Editor's Note: As part of a paid partnership with Certified Collectibles Group, cllct is publishing a series of stories highlighting the company's growth and future initiatives.
Certified Collectibles Group (CCG) vice president Harshen Patel still remembers the moment nearly four years later.
Standing next to CEO Steve Eichenbaum at the 2021 National Sports Collectors Convention in Chicago, the pair looked toward the company’s booth on the show floor.
It was the first National Convention for CGC Trading Cards, which was roughly a year old at the time, and Certified Sports Guaranty, which had just launched that February. For CGC and CSG, there was a chance to make a grand entrance on the industry’s biggest stage.
The show was packed, and the card market was surging.
Yet their booth felt empty.
“Is this what it feels like to be on the other side?” Patel asked Eichenbaum.
CCG had grown accustomed to seeing shows and auctions packed with its holders. The best and most expensive comics in existence are often graded by CGC. NGC holders can be spotted protecting coins at the Smithsonian.
Success had been the norm, and this feeling was uncomfortable. They never wanted to feel it again.
“We don’t like to lose — I remember that first year thinking that I don’t like this feeling,” Eichenbaum recalls. “We have to do everything in our power to change this.”
Nearly four years later, CGC’s trading card business has positioned itself as the category’s second-most popular grader as it races toward its 10 millionth graded card.
At its core, the company has continued to follow many of its earliest key objectives. The public-facing part of the business appears to be a completely new company, however — and that’s because it is.
Best known for grading comics (CGC), coins (NGC) and banknotes (PMG), CCG leapt into the card grading category in 2020 as the markets for sports cards and TCGs such as Pokémon were rapidly growing. CCG had the experience needed to launch a new category, and there was market share to take.
Finding the right people to lead the new category didn’t take long.
Once a grader for PMG, Matt Quinn, now the VP of TCG and non-sports grading, helped launch CGC Trading Cards in July 2020. Andy Broome, now the VP of sports card grading, formerly worked at competitor BGS and was hired to launch CSG.
The goal from the start was simple: Try something new.
“One of the reasons it was enticing for me to start here and start CSG was the chance, in my mind, to do it differently — things that I saw in the industry, not necessarily even just specific companies, but in the industry as a whole," Broome recalls of the motivations to join CSG.
According to Broome, CCG’s extensive experience grading other collectibles helped jumpstart its entrance into cards. The company had built new holders from scratch before, so it knew what the process for trading cards could look like.
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The technological infrastructure was a major boost, too, with Broome citing a tool that government agencies use to examine documents — in this case, he can use it to see if an autograph has been altered or removed from a card completely.
At the rear of the company’s card grading room sits a piece of equipment that can holder, sonically seal and digitally image cards in a rapid series of steps, which has helped manage turnaround times amid a growing number of submissions.
Today, the grading process for trading cards is efficient and streamlined. But that’s largely because the company had to learn the hard way.
Just as CGC Trading Cards and CSG were hoping to start a slow climb, interest in grading exploded to the point that every major card grader was inundated with submissions and backlogs for some extended turnaround times from months to more than a year.
The staggering number of submissions forced CGC Trading Cards and CSG to scale quickly or be left behind. Luckily for Broome and Quinn, both arms of the trading card business withstood the barrage.
“I think that the trading card boom really helped overall card grading,” Broome said, “but we got hit so hard and so fast that it forced us to pivot and scale, but do it in a quality way.”
Among the benefits of being forced to scale quickly was the careful approach to grading training and education. At some level, it could have been easier to pluck a grader from coins or comics to be trained to work with cards.
Instead, Broome and Quinn took a more calculated, long-term approach. The company would remain highly selective for grading roles, regularly test employees to keep them sharp and continuing education would be mandatory.
For Broome, it was something he expected to see other companies pursue harder. This was a chance to do things differently.
“The lack of training in the industry was one reason that drove me to make sure we have a top-notch education system,” Broome said. “I have felt like in other places it was very lackluster. There was so much more that could be done.”
For Broome and Quinn, the process of expanding the grading room from fewer than 10 total graders when CGC Trading Cards and CSG first launched to the now roughly 70 graders across sports, non-sports and TCG has been long and tedious.
According to Quinn, about 90% of the grading team has been promoted from within after starting at the bottom. Graders hired directly for the role often come from other companies with prior experience, but the overwhelming majority of the staff started in entry-level positions and had to earn promotions before ever grading a card.
Many of the current graders begin as receivers or verifiers where they’ll handle tasks such as confirming orders match submission forms or whether cards are identified correctly. The tasks are basic, but employees are encouraged to point out when cards might have been altered or faked. Employees with a knack for catching issues early and flagging them for graders down the line show promise as future graders.
