Blake Martinez #54 of the New York Giants plays the field against the Washington Football Team during an NFL game at FedExField on September 16, 2021 in Landover, Maryland.Before he left football to sell Pokémon cards, ex-NFL linebacker Blake Martinez made millions tackling people.in earnings, even co-leading the league in tackles in 2017. Then, in 2021, he tore his ACL and was released from the New York Giants a year later.
Martinez declined to provide profit figures, but noted that a quarter of profits get reinvested back into Blake's Breaks. The rest is take-home pay for himself and his 15 contract employees. At six years old, Martinez took the $15 he earned from weekly chores and bought Pokémon cards at the Circle K convenience store down the street, he says. He stored his thousand-plus cards in a binder, only taking them out to play with his friends while stuck at his sister's gymnastics practices.
He started buying more boxes, paying tens of thousands of dollars for 36 packs of cards at a time. On live video streams on Whatnot — a platform in which he'd previously invested, back in 2019 — he opened the boxes for viewers and auctioned the cards off one by one.Martinez sustained the side hustle in between practices and games for about two years, occasionally advertising it during
He hired managers to lead small teams, and came up with the company's revenue split with the help of consultants, he says. Today, the company primarily runs out of warehouses in Miami and Denver, with a third soon coming in New Jersey.