A personal trainer who gave up his day job to focus on his side hustle said he made £2.4 million in revenue over the past year and urged people not to “get stuck in their nine-to-five” jobs if they have other passions.
Aaron Pearce, 38, from Suffolk and living in Essex, said he had “always been interested in” collectable items like Pokemon cards and football stickers and cards since growing up in the 1990s. But when he graduated from university in his early 20s, he started working his “way up” in the fitness and leisure industry to become an area manager of several gyms.
From spare room to full-time
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Aaron said his sector “completely shut down” so he had time to explore reselling as a side hustle, including trainers, clothes and football cards. It was the latter that stuck, so Aaron searched on social media sites like Instagram to connect with other collectors and to buy and sell cards that he sold for up to £20 per item.
But it was Aaron’s introduction to a live shopping marketplace website in 2023 that turned his football card business from a spare-room hobby into a full-time job by March 2025, in dedicated offices with a team of seven people.
Case breaking and livestreaming
Rather than reselling individual cards, Aaron carved out a space in the market for opening cases while livestreaming and selling spots to individuals. Aaron can buy boxes of cards for £400 or full cases of 12 boxes for £4,800, with a total of 150 cards in each box.
A Liverpool supporter might buy a £100 “spot” on a livestreamed case opening and then they would get all of the Liverpool cards that came out of it. The number of spots on offer varies between livestreams and boxes or cases opened, but he cited one evening in July that had 340 spaces filled.
He made almost £700,000 in revenue in his first full year between July 2023 to 2024, then £1.2 million in his second year and now £2.4 million in the last year.
Big hits and life-changing cards
Aaron said: “One of the biggest cards we’ve had is a Lamine Yamal rookie card, which was a one of one, meaning there’s only one of them in the world. Someone bought that spot in a case break for about £15 to £20… the card itself now is probably worth over £100,000.
“It’s a crazy feeling. Because we open so much product, we’re very lucky with quite a lot of big hits, which could change quite a lot of people’s lives.”
Aaron remembers collecting albums of football stickers with his father as a child, but said they got “lost along the way” into adulthood. When he graduated from university with a degree in sports and exercise science in his early twenties, he said he “progressed into the personal trainer world” and worked his way up from sales, to reception, and various levels of management.
From hobby to business
Over the years, Aaron said he tried getting into reselling trainers and clothes as side hustles, but they “fizzled over time” due to “demand dying down”, so he looked into football cards. Initially starting as a hobby, Aaron progressed to connecting with other collectors on social media and then buying and selling individual cards that appealed to him, ranging from £5 to £20 and making small profits.
At the start of 2023, a friend of Aaron’s suggested he try opening packets of football cards in livestreams and he was immediately “very interested” in the idea. He researched it and found the live shopping marketplace site Whatnot, so he said he decided to make a “heavy investment” and take a risk by dipping into his savings from his fitness job to buy a £4,800 case of football cards. He would then sell spots to collectors via his account, Baller Breaks UK, effectively offering them a chance to get rare cards of the specific teams they collect.
Aaron said: “I was definitely nervous at the time, but I was excited too. It was a product that I would have never been able to open up myself because I wouldn’t have been able to afford it. But at the same time, I realised that it was a very good business opportunity and if that went well, it would set us up for the future, which it did.”
Aaron made £6,324 in revenue during that first livestream. In the early days, Aaron would come home from his day job and do livestreams in his spare room from 9pm until as late as 2am, to an average of 20 to 40 viewers at a time.
He said: “Across a two-and-a-half-year period, I think I had 10 days off from streaming. So it was really just driving the consistency.”
Scaling up and future plans
Now, having moved into a new house with a separate outdoor office space for business and stock storage in the summer of 2025, Aaron can do three livestreams a day and said he could have a case of cards worth £10,000 “come in one day” and by the end of the day, it had “already been turned over”.
To help him upscale the business, he said he has hired a packaging team for the orders he sells, an operations manager, and additional livestreamers so that Aaron can “become a bit more hands off and manage the business”. The growth of his reselling business meant that Aaron could give up his full-time job in personal training in March 2025, having more time to network at international card shows.
Aaron said: “It just came to a point where it didn’t make sense to continue the full-time job day to day. We had an unlimited potential earning in this side hustle and it was a no-brainer.”
He said he feels “very proud” of how far he has come, especially when he helps secure rare cards for his customers, like when two people paid £10 each for a spot last year and got a dual autograph card of Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho, which they sold for £35,000 at auction. Depending on securing enough stock from wholesalers, Aaron hopes to get to a point where the business is livestreaming 24 hours a day, seven days a week to global audiences.
Looking back on how far he has come, he said: “A lot of people get stuck in their nine-to-five, but they have a passion that they want to follow. I think it’s important to try to pursue that. If you’ve got something that you really enjoy and you can put your full focus into that, you can grow something that’s going to change your life.”