The best of the best can attempt to train for open grading positions after roughly six months with the company. Some will pass and move on to the new role, while others remain in receiving or verification. At the end of the training, most new graders have been with the company for at least a year. The investment is significant, but Quinn says there’s no other way to do it correctly.
“The person will basically be unprofitable for us for a few months, at least while they’re going through the training process,” Quinn said. “All they’re doing is learning for us. But in our eyes, it’ll pay off once they get to the point where they’ll be an acceptable grader.”
Though the training for grading positions is long, a promotion to the role is far from the end of a grader’s education. And that’s something Broome and Quinn have made sure sticks.
Broome and Quinn both host card classes that cover topics ranging from new products to new types of counterfeits and fakes. The classes are mandatory, and both believe they are critical to keeping the team consistent.
If something new is discovered on the grading floor, the team stops and the topic is covered on the spot.
Graders are also given regular submissions that test the ability to grade surfaces, edges, centering and corners. Each submission is analyzed and graders who might have become too harsh or too lenient on any of those elements have additional training to correct it.
The company even uses internal and external gem-rate data to analyze long-term trends that might pop up for individual graders. With a large enough sample size, Broome and Quinn can see how a grader approaches specific sets or types of cards and adjust training accordingly.
“I can see patterns if one grader is a little bit off on surface or maybe they’re straying on edges,” Broome said. “And that happens, right. We’re all human, but it’s my job to recalibrate that.”
Overall, Broome and Quinn believe they’ve created the right infrastructure and operation to be the best grader in the trading card category. None of that matters if collectors don’t recognize your holder, however, and that was a critical mistake the team made early that had to be corrected.
In a vacuum, splitting the trading card category between CGC Trading Cards for trading card games (TCGs) and CSG for sports made sense. The hard reality was that sports card collectors didn’t know what CSG was, and they didn’t immediately connect it with CGC and the brand’s long history of grading other categories.
CGC’s brand recognition could immediately give the company credibility in a new category. CSG didn’t have that. Dozens of focus groups and interviews with collectors and dealers later, it was clear the two brands needed to merge.
In July 2023, CGC Cards was launched.
The consolidation arrived alongside an updated grading scale and a new label. So far, the data indicates the decision didn’t just potentially save the business but catapulted it into its current position.
According to third-party grading tracker GemRate, the highest combined volume a month prior to the merger was the nearly 176,000 cards graded in June 2022. In the three years since, CGC Cards has topped that total 15 times, including a record May in which more than 570,000 cards were graded.
At the company’s current pace, it could top its entire 2024 total of 2.32 million graded cards by the end of July, and that trajectory has largely been driven by the growth of Pokémon cards. Of the more than 570,000 cards graded by CGC in May, more than 393,000 were TCG — a 146% year-over-year jump for the company.
GemRate’s industry report showed the major authenticators collectively graded a record 2.4 million items in May, and 60% of that was considered TCG. Though CGC Cards’ entrance into the trading card category was largely driven by the surging interest in sports cards, the company has always made TCG a priority, and that strategy is paying off years later.
“We’ve always been gung-ho about it, so we know that the market for TCG is huge,” Quinn said. “We’re here to take up even more market share just through our process and how we handle things here. So it’s an exciting time just to see the sheer volume of cards.”
How much volume CGC Cards will see throughout the rest of 2025 is obviously unclear, but the current growth shows an expanding delta between CGC and third-place SGC, indicating CGC has only strengthened its position in the grading hierarchy.
In CGC Cards’ first full year as a consolidated brand, it graded more than 1.7 million cards to outpace SGC’s 1.2 million. The gap between the two closed slightly in 2024 but has greatly expanded so far in 2025.
According to GemRate, SGC, which focuses heavily on sports and vintage sports, has graded roughly 800,000 cards so far in 2025. CGC has already eclipsed 1.7 million, and it expects that number to rapidly increase with Pokémon experiencing incredible growth month after month.
The data shows CGC has entrenched itself as the clear No. 2 card grader in the industry, but there’s still work to do, Broome says. There’s a massive gap between PSA’s volume and the rest of the field, but things can change quickly.
Changes in the grading hierarchy during the COVID-19 pandemic showed the hobby firsthand collector sentiment can change rapidly and graders, no matter how deeply rooted in the community, can lose trust and market share at a stunning rate.
For Broome, Quinn and CGC, the expectation is the company stays the course, continues to build trust, and does things a little bit differently than everyone else. That’s how the company started, and that’s how it hopes to eventually win.
“My goal still is to be No. 1 in the card grading space,” Broome said. “The fact that we’ve gotten to No. 2 in less than five years, I think is just a testament to how hard we work at this and how much it means to us.”
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct, the premier company for collectible culture. He was previously the Collectibles Editor at Sports Illustrated. You can follow him on X and Instagram @benmburrows.