gum was still a relative novelty sold in individual pieces. Topps’ most successful early product was Bazooka bubblegum, which was packaged with a small comic on the wrapper. Starting in 1950, the company decided to try increasing gum sales by packaging them together with trading cards featuring Western character Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd); at the time Boyd, as one of the biggest stars of early television, was featured in newspaper articles and on magazine covers, along with a significant amount of "Hoppy" merchandising. When Topps next introduced baseball cards as a product, the cards immediately became its primary emphasis.

The "father of the modern baseball card" was Sy Berger. In the autumn of 1951, Berger, then a 28-year-old veteran of World War II, designed the 1952 Topps baseball card set with Woody Gelman on the kitchen table of his apartment on Alabama Avenue in Brooklyn. The card design included a player's name, photo, facsimile autograph, team name and logo on the front; and the player's height, weight, bats, throws, birthplace, birthday, stats, and a short biography on the back. The basic design is still in use today. Berger would work for Topps for 50 years (1947–97) and serve as a consultant for another five, becoming a well-known figure on the baseball scene, and the face of Topps to major league baseball players, whom he signed up annually and paid in merchandise, like refrigerators and carpeting.

The Shorins, in recognition of his negotiation abilities, sent Sy to London in 1964 to negotiate the rights for Topps to produce Beatles trading cards. Arriving without an appointment, Sy succeeded by speaking in Yiddish to Brian Epstein, the Beatles manager.

Berger hired a garbage boat to remove left over boxes of 1952 baseball cards stored in their warehouse, and rode with them as a tugboat pulled them off the New Jersey shore. The cards were then dumped into the Atlantic Ocean. The cards included Mickey Mantle's first Topps card, the most valuable card of the modern era. No one at the time, of course, knew the collector's value the cards would one day attain. Currently, a pack of 1952 Topps baseball cards is worth at least $5,000.

Incorporation

The company began its existence as Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., a partnership between the four Shorin brothers. It later incorporated under New York law in 1947. The entire company originally operated out of Brooklyn, but production facilities were moved to a plant in Duryea, Pennsylvania in 1965. Corporate offices remained at 254 36th Street in New York, a location in the Brooklyn waterfront district by the Gowanus Expressway. In 1994, the headquarters relocated to One Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan.

After being privately held for several decades, Topps offered stock to the public for the first time in 1972 with the assistance of investment banking firm White, Weld & Co. The company returned to private ownership when it was acquired in a leveraged buyout led by Forstmann Little & Company in 1984. The new ownership group again made Topps into a publicly traded company in 1987, now renamed to The Topps Company, Inc. In this incarnation, the company was incorporated in Delaware for legal purposes, but company headquarters remained in New York. Management was left in the hands of the Shorin family throughout all of these maneuverings.

Shareholder dispute and buyout

Criticism of the company's financial performance and flat stock price led two hedge funds holding 7.4% of the stock to launch a proxy fight in July 2006. Calling for better management of the company as the Topps Full Value Committee, they tried to place three members on the company's board of directors at the annual shareholder meeting. In a compromise with Topps, the three dissident shareholders were elected to the Topps board to replace two directors running for re-election, while CEO Arthur Shorin (son of Joseph) stayed on as a tenth member of the board.

The battle extended into 2007 with a $385 million buyout offer led by the firms Madison Dearborn and Tornante (an investment company started by former longtime Disney CEO Michael Eisner). The price of $9.75 per share was endorsed by Topps executives, but the dissident board members felt it undervalued the company and pushed to shop for other bidders. This led to discussions of a potential merger with the rival Upper Deck Company, which was prepared to buy Topps for $10.75 per share (a total of about $425 million). Topps management decided to reject this offer, citing concerns about the financing and potential antitrust regulation; Upper Deck pursued it for several more months, but as a hostile takeover bid.

