Will Wade has lived a tough life, but perseverance and determination seem to run in his family. 

Wade has gone from a drug addict spending time in jail to an up-and-coming entrepreneur. He’s turned the corner with a little help from his famous cousin—NBA superstar Stephen Curry. 

In 2022, after Curry captured the fourth NBA championship of his career with the Golden State Warriors, it sparked an idea in Wade’s head. He wanted to archive the history of Curry’s basketball journey through what he calls “adhesive artifacts,” or stickers and trading cards. Wade founded Canvas Marketing, and is producing what he refers to as handmade art.

Canvas Marketing

The stickers celebrate a specific moment when Curry did something amazing in a game during the 2025-26 season. Wade tells a story about the moment on the back of a card, conveying it to artist LuckyMong, who in turn designs a card.

“I was really in the right mind frame, state of mind. I was clean and sober,” said Wade, who lived with the Curry family when he was a teenager and his parents were in jail. “I felt in debt and I wanted a way to repay him. I don’t think he knows it yet, but hopefully he will know that what I’m doing here is writing his history as his brother sees it.”

Wade wants his cousin’s legacy to live on forever as one of the best pure shooters in NBA history.

“I got this idea around the time they deleted Pete Rose’s history, around the time they deleted Jackie Robinson’s history,” Wade said. “So, I wanted to archive Steph’s history in a way that was true to me and what corresponded to my reality of him being the greatest of all time.”

CURRY FAMILY

With his parents in prison during the most impressionable days of his life, Wade stayed with his grandmother. After spending summers with the Curry family, Wade was given the opportunity by Steph’s mother, Sonya, to move in with his famous relatives when he was in high school.

“I was a project of Sonya’s,” said Wade, whose grandmother and Stephen’s grandmother are sisters. “Thank God for her.”

Dell Curry, Steph’s father, had just wrapped up a lengthy NBA career and the family was living in Charlotte, N.C. Stephen was a young, budding basketball player at the college preparatory Charlotte Christian School and his brother, Seth, was just two years younger. 

Being just six months apart in age, Wade and Stephen were close; they shared a bedroom and a lot of great times together.

An accomplished educator, Sonya coached Wade to pass his college entrance exams. But in his 20s, Wade got mixed up with the wrong crowd; he became an intravenous heroin addict and Xanax user.

“I wanted to be like my father,” Wade said. “I wanted what everyone else wanted me to be. So, I tried to act like that instead of living out what I really should have been and how I was taught to be.”

Someone close to Wade died of an overdose, and authorities were trying to pin it on Wade. That was “eye-opening” for him. Wade spent seven months in jail without bail, fighting the case and proving his innocence.

“I finished up a little incarceration and when I came home, Steph was like, ‘What’s it going to take, bro, to get the old Will back?’” Wade said. “I was really like, ‘Socioeconomics. I have to sell drugs to live.’ I don’t think he could ever really understand that until I verbally like told him so. After that, he supported me for a few months. Then that didn’t feel right as a man, so my buddy, Blaine Hunt—they call him ‘Trophy Vault’ in the hobby—was like, ‘You should ask Steph to start signing some jerseys and memorabilia and cards for you and then sell it.’”

Hunt, who is a big Curry card collector, took Wade to a Warriors game in 2022. Curry had a monster night. Hunt told Wade to text Curry and tell him if he gives him that jersey and has it inscribed and signed, he will give Wade $100,000 to start his own business.

Curry met the pair after the game and instructed Hunt not to give Wade the entire $100,000 up front. Wade was fresh out of prison and “could have gone either way,” he said.

Wade received a first payment of $10,000, and Canvas Marketing was born. It was the fresh start that he so desperately needed.

STICKERS & CARDS

Wade, who lives in Carlsbad, Calif., watches or listens to every one of Curry’s games.  

He will capture important moments in games and start spit-balling for his next Curry sticker. He relays dialogue to LuckyMong (Jay Kim), who is in Seoul, South Korea. So, after “scheming” all night, Wade is heading to bed when LuckyMong is just waking up.

