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2011 Topps Heritage Q&A
As you are undoubtedly aware, 2011 Topps Heritage is in stores now. I sat down for a quick Q&A with Topps baseball brand manager Matt Perrone to discuss this year’s Heritage…
I opened by first box of Heritage last night and the first thing I noticed was that there was no gum! Why did we decide to eliminate that this year?
While we recognize the nostalgic appeal of including gum in packs of Heritage Baseball, collector feedback told us that appeal was almost purely nostalgic, as the vast majority of the gum ended up in the garbage. Given that, we felt collectors would be better served by eliminating the gum and putting that savings toward inserting an extra card in each pack (another change for this year that I hope you noticed!).
I did notice! And speaking of the cards, as we’ve done with Heritage in previous years, the card images are meant to mirror the images in the ’62 set as closely as possible. How much extra research, planning, etc. goes into creating this set? What is your process as a brand manager?
In that way, it does take quite a bit more planning and research than the average product, but every product has its quirks that require more attention than others. Heritage is fun because it’s the one that gives us an excuse to spend a whole bunch of time with one of our vintage products.
The process itself isn’t that much different than most other products, it’s just a lot more front-loaded. We spend quite a bit of time digging into what was done 50 years ago—everything, warts and all—and create a master list of what went right and what went wrong. Then we do our best to recreate that experience for today’s collector with the players he follows. It’s a lot of fun and really gives us a chance to step back and take a more detached look, if you will, at what it is we do here. And that kind of research and thinking carries over into our work on other products and benefits us across the board, I think.
So what are some of the quirks that collectors can expect to find in Heritage this year?
Anyone who knows 1962 Topps knows about the green-tint variations, and we’ve done our best to replicate that quirk in every detail. And if you buy your cards at some of the bigger retailers, you may also come across some cards in those packs with a new spin on that old “error.”
Speaking of errors, we’ve also combed through the original set for any that happened to sneak by back in the day and replicated those as best we could with the players of today. That’s the thing about Heritage; if you really know your stuff, there aren’t too many surprises. If we’ve done our job well, you should be able to figure most of it out just by looking at the old set. It’s a lot of fun putting these new twists on old errors, and we hope collectors appreciate the sense of fun and homage in which they’re done.
We’ve also got something special for the Hobby in there, too. The 1962 set had a small base subset dedicated to the life and career of Babe Ruth. You can never give too much credit to the Babe, so we reproduced those cards exactly as they originally appeared. But ’62 was also the year Jackie Robinson was inducted into the Hall of Fame, so we felt it would be appropriate to honor him as well with the same sort of tribute this time around.
Anything else about the set you’d like collectors to know?
Just that it’s a lot of fun to work on and we hope collectors have as much fun digging into it as we had putting it together.
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