Vernon man turns childhood Pokémon hobby into an award winning business

Blake Ouellet of Vernon has turned a childhood hobby into an award winning business.

Ouellet, like a lot of kids, collected Pokémon cards when he was young, but unlike most kids he kept at it until he won eBay’s Entrepreneur of the Year for 2025.

“I collected as a kid, collected on and off all through my life, and then around 2020, really got back into it,” he told iNFOnews.ca. “In order to pay for them, I started a small eBay store, listed some stuff and it just grew over time to a point where it eventually really, really ramped up.”

He quit his job as an account representative at Infotel, iNFOnews.ca’s parent company, to run his card selling business Blaketoise TCG full time around a year ago.

Selling individual cards for a profit started out as a way to help fund his collection, but with Pokémon cards rising in popularity, and therefore in value, he realized he could make a buck. 

Some Pokémon cards aren’t worth much, but others can be worth millions of dollars. A single Pikachu card sold for $5.75 million back in 2022. 

“We deal in like mid- to low-end cards for the most part. I have a card right now worth about ten thousand bucks,” he said.

It isn’t as easy as finding a few valuable cards and putting them on eBay.

Ouellet scours online forums, card shows and has a small storefront in Vernon where people can come in and sell him their collections which he combs through for valuable cards. 

“It’s a lot of different avenues. You’ve got to get creative with it. Trying to find products from different areas,” he said. “In terms of acquiring products and buying products, we started to do card shows across the Okanagan and across BC. It’s a big thing in every metropolitan area across the world now.”

Pokémon cards are like any collector item — be it art, historical artifacts and so on — since they’re worth whatever people are willing to pay for them.

“The value is sort of subjective based on who’s buying,” he said. “It’s collectible or it’s cool artwork or it’s a character that people like.”

There are several popular card games with cards that could be worth a million dollars like Magic the Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh! 

Ouellet said he’s always been most interested in Pokémon and those other card games are more about the competitive aspect of actually playing the game while the collector scene in Pokémon is more of the focus. 

“The Pokémon franchise is built around collecting,” he said. “There’s just more of that side of things where a card that may be useless to actually play within a tournament might have a lot of value.”

Since the value of a card fluctuates, there’s an app called Collectr which allows people to upload their collection and it will track the value of the cards like a stock in a portfolio.

“That has caused a big uptick in the investment angle of it all. People are seeing it as a stock in a sense,” he said. “The stuff that I keep for myself, generally, I track in there and follow along. In 2025, it’s gone up substantially without me even doing anything.”

He said while some people look at the cards as an investment and it is his full-time job, he still thinks collecting should be fun.

“I love Pokémon. I’m a fan of the franchise,” he said. “I don’t want to just collect and just do this for money. I’d feel like I’m completely soulless.”

He said winning eBay’s entrepreneur of the year award for 2025 felt like vindication for all the time and money he spent from working it as a side hustle to turning it into a successful business.

“It’s the first big piece of recognition that I’ve received for the work I’ve done. Just knowing it’s all across Canada, in stores in Toronto and Vancouver and all over the place. It’s like I beat them. I was the entrepreneur of the year,” he said. 

Ouellet is going to be at a card show at the Capri Hotel in Kelowna on Nov. 1, his cards can be found online here and he has a storefront at 8106 Highland Place in Vernon for folks who want to pop in and check it out or sell him some Pokémon cards.