25-year-old skipped college—now her sports trading card company brings in more than $1 million a week on Whatnot

CNBC

17 hours ago

Dakota Peters wasn't sure what she'd do after high school.
The 25-year-old Florida native weighed going to college but ultimately decided against it. Her older sisters taught her that if she didn't have a specific direction for studying, she was better off just getting work experience in the real world.
During her senior year of high school, Peters shadowed her family in their commercial real estate business and ultimately went to work for the company post-graduation in 2017. But by 2021, she felt it was time to tackle something different.
She and her sisters started selling sneakers from their decades-long collection on Instagram in 2017, and in the spring of 2021, Peters discovered that the live auction app Whatnot was another platform they could sell on. At the time, the app was only streaming sports trading card sellers but was planning to expand.
As Peters waited for her opportunity to sell sneakers, she got hooked. Watching sellers "break," or unbox, sealed collectable cards "was just mind blowing to me," she says. "I was like, where did this come from?"
Peters had always loved sports and decided to give selling sports trading cards on Whatnot a shot. In her first year, her profile brought in just over $1 million in gross revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Today, her company Achickrips has multiple Whatnot seller channels and brings in more than $1 million in gross merchandise value per week.
Here's how Peters built her booming business.
There was a natural tie-in between selling sports trading cards and selling sneakers. If a sneaker is linked to a specific athlete, the popularity of their sneaker, like their trading card, depends on the success of that athlete's career.
That basic understanding gave Peters a good base for learning her new field and a friend helped her procure the cards for her first stream. Streamers point a camera at card boxes and slowly unveil the contents of a box. Viewers can then let the streamer know they want to buy a card (or multiple).
Peters' first stream was about four hours, she says, and she did it from about 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. to make sure she wasn't competing with other sellers. Less than 20 people tuned in. But she made, to the best of her memory, "maybe $500, $600," she says, adding that "the buyer base was just there for the taking."
That first year, "I used to do 12 hour streams to 24 hour streams," she says. She would then answer DMs and work on sorting and shipping. She also built out relationships with card box sellers to ensure she got the highest-quality cards.
"It felt like a 24-hour shift every day," she says.
Given her quick success, Peters started hiring help that first year. At first it was part-timers who helped tackle the day-to-day of the business. In 2022, she made her first full-time hire. Today, Achikrips has more than 40 employees, she says. The majority of them work full time.
People are "either sorting through the orders, [they're] shipping the orders, there's people doing customer service," she says. About half of them stream, in addition to taking on other tasks.
The company now has five different sports trading profiles that sell football, basketball and baseball cards. In the last year, the company has also expanded to new fields: They now have a profile for selling thrift clothing and one for selling coins.
Peters stepped away from streaming herself in 2023.
It was getting hard to be "creating the ideas and paving the way for us to get there while still sitting behind and streaming multiple hours a day," she says. She's taken on a more high-level managerial role putting out fires as they come: "The Wi Fi is out in the corner, we're going to run out of [protective card] sleeves soon," etc.
Down the line, she wants to get the company's channels to be streaming more hours of the day and to experiment with YouTube. "People are now making social posts solely about the entertainment factor of ripping the cards," or breaking them out of their packaging, she says, without even trying to making money off of them. That's an avenue she's interested in exploring.
Five years ago, Peters hadn't even heard of Whatnot. Now, she loves what she's doing. "I couldn't dream of a better thing to call work," she says.