etopps Baseball

The Topps Company, Inc. (NASDAQ: TOPP) is a publicly traded company based in New York City that manufactures candy and collectibles. It is best known as a leading producer of baseball cards and other sports-related trading cards. more...

Home
Baseball-MLB
Baseball-Minors
Baseball-Negro Leagues
Basketball-NBA
Basketball-WNBA
Boxing
College Trading Cards
Football-CFL (Canadian)
Football-NFL
Golf-LPGA
Golf-Other
Golf-PGA
Hockey-Minors
Hockey-NHL
Olympics
Other
Racing-Indy Racing
Racing-NASCAR
Racing-Other
Soccer
Storage, Display Supplies
Tennis
Wrestling-WWE
etopps
etopps Baseball
etopps Basketball
etopps Classics
etopps Football
etopps Hockey
etopps NASCAR
etopps UK Football

Company history

Topps itself was founded in 1938, but the company can trace its roots back to an earlier firm, American Leaf Tobacco. Founded in 1890 by Morris Shorin, the American Leaf Tobacco Co. imported tobacco to the United States and sold it to other tobacco companies. (American Leaf Tobacco should not be confused with the American Tobacco Company, which monopolized US-grown tobacco during this period.)

American Leaf Tobacco encountered difficulties as World War I cut off Turkish supplies of tobacco to the United States, and later as a result of the Great Depression. Shorin's sons, Abram, Ira, Philip, and Joseph, decided to focus on a new product but take advantage of the company's existing distribution channels. To do this, they relaunched the company as Topps, with the name meant to indicate that it would be "tops" in its field. The chosen field was the manufacture of chewing gum, selected after going into the produce business was considered and rejected.

At the time, chewing gum was still a relative novelty sold in individual pieces. Topps's most successful early product was Bazooka bubblegum, which was packaged with a small comic on the wrapper. Starting in 1950, the company decided to try increasing gum sales by packaging them together with trading cards featuring Western character Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd) at the time Boyd, as one of the biggest stars of early television, was featured in newspaper articles and on magazine covers, along with a wave of Hopalong merchandising. When Topps next introduced baseball cards as a product, the cards immediately became its primary emphasis.

The company began its existence as Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., a partnership between the four Shorin brothers. It later incorporated under New York law in 1947. The entire company originally operated out of Brooklyn, but production facilities were moved to a plant in Duryea, Pennsylvania in 1965. Corporate offices remained at 254 36th Street in New York, a location in the Brooklyn waterfront district by the Gowanus Expressway. In 1994, the headquarters relocated to One Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan.

After being privately held for several decades, Topps offered stock to the public for the first time in 1972 with the assistance of investment banking firm White, Weld & Co. The company returned to private ownership when it was acquired in a leveraged buyout led by Forstmann Little & Company in 1984. The new ownership group again made Topps into a publicly traded company in 1987, now renamed to The Topps Company, Inc. In this incarnation, the company was incorporated in Delaware for legal purposes, but company headquarters remained in New York. Management was left in the hands of the Shorin family throughout all of these maneuverings.

Read more at Wikipedia.org