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Concept
Topps
Summary
The Topps Company, Inc. is an American company that manufactures trading cards and other collectibles. Formerly based in New York City, Topps is best known as a leading producer of baseball and other sports and non-sports themed trading cards. Topps also produces cards under the brand names Allen & Ginter and Bowman.
In the 2010s, Topps was the only baseball card manufacturer with a license with Major League Baseball. Following the loss of that license to Fanatics, Inc. in 2022, Fanatics acquired Topps in the same year.
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 members of the Saloman family, the American Leaf Tobacco Co. imported tobacco to the United States and sold it to other tobacco companies. Eventually, in 1908, Morris Chigorinsky Shorin came in control of the company.
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's most successful early product was Bazooka bubble gum, 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.
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