Photo courtesy Jake + Dean Uncommon Coasters
When you think about community service, activities such as trash pickup or mentoring students probably come to mind. However, for Jake Pasternak and Dean Whitbeck, co-founders of Jake + Dean Uncommon Coasters, community involvement came in a more unconventional form: trading cards.
It all started when Whitbeck’s sister-in-law invited him and his family to a party soon after they moved to Richmond in the early 2000s. He met Pasternak, and the two forged an immediate friendship, bonding over their love of the Grateful Dead. About 15 years later at a shop in Lakeside, the friends purchased a pack of trading cards, poring over them with joy and excitement. The moment was the beginning of their business.
“Jake was flipping cards on eBay, and I had the idea of simply laminating them,” Whitbeck says. “We had these cards and had the idea to do ornaments with [them], and Jake had the idea to do light switches.”
They expanded on the idea, making coasters with original trading cards — featuring sports and entertainment figures and other “eclectic” subjects — sealed inside with resin, but were forced to pause production due to the pandemic. “This was September of 2020, so we had no way to sell them, but we had them,” Whitbeck says. “We kept meeting and talking about the business and focusing on our social mission.”
Dean Whitbeck and Jake Pasternak of Jake + Dean Uncommon Coasters and Project rePurpose (Photo by Ansel Scudder)
Both men come from mission-focused careers — Pasternack started a low-cost veterinary clinic called Helping Hands with his wife, Lori, and Whitbeck is involved in workforce development — so the philanthropic arm of their business, Project rePurpose, came naturally.
“Both of us knew that, because of Helping Hands and working in education and nonprofits, if we were going to build this, we had to be rooted in a social mission. All we thought about were smiles and just wanted to bring joy to people in a period of time when people needed it most,” Whitbeck says.
Project rePurpose, originally known as Project Jake + Dean, has a three-pronged approach to giving back to the community. It gives people the opportunity to donate unwanted trading cards rather than throwing them away or letting them linger in storage. Those donated cards are then sorted and put into card packs and boxes by local students in workforce development programs at Henrico County Public Schools, St. Joseph’s Villa and Maggie Walker Governor’s School. Once packed, the cards are given back to students in those schools and to local hospitals and fire stations to share with families and children. (The duo note that they occasionally find valuable or interesting cards among those donated, some of which are used in coasters, but most of them go into Project rePurpose card packs.)
Pasternak has seen an outpouring of support for this program. “We had so many people who came to us along our journey that had cards that they had no idea what to do with. The fact that [the cards] could go and have a use beyond [sitting in] their basement or throwing them in the trash brings people joy,” he says, adding that Graybo’s Sports Cards in Jackson Ward has also been a generous donor.
Photo courtesy Jake + Dean Uncommon Coasters
Pasternak also hopes to see Project rePurpose expand beyond Richmond. “We’re going to make it so that this can be replicated, not just here but in different states, and it’s not just dependent on Jake or Dean to run. It’s going to be a framework that will connect a network of people with uses for their cards in the spirit of what we’re doing. We’ve got a vision to make that successful long term as part of our legacy,” he says.
After homing in on the mission behind their business, Pasternak and Whitbeck were able to get back to retail sales in the spring of 2021 by joining the PopUp RVA market at The Diamond.
“We stuck with that market week to week. We did that for two years. We did the pop-up market every Saturday and Christmas season,” Pasternak says. “This year, we’ve moved on to more special events.” Those include GalaxyCon, PrideFest, High Point furniture market in North Carolina and the Iron Blossom music festival. They also have a permanent shop at Independence Golf Club.
This increase in sales has led the partners to expand their line of offerings. In addition to the original trading card coasters, they sell coasters featuring customizable Polaroid photos and larger display pieces with collectable memorabilia.
“Jake has developed a way to do things thicker than a trading card, like iPods, iPhones or Lego figurines. That’s when people are like, ‘Holy cow, how’d you do that?’ And that hits on the nostalgia that I feel is undervalued and is what we need right now,” Whitbeck says.
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