“What’s important to me is archiving the history,” said Wade, who will turn 39 in October. “Then we take it a step further and we inscribe the artwork on the block chain via bitcoin, making it immutable, so it can never be altered, deleted or changed.” 

One example of a Curry sticker comes from the Warriors’ game against the Orlando Magic on Dec. 22, 2025. Curry scored 26 points on 10-of-23 shooting from the field—including four 3-pointers—to go with six assists and two steals. The front of the sticker has an image of Curry lassoing Disney character Steamboat Willie. On the back of the card is a description of what happened in the game. 

The stickers, which are waterproof, were originally designed for kids to affix to their card carrying cases.

“I made this because I was like, ‘It would be cool to have a Steph thing on your Zion case or even on your car windows,’” Wade said.

All of the stickers of Curry are numbered from /222 on down. The Stephen Curry: To Be Continued Season 2 product has 43 cards and features about 500-600 on-card Curry autographs—all numbered /10 or fewer. 

Each pack contains one card and costs $50. Each box has 10 packs and sells for $350. Each case, going for $3,000, has 100 boxes and includes one guaranteed autograph. 

Season 1: The New Era cards featuring highlights from Curry’s 2024-25 season dropped on Aug. 10. Season 1 consists of trading cards, not stickers, like in Season 2. Wade’s latest series of cards contain not just autographs of Steph but also of Seth.

Whenever a product drops, it is announced on Canvas Marketing’s Instagram page @canvasmktg; it can also be found at canvasmktg.com.

“They sell fast when we drop them,” Wade said. “We do like one drop a month.”

When Wade was designing his stickers and cards, he wanted to make sure the packs couldn’t be opened and then resealed. Each sticker is placed in a penny sleeve and a top loader before being hand inserted into a pack. The packs can only be opened by ripping a perforated strip, similar to a pull-tab.

“We made that intentionally, so once that it was tampered with, it’s self-evident,” Wade said. 

Wade recently lined up a collaboration with Beckett that could really open up a lot of avenues for Canvas Marketing and the Curry cards. 

“Beckett is overseeing our printing process. They’re going to take the liability for the checklist and they’re going to authenticate every card from the inception,” Wade said. “That’s what Topps and all these other companies, I believe, should do. That’s what I’ve created, a product I hope other companies will see how we’ve done it. Like, no foil pack. A foil pack could leave room for fraud, to be resealed. That’s why mine is a pull-tab—once you open it, you can’t reseal it.” 

Curry doesn’t have a hand in Canvas Marketing and his stickers and cards besides the autographs he provides. Wade feels grateful his cousin devotes time to sign stickers and cards.

“I feel like I’m bothering Steph sometimes. I’ll go chase him down for autos,” said Wade, who donates 10% of all his proceeds to Curry’s Eat.Learn.Play Foundation. “But I won’t go back to the past me. I used to wait in hotels on people to bring drugs. I used to do stupid stuff. So, to go out and wait on my brother, my family member, and patiently with respect and ask if he could further help us advance with some autos on this stuff. I’ll humble myself, invite or not. I want to do the right thing for me and my family, and for that to happen, that’s what I have to do.” 

Wade, who has been off drugs for nearly five years, turned Canvas Marketing into a family affair. His half-brother, Deion, and cousin Nick both work at the company.  

Wade is still trying to get the word out to collectors about what he’s doing in the hobby.

“It’s hard to get people to believe in what we’re doing,” Wade said. “I’ve heard a million ‘no’s,’ but because I believe, I just keep going. I know I’m just one ‘yes’ away.” 

Wade was at this year’s National Sports Collectors Convention walking around the show floor and promoting his product. He isn’t just waiting around for his product to pop. 

“I’m a hustler. My background is street sales,” Wade said. “I didn’t change too much, just doing the right thing. I’m still hustlin’. I’m still schemin’.”