Topps

Topps Digital

In 2012, Topps began creating digital sports cards, starting with the Topps Bunt baseball mobile app. After releasing Bunt in 2013 and finding success with it, they expanded their sports card market with other mobile apps, including the Kick soccer mobile app in August 2014, the Huddle football mobile app in April 2016, and the Skate hockey mobile app in 2017.

Along with sports cards, Topps also expanded its marketplace for collectors of digital goods to include non-sports cards on mobile devices. In March 2015, they released their Star Wars Card Trader app, and in May 2016 they released a Walking Dead trading card app. Following the success of their assortment of digital trading card apps, they once again expanded their marketplace for digital collectors a few years later, releasing a Marvel trading card app in the spring of 2019 and their Disney trading card app in November of that same year.

In March 2020, Topps announced a collaboration with WAX.io to make their cards tradable on the blockchain. As of December 2020, Topps has only made Garbage Pail Kids cards available to traders via blockchain but they have announced Alien Quadrilogy collectibles will be coming soon.

In April 2021, Topps announced plans to go public via a merger with Mudrick Capital Acquisition Corporation II, a publicly traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). Michael Eisner's firm The Tornante Company planned to roll its stake into the new company while Mudrick Capital would lead an additional investment of $250 million. The deal valued Topps at $1.3 billion. However, reports surfaced within six months of their initial plans that Mudrick Capital Management had backed out of the investment deal.

In August 2021, it was reported that Fanatics, Inc. acquired future exclusive licenses with Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association to produce baseball cards. In January 2022, Fanatics announced they had acquired Topps for US$500 million.

In January 2023, Topps released both physical and digital trading cards for their latest partner, the 24 Hours of Le Mans motorsport event. The release is set for February 2023 and will feature art work from original race posters from 1923 to the present day.

Non-sports products

Originally, Topps was purely a gum company, and its first product was simply named "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 (Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In), book covers (Batty Book Covers) and toys (Flying Things), plus offbeat packaging (Garbage Can-dy). More recently, the company published comic books and games.

Candy and confectionery items

Bazooka bubble gum remains the longest-lived Topps product line to this day, small pieces of bubble gum in patriotic red, white, and blue packaging. Bazooka was introduced in 1947 as a bar of bubble gum that sold for five cents. Unlike the bubble gum that was 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 chewing gum in some way. Sales declined significantly in the 1970s, however, when this relatively hard bubble gum was challenged by Bubble Yum, a new, softer type of bubble gum from Life Savers.

Later, Topps added more candy items without either chewing gum or bubble gum. One particular focus has been lollipops, such as Ring Pops. However, Topps has noted that increasing public attention to childhood nutrition has undercut 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 Topps candy products include Push Pops, Baby Bottle Pops and Juicy Drop Pops.

Discontinued products include Vertigo lollipops, which consisted of a creamy lollipop with a chocolate half, and Wazoo bars.

When the Topps name was sold, along with the trading card business and its entertainment properties, to Fanatics, the confectionary business was spun-off as Bazooka Brands, which remains owned by the previous owners.

Non-sports trading cards

As its sports products relied more on photography, Topps redirected its artistic efforts toward non-sports trading cards based 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. Future screenwriter Gary Gerani (Pumpkinhead) joined the company in 1972 and became the editor / writer of almost all of Topps' film and TV series products, most notably the aforementioned many Star Wars card series, while also creating and helming original card properties such as 1988's Dinosaurs Attack!.

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, 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 You'll Die Laughing cards which first appeared in 1959. The 1962 Mars Attacks cards, sketched by Wood and Powell and painted by Norman Saunders, later inspired the 1996 Tim Burton film Mars Attacks!. A tie-in arrangement with the film had earlier led to the release of a 1994 expanded version of the cards, 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 parody of various household consumer products, and Garbage Pail Kids, a parody of the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. Another popular series was Civil War News, also with Norman Saunders' artwork.

Earlier, particularly in the early and mid-1960s, Topps thrived with several successful series of parody and satire cards for a variety of occasions, usually featuring artists who also worked at Mad magazine. There were several insult valentine card series, a 1959 series of insult epigram cards titled Wacky Plaks, several series of well-known product advertising parody cards, a 1980 series of cards based on, and inspired by, the "mad car driver cartoons" of artist Ed "Big Daddy" Roth titled Weird Wheels, and a sticker card series of fanciful bizarre "rejected aliens" from other planets, among other semi-subversive outrageous over-the-top concepts designed for the semi-rebellious adolescent boomer market.

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, Wacky Packages 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.

In 2015, Topps started to expand its non-sports category by adding more TV series and science fiction with its brand-new Star Wars line (expanding into its own Topps virtual card mobile app that was similar to Topps Bunt), as well as Doctor Who, with regular autographs as well as vintage cut autographs, screen-worn relics, and more.

The Disney Channel

Topps worked together with the Disney Channel to create trading cards based on both the High School Musical film trilogy (High School Musical, High School Musical 2 and High School Musical 3: Senior Year) and the TV series 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 the then-retired comics industry legend Jack Kirby, known collectively as the "Kirbyverse". Topps Comics particularly specialized in licensed titles with tie-ins to films or TV 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 series.

These comic books featured former Marvel Comics editor Jim Salicrup as its editor-in-chief. Aside from The X-Files, some of its more famous titles included Lone Ranger and Tonto by Timothy Truman, Xena: Warrior Princess, 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 (The 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 its operation of WizKids in November 2008 due to the economic downturn. The brand was acquired by NECA in September 2009.