Upper Deck eventually withdrew its offer, complaining that Topps had impeded any reasonable efforts toward a merger. Meanwhile, a vote on the lower bid was delayed in the aftermath of Upper Deck's withdrawal, allowing management more time to lobby for shareholder support. The buyout was eventually approved in a special shareholders meeting by nearly two-thirds of the shares voting. The result was close, however, as the bloc voting for the deal was only a narrow majority of total shares outstanding, including those not voted (a requirement to complete the deal).

On October 12, 2007, Topps was acquired by Michael Eisner's Tornante Company and Madison Dearborn Partners. Under Eisner's direction, Topps began to expand into the entertainment and media business with plans for a Bazooka Joe movie. Former television executive Staci Weiss began working with Tornante to develop projects based on Topps properties, including Garbage Pail Kids, Wacky Packages, Dinosaur Attacks, Mech Warrior and Attax.

Topps Europe Ltd

Topps has a European division, which is based in Milton Keynes, UK. From this office products are launched across Europe, including Spain, France, Germany, Norway, and Italy. This division also co-ordinates products launches across the numerous other international markets including the Far East, Australia, and South Africa.

In 1995, The Topps Company Inc. completed its takeover of Merlin Publishing. Merlin’s official company name changed to Topps Europe Limited, however some of its products still carried the Merlin brand as it was easily recognized by consumers.

Topps Europe Limited continues to produce a wide and varied range of sports and entertainment collectables across Europe. Its range of products now includes stickers, albums, cards and binders, magazines, stationery and even temporary tattoos!

Topps Europe Ltd Products

In 1994 Topps, which was then known in Europe as Merlin, acquired the Premier League license allowing the company to exclusively publish the only official Premier League sticker and album collection in the UK. The initial success of the Premier League stickers and album collection was so great that it took even Merlin by surprise, with reprint after reprint having to be produced.

Topps Europe Ltd has continued to launch hugely successful products across Europe. Some of the most successful licenses have included WWE, Pokémon, Doctor Who, High School Musical and SpongeBob. Premier League stickers and albums are now in their 15th year and are now published under the new name of ‘Topps Total Football’.

Match Attax, the official Premier League trading card game, is the biggest selling boys collectable in the UK two years running. Being sold across the globe in a number of countries, the collection also holds the title of the biggest selling sports collectable in the world. It is estimated that around 1.5 million children collect it in the UK, and 2.5 million children in the world.

In the spring of 2008, Topps acquired the exclusive rights to the DFL Deutsche Fussball Liga GmbH for trading cards and stickers until the Bundesliga Season 2010/11. Bundesliga Match Attax was launched in January 2009 and is now available in over 40,000 stockists. The collection is the first of its kind in Germany and has become one of the biggest selling collections in the country.

Topps baseball cards: A history

Entry into the baseball card market

In 1951, Topps produced its first baseball cards in two different sets known today as Red Backs and Blue Backs. Each set contained 52 cards, like a deck of playing cards, and in fact the cards could be used to play a game that would simulate the events of a baseball game. Also like playing cards, the cards had rounded corners and were blank on one side, which was colored either red or blue (hence the names given to these sets). The other side featured the portrait of a player within a baseball diamond in the center, and in opposite corners a picture of a baseball together with the event for that card, such as "fly out" or "single".

Topps changed its approach in 1952, this time creating a much larger (407 total) set of baseball cards and packaging them with its signature product, bubblegum. The company also decided that its playing card model was too small (2 inches by 2-5/8 inches) and changed the dimensions to 2-3/4 inches by 3-5/8 inches with square corners. The cards now had a color portrait on one side, with statistical and biographical information on the other. This set became a landmark in the baseball card industry, and today the company considers this its first true baseball card set. Many of the oil paintings for the sets were rendered by artist Gerry Dvorak, who also worked as an animator for Famous Studios. In 1957, Topps shrank the dimensions of its cards slightly, to 2-1/2 inches by 3-1/2 inches, setting a standard that remains the basic format for most sports cards produced in the United States.

