When we first stared out in the card biz, very few cards came in plastic sleeves. Honestly, hardly any. The ones that did had special adornments that the sleeves helped protect. Then suddenly every card brand and their dog started putting their cards in plastic sleeves. I get it from a retail stand point – it looks so neat and tidy on your fancy card wall. It protects the cards from being handled too much and envelopes from being lost…. but at what cost?!?

Now I won’t sit here pretending to be innocent. In my 16 years I’ve had a few retail stores request plastic sleeves for my cards and I obliged. It sucked and I hated it, but I did it. (I haven’t done it in years.) 

Recently I started thinking about all those cello bags and plastic sleeves and I started doing some research. Sure, a lot of bags out there are “bio-degradable” or “compostable”…. but did you know that it takes near perfect circumstances for those bags to actually disappear? And chances are most of those bags are still around. 😟 

It turns out there’s this whole movement out there to sell your cards naked and I’m happy that I’ve been selling mine naked 99% of the time for the past 16 years. Sure, cards are awesome and it sucks when they get bent of scuffed or whatever… but the world doesn’t need all that extra packaging.