When Collectors — the parent company of PSA and SGC — acquired Beckett Grading Services in late 2025, the hobby braced for the worst. The prevailing assumption was simple: Collectors had bought a competitor to quietly retire it, absorbing whatever market share remained into PSA's orbit. Six months later, the opposite is happening.

Under General Manager Colin Hudson, who took the reins last December, Beckett is undergoing a renaissance that few predicted. Rather than winding down, the company is investing in its grading infrastructure, reviving its heritage branding, and scaling capacity at a pace not seen in years.

Doubling Down on Capacity

When Hudson arrived, Beckett was grading roughly 4,000 cards per day. By early June, that number had climbed to approximately 7,000 — a 75% increase in six months. In May alone, Beckett hit 145,000 graded items, representing a 49% month-over-month surge. Hudson's stated goal is 10,000 cards per day by year's end.

"I challenged the team, OK, let's develop a plan that by the end of the year we're doing 10,000 units a day. So, basically, more than doubling output," Hudson told Sports Collectors Digest in a June 24 feature. "We're well on our way to that goal."

The growth comes from aggressive operational investment: nearly 100 new roles across the organization, process-level data analysis, and a systematic overhaul of every stage of the grading workflow. According to Hudson, the company is scrutinizing "every single process in the grading operation" to squeeze more throughput and productivity from each stage.

Brand Revival

In May, Beckett brought back its iconic "B with laurels" crest — the heritage logo that defined the brand for decades — alongside a refined grading label that improves readability with larger grade fonts and better spacing for subgrades and autograph details. The response from collectors, by all accounts, has been positive.

"There seems to be this nice feedback loop where the better we get growing our capacity, the more Beckett slabs that are on the market, the more that kind of demonstrates that there's value in the slabs, which in turn drives more trust and more submissions," Hudson said.

Collectors CEO Nat Turner made the company's posture clear: "Beckett has a very powerful brand, very nostalgic to me personally and I think to pretty much every sports card collector from the '80s and '90s. In my opinion, they kind of lost their way in the middle 2000s with kind of lack of investment perhaps and didn't really keep up with the industry."

The Subgrade Moat

Perhaps the most significant strategic decision is what Beckett won't change. Hudson and Turner have both committed to keeping Beckett's core differentiators — the subgrade system, the black label chase, and the inner sleeves — intact. These features, which PSA doesn't offer, give Beckett a defensible niche in a grading market that has increasingly commoditized around the standard 10-point scale.

"That black label chase, the value of the black label, the subgrades, the inner sleeves, these are things only Beckett is really offering at scale," Hudson said. "The last thing I want to do is just be like interchangeable with PSA."

Turner echoed the sentiment: "We're going to stay true to the subgrades. I've always liked the Beckett subgrades. I don't think it's the right thing to do for PSA, so you're not going to see any sort of cross pollination on that front."

The Numbers Tell the Story

According to GemRate, Beckett graded 842,000 cards in 2025. For context, PSA graded 19.26 million, CGC 4.92 million, and SGC 1.42 million. The gap between Beckett and the market leaders remains enormous, but the trajectory — a 49% monthly increase in volume, a new website launching with vault integration, a new app in July — suggests the company has finally reversed its years-long decline.

A new Beckett website, slated to launch at the end of June, will include vault functionality that allows collectors to send Beckett orders directly to the PSA vault — unlocking instant offers and eventual eBay integration. A companion app follows in July.

Friendly Competition

Despite operating under the same corporate umbrella, Beckett maintains independence in its daily operations, pricing, and marketing. Hudson described the relationship as sibling rivalry rather than a merger of equals.

"There's a unique tension and while we play on the same team and we're the same family — you still fight with your brothers and sisters," he told SCD. "The way that you fight with your brothers and sisters is different than if you're in a street fight. There's no stabbing, there's no fingers in the eye."

Beckett's revival is still in its early innings. But six months after the doomsday predictions, the company is hiring, scaling, and — for the first time in years — gaining ground rather than losing it.

Primary source: Greg Bates, Sports Collectors Digest, June 24, 2026. Population data per GemRate. The SCD feature includes direct interviews with Colin Hudson and Nat Turner.