In Australia, Topps has produced Cricket Cards with the ACB for season 2000–01 and 2001–02. As well and AFL Chipz much like the NBA poker style chipz.

Non-sports products

Originally, Topps was purely a gum company, and its first product was simply called "Topps gum". Other gum and candy products followed. In imitation of Bowman and other competitors, Topps eventually began producing humor products unrelated to sports. This included stickers, posters (Wanted Posters, Travel Posters), media tie-ins (Laugh In), book covers (Batty Bookcovers) and toys (Flying Things), plus offbeat packaging (Garbage Candy). More recently, the company published comic books and games.

Candy and confectionery items

The longest-lived Topps product line remains Bazooka bubblegum, small pieces of gum in patriotic red, white, and blue packaging. Bazooka was introduced in 1947 as a bar of gum that sold for five cents. Unlike the gum sold with baseball cards, it was of better quality and capable of selling on its own merit. In 1953, Topps began selling smaller penny pieces with the Bazooka Joe comic strip on the wrapper as an added attraction.

Even though baseball cards became the company's primary focus during this period, Topps still developed a variety of candy items. For quite a few years, the company stuck within familiar confines, and virtually all of these products involved gum in some way. Sales declined significantly in the 1970s, however, when this relatively hard gum was challenged by Bubble Yum, a new, softer form of bubblegum from Life Savers.

In recent years, Topps has added more candy items without gum. One particular focus has been lollipops, such as Ring Pops. However, Topps has complained that increasing public attention to childhood nutrition undercuts its candy sales. Under pressure by shareholders, the company considered selling off its confectionery business in 2005, but was unable to find a buyer to meet its price and decided to cut management expenses instead.

Other brands include Push Pop, Baby Bottle Pop, and Juicy Drop Pop.

Non-sports trading cards

As its sports products relied more on photography, Topps redirected its artistic efforts toward non-sports trading cards, on themes inspired by popular culture. For example, the Space Race prompted a set of "Space Cards" in 1958. Topps has continued to create collectible cards and stickers on a variety of subjects, often targeting the same adolescent male audience as its baseball cards. In particular, these have covered movies, television series, and other cultural phenomena ranging from The Beatles to the life story of John F. Kennedy. The many Star Wars card series have done well, with a few exceptions.

Many Topps artists came from the world of comics and continued to work in that field as well. The shift from sports to other topics better suited the creative instincts of the artists and coincided with turmoil in the comic book industry over regulation by the Comics Code Authority. Beginning at Topps when he was a teenager, Art Spiegelman was the company's main staff cartoonist for more than 20 years. Other staffers in Topps' Product Development Department at various times included Larry Riley, Mark Newgarden, Bhob Stewart and Rick Varesi. Topps' creative directors of Product Development, Woody Gelman and Len Brown, gave freelance assignments to leading comic book illustrators, such as Jack Davis, Wally Wood and Bob Powell. Spiegelman, Gelman and Brown also hired freelance artists from the underground comix movement, including Bill Griffith and Kim Deitch and Robert Crumb. Jay Lynch did extensive cartooning for Topps over several decades.

Drawing on their previous work, these artists were adept at things like mixing humor and horror, as with the Funny Monsters cards in 1959. The 1962 Mars Attacks cards, sketched by Wood and Powell and painted by Norman Saunders, later inspired a Tim Burton movie. A tie-in with the Mars Attacks film led to a 1994 card series, a new 100-card "archives" set reprinting the 55 original cards, plus 45 new cards from several different artists, including Norm Saunders' daughter, Zina Saunders.

Among Topps' most notable achievements in the area of satire and parody have been Wacky Packages, a takeoff on various household consumer products, and Garbage Pail Kids, a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. Another popular series was the Civil War News set, also with Norman Saunders' artwork.

