The Story Behind Alpha Holders
Hello card collecting world! My name is Jerald Reichstein — a lifelong collector, design professional, and entrepreneur. Jackson Lau and I have been business partners for more than a decade as owners of Bouncing Pixel, a creative studio in Houston, Texas. Alpha Holders is our pandemic project.
When the world stopped spinning normally in March 2020, we sent our team home to work remotely and found ourselves with some free time to think. We're a couple of restless creative professionals who like to make things, so here we are.
The Big Idea
What do these two cards have in common?
The simple answer is that they've both been graded and encapsulated by PSA in similar slabs. That's where the similarities end. One might be worth $10 to the right collector while the other deserves to be treated like valuable art. The Ruth card has been in my family since the 1930's along with many other Goudey baseball cards. I submitted part of our raw card collection to PSA in 2020 and loved how they looked when they came back home. This is where the Alpha Holders story began.
Our First Prototype
We thought about a storage system for a few months and then started working on some cardboard prototypes. I learned how to build cardboard models way back in architecture school. For me it’s the fastest way to turn ideas into prototypes. Our goal was to make something stackable with a low profile and a small footprint.
Computer Models and 3D Prints
We learned that when plastic parts are fabricated through an injection molding process they are prone to warping if the walls are too thick. What we envisioned as an single extruded tray would need alteration. The would need to be made from two parts that snap together. We were then able to modify the holder into a u-shaped composition that only needed one endcap. We had the parts 3D printed on the highest quality printer we could find.
Steel Mold Fabrication
Three of these babies weighing in at over 600 pounds each finally arrived! We were queued up for our turn in the fabrication line, but it looked like we'd have to wait until 2022 to crank out the first holder. There seemed to be a line for everything. Raw material costs had gone up twice since we got our first quote.
Production Begins
The first run of our prototypes got underway in January 2022! This last part of the production process showed us just how complex it is to make the simplest plastic things we interact with daily. After the plastic is melted it gets piped through temperature resistant tubes into the steel molds at about 180 degrees. The parts form, solidify, and are then ejected while still pretty hot, so they have to sit and cool before being checked for imperfections and warping.
Our Samples Are Ready
Each holder is comprised of a main cavity where the slab sits, a backing, an end cap, and a clear polycarbonate screen. We’re putting these together ourselves, by hand, to make sure the job is done right. Our good friends at Kruk Cards provided us with some stellar cards for our photo shoot, no questions asked. They're the best!
Introducing Alpha Holders
We're running our company as a family business and are lucky to be located in one of the biggest metro areas in country. Two of my kids graduated from college with degrees in advertising and business. I sent them with 50 dealer samples to give away at the Tristar Houston Sports Collectors Show. They took some photos, explained our idea, and watched a couple of dealers load them up with their slabs and drop them on the concrete floor. Live drop test -- SUCCESS!
We're Open for Business!
We took final delivery of our MADE IN TEXAS parts and hand carried them upstairs at our Houston office. It was a nice workout! We're ready to start selling and delivering our holders to the card collecting community.
