Oh god, when did this start? That's always the downfall of any collectible hobby when someone starts thinking it's a good idea to seal them in plastic boxes with a number stuck on the side (because as soon as someone does this to their collectible, they instantly think it's with 4-5x more than what it's been selling for forever)... They actually do this with Atari 2600 and original Nintendo system games, and they are pretty much the laughing stock of the vintage gaming community.
(I've seen vintage NES games listed in the high 5-digit price range just because they had it sealed in a plastic box...) I think vintage sports cards and comics are the only things that people really want sealed up like this.
But, right off, I notice some serious problems with this service. In order for it to really work in a collectible market, the item has to be preserved _EXACTLY_ as it was sold (unless it's declared a 'loose' pin (i.e., packaging not included) on the grading scale), but they don't seem to be allowing space for the backing card or the plastic bag that covers the pin when it was sold (for the ones that have them). And, where are the original pin backs? You can't just throw away the packaging and original parts of the pin and call yourself a collectibles grading service. It's okay to not want the cards/packaging attached to the pin, but it should still be graded as well as the pin and sealed with it (and when listed as 'with packaging', the condition of the packaging affects the overall grade). Trust me, as time goes on, pins with their original packaging will be worth a lot more than loose ones, it affects every collectibles market.
Sure, many people right now probably don't care about the cards/bags (and maybe even not the pin backs since they are easily replaced), but if there is anyone that actually wants their pins 'graded' and sealed in un-openable plastic boxes, _THOSE_ will be the kinds of people that will want every scrap of paper included with the pin when it was originally sold, and would even want to verify the Mickey pin-backs where the actual ones sold on the pin (which it probably impossible, but that's how 'encapsulated collectors' think
). The fact that someone is selling a graded PODM right now with the card sitting separately outside the box tells me they are missing a serious point of mint-in-package collectibles (which, again, is what encapsulated caters too. If you don't care if you pin has the packaging, than you probably aren't going to want it sealed in a plastic box you have to destroy to open).
I also find it odd that the grading information on the plastic box doesn't mention the grading service at all (like PPGS), and doesn't appear to have any anti-counterfeiting measures applied (holograms, watermarking, etc). In a collectibles field that we know contains a lot of counterfeiting, they should make their grading service identifiers very hard to copy. As it is, if someone presents you with one of these pins, from what I can see you'd have no way of verifying them. Sure, there's a 'serial number', but if you don't know who the company is that graded it, how do you verify that? And even if you have heard of them, I don't see anyway to verify the serial number either. Doesn't really seem like this is ready to go live, unless I'm just missing things. Seems like it would be easy for me to seal any pin I wanted to in a plastic box, copy one of the stickers they put in the box, and sell it as a graded pin.