Although baseball cards have been Topps' most consistently profitable item, certain fads have occasionally produced spikes in popularity for non-sports items. For a period beginning in 1973, the Wacky Packages stickers managed to outsell Topps baseball cards, becoming the first product to do so since the company's early days as purely a gum and candy maker. Pokémon cards would accomplish the same feat for a few years starting in 1999. In the absence of new fads to capitalize on, Topps has come under pressure from stock analysts, since its sports card business is more stable and has less growth potential.

Disney Channel

Topps worked together with the Disney Channel to create trading cards of High School Musical, High School Musical 2, High School Musical 3, and Hannah Montana.

Comic books

: Drawing on its established connections with artists, in 1993 Topps created a division of the company to publish comic books. Known as Topps Comics, its early efforts included several concepts from retired industry legend Jack Kirby, known collectively as the "Kirbyverse". Topps Comics particularly specialized in licensed titles with tie-ins to movies or television series, though it also published a few original series. Its longest-running and best-selling title was The X-Files, based on the Fox TV show.

These comic books featured former Marvel Comics editor Jim Salicrup as its editor-in-chief. Some of the more famous titles included The X-Files, Lone Ranger and Tonto by Timothy Truman, Xena, Mars Attacks, and Zorro, which introduced the famous comics character Lady Rawhide. With sales stagnating, the company decided to pull out of the comics business in 1998.

Games

The Topps Pokémon cards were purely for entertainment, pleasure and collecting, but a new niche of collectible card games was also developing during this period (a Pokémon trading card game was produced simultaneously by Wizards of the Coast). Topps made its first foray into the world of games in July 2003 by acquiring the game company WizKids for $29.4 million in cash, thus acquiring ownership of the rights to the well-known gaming universes of BattleTech and Shadowrun. By inventing yet another niche, the constructible strategy game Pirates of the Spanish Main, this unit managed to reach profitability. Topps shut down Wizkids operation in November 2008 due to the economic downturn, terminating the brand while keeping their intellectual properties as the Topps company.

Awards

In conjunction with Minor League Baseball, Topps presents the J.G. Taylor Spink Award to the Topps/Minor League Player of the Year. This award should not be confused with the identically named J. G. Taylor Spink Award that is the highest award given by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) to its members.

Also in conjunction with Minor League Baseball, Topps presents the George M. Trautman Awards to the Topps Player of the Year in each of sixteen domestic minor leagues.

Topps All-Star Rookie Team

See also

Donruss

Fleer

Razor Entertainment

Topps baseball card products

Upper Deck

Notes

Bowman Gum, Inc. v. Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., 103 F.Supp. 944 (E.D.N.Y. 1952).

Boyd, Brendan C. & Fred C. Harris (1973). The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-10429-9.

Caple, Jim. "A card fan's dream come true". ESPN.com Page 2, 25 July 2006.

Fleer Corp. v. Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., 501 F.Supp. 485 (E.D. Pa. 1980).

Fleer Corp. v. Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., 658 F.2d 139 (3d Cir. 1981).

Haelan Laboratories, Inc. v. Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., 202 F.2d 866 (2d Cir. 1953).

Haelan Laboratories, Inc. v. Topps Chewing Gum Co., 112 F.Supp. 904 (E.D.N.Y. 1953).

Schwartz, Ben. "Culture Jamming for the Swingset Set". Chicago Reader, 25 June 2004.

Schwarz, Alan (2004). The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination with Statistics. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 0-312-32222-4.

Slocum, Frank & Red Foley (1990). Topps Baseball Cards: The complete picture collection, a 40 year history. New York: Warner Books.

Smith, Aaron. "Mickey Mantle or Martha?" CNN/Money, 24 March 2005.

Thompson, Wright. "Investors gear up for takeover". ESPN.com Page 2, 27 July 2006.

References

External links

Official website

British Association Football Card Museum

Topps facts from USA Today

Sy Berger: Father of the modern baseball card

Category:Baseball cards Category:Trading cards Category:Companies based in New York City Category:Companies established in 1938 Category:Confectionery companies of the United States Category:Madison Dearborn Partners companies Category:Manufacturing companies based in New York Category:Private equity portfolio companies