“People tell us, ‘thanks so much,’ because there’s not another store like this nearby, neither in Glenpool, nor in Sand Springs.”
Daddy & Daughter Cards is located at 224 N. Mission Street in a strip center surrounded by auto insurance and a tattoo shop. The place is easy to miss, but the experience inside is unlike anything else Sapulpa has.
The retailer sells itself as a haven for nerdy types who enjoy card games like Magic The Gathering or Pokemon, but that’s just scratching the surface; you’ll also find collectible dice, board games of every flavor, and even collectible cards of a more common variety, such as the Kevin Durant Seattle Supersonics card that sits inside the front display case.
The store is primarily owned by 31-year-old Jaron Williams, who gets a lot of help from his wife Amanda, and daughters Chloie, 9, Blake, 6 and eventually Camryn, who is only 16 months old as of now.
Jaron and Amanda say the reception has been warm…once people found out what they actually do.
“We had people coming in to ask if we were a daycare,” Amanda said during a conversation with Sapulpa Times this week.
It’s not hard to see where the confusion comes from; card shops like this are hard to come by already—most playing cards like these are usually relegated to a shelf in a comic book store—or they have a more science-fiction-sounding name. At first glance, the logo lends itself to a daycare or greeting card company. Another look gives a glimpse into the series of events that led to the start of Daddy & Daughter Cards.
Jaron is “Dad” and the central figure in the anime-style characters featured in the logo. From left to right are the daughters Chloie, Blake, Lucy and Camryn. Lucy is unique in that her character wears a halo.
In October of 2019, the Williams were enjoying life at a new home in the Pretty Water area and expecting their next daughter, to be named Lucy. At 37 weeks along, Amanda said the pregnancy had been a difficult one. She worked as a nurse at Saint Francis Children’s Hospital, and had been around enough difficult pregnancies to know that something wasn’t right. She began having contractions and went into labor and it wasn’t long before things took a turn for the worst; Amanda’s placenta ruptured, cutting off the needed oxygen supply for baby Lucy.
“Lucy lived for 36 hours,” Amanda said.
The loss of Lucy was devastating on the whole family. A month after the tragedy, Chloie was diagnosed with epilepsy and suffered a seizure, causing her to fall down the stairs. The family found themselves back in Saint Francis for the second time in 45 days.
Internally, Jaron was struggling. “I began to really think about how little time I have with my girls,” he said.
He and Amanda discussed the idea of Jaron becoming a stay-at-home dad and by the end of December that year, he was doing just that.
Months later, COVID-19 shut the world down, and the Williams found themselves looking for additional income.
It started when Blake, a first-grader at Pretty Water, handed her dad a pack of Pokemon cards at a store. “We didn’t even know Pokemon was still a thing,” Amanda said. “We started playing and collecting during COVID, and it just kind of became our way to decompress.”
As Jaron began searching online for a certain group of Pokemon cards, an idea came to mind: in their collections were a lot of doubles. They were buying from people who were selling single Pokemon cards. Could they do the same?
The began listing single cards for sale, ranging in price from just $.25 to a few dollars or more. “It just became a snowball,” Amanda said.
People began to find and buy regularly, both singles and bundles. Eventually, their office in their house became filled with shipping supplies and inventory. Faced with the need to move their business outside their house, the Williams made the decision to expand into whole packs, dice and board games and open a retail store on Mission Street. They just opened a few weeks ago, after more than a year of selling online.
Jaron and Amanda say that losing Lucy was hard, but they’re determined to keep her memory alive in every way possible. “She’s really kind of the driving force behind this whole thing,” Jaron says. He exemplifies that statement by wearing a shirt that says ‘Dad4‘
Daddy & Daughter Cards joins the growing list of businesses in Sapulpa choosing to stay open later. They are open Wed-Fri from 12pm to 8pm, Saturday from 10pm to 10pm, and Sunday from 12pm to 6pm. They frequently host Magic the Gathering Tournaments and Board Game nights as they try to encourage families to spend more time together without a screen involved.
