Upper Deck Company

The Upper Deck Company, LLC (colloquially as Upper Deck and Upper Deck Authenticated, Ltd. in the UK) is a private company primarily known for producing trading cards. It was founded in 1988. Its headquarters are in Carlsbad, California, United States.

The company also produces sports related items such as figurines and die-cast toys on top of having exclusive agreements to produce memorabilia, under the brand name "Upper Deck Authenticated", with athletes including Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, LeBron James, Wayne Gretzky, Serena Williams, Roberto Luongo, Connor McDavid, and Ben Simmons. Under the Upper Deck Entertainment name, the company also produced card games such as World of Warcraft and Vs. System.

Upper Deck is also the current licensor of the O-Pee-Chee brand since 2007, having released several baseball and ice hockey card collections.

On December 23, 1988, Upper Deck was granted a license by Major League Baseball to produce baseball cards, and just two months later, on February 23, 1989, delivered its first two cases of baseball cards to George Moore of Tulsa's Baseball Card Store in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its inaugural 1989 set stood out from other trading cards with its glossy fronts on heavy-duty cardboard (thicker than other card stocks), with an additional color photo on the back of each card and a counterfeit-proof tiny hologram marking. Upper Deck sold out its baseball cards midway through this inaugural year, then pre-sold its entire 1990 baseball stock before the year began.

The 1990 set included the industry's first randomly inserted personally autographed and numbered cards of sports stars. All Upper Deck brands bear an exclusive trademark hologram, and Upper Deck was named "Card Set of the Year" every year from 1989 to 2004.

Paul Sumner created the Upper Deck concept in 1987. He worked in printing sales and came up with the idea for a premium card. When he heard about card counterfeiting, he realized that he knew a way to protect cards. He had studied holograms in college and had used them in printing his company's brochures. He hired Robert Young Pelton to design and produce a prototype. Pelton designed and produced the cards for Upper Decks first three-year rise. Pelton's agencies, Pelton & Associates and Digital Artists, were replaced by Chiat/Day. Paul Sumner resigned with the understanding that he would be known as the "Co-Founder of Upper Deck," something that the company's owner and CEO, Richard McWilliam, recognized until McWilliam's death in 2013.

On March 20, 1990, Upper Deck received licenses from the National Hockey League and the National Hockey League Players' Association to produce hockey cards. The company also obtained licenses from the National Football League and the National Basketball Association in 1990, making Upper Deck the first trading card company in 10 years to be licensed by all four leagues. Upper Deck quickly rivaled Topps, which had been considered the standard, and other competitors, such as Fleer, Donruss, and Score. By 1991, the company built a 250,000-square-foot (23,000 m²) plant of brown marble and black glass on a hilltop 30 miles (48 km) north of San Diego.

After Upper Deck introduced its premium baseball series, other companies followed with improved photography, better design, and higher-quality paper stock. The sports card market grew from $50 million in 1980 when Topps' monopoly was broken by Fleer, to a $1.5 billion industry in 1992. Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson served as an adviser in the early 1990s. Jackson would also serve as the inspiration for the first certified autograph card inserted into trading cards with the company's "Find the Reggie" campaign. A massively successful promotion for the Upper Deck brand, the triple portrait of Jackson, remains an iconic image among baseball card collectors.