When the Patriots win, so does Bay State Apparel
Courtesy
Brian Whitney, owner of Bay State Apparel.
Ever wonder how sports championship merchandise hits retail stores so soon after a victory? If you bought a Patriots Super Bowl winning T-shirt or hat right after the big game this past February, you may have Bay State Apparel to thank. The Leominster company provides screen printing and embroidery services on everything from T-shirts to jackets to bags.
Owner Brian Whitney spoke about why he started the company, typical order sizes, and what exactly goes into making clothing right after a victory.
What does Bay State Apparel make?
We do screen printing and embroidery and all that for apparel. Your typical T-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, jackets, uniforms, bags, things like that.
We’ve got two different types of business: local schools and businesses, where we sell directly to them, and we can contract work, where we work with a lot of marketing and promotional type companies, and they’re the middleman between some large corporate account type work. They get the orders from them directly, and they have a printer/embroiderer to contract to decorate their good for them. It’s 85 percent that and 15 percent local business.
How big is a typical order?
An average order is maybe 100-300 pieces. We do as small as a dozen, and we get orders into the tens of thousands.
Why did you decide to start the company?
I actually went to school and got a four-year business degree. I played on a lot of sports teams, and I was always in charge of getting uniforms; and it seemed and there wasn’t a good place to get them done.
I saw a printing press, bought it, put it in the cellar of my house and started dabbling a little bit here and there, and I got into it full time, left my real job, started it up, and haven’t looked back.
How many people do you employ?
We’ve got 17 people. We have five in the office, and the rest are production.
Any clients we may have heard of?
We run a program for Prudential Insurance, and we do some good sized orders for Dell. We’re a contracted vendor for the University of Connecticut, and we do a lot of orders for them.
When it’s a contract, they will get us the goods. The art sometimes comes from them or sometimes we create it -- and it’s just a matter of figuring out colors you’re doing, the location, and whether it’s printing or embroidery. We do big orders for Boston University as well.
We’re one of the contractors for a big major league license holder, so when the Patriots, Red Sox, Celtics or Bruins get into playoffs -- normally just for the finals or semi-finals -- they will send us the artwork and the shirts, and have us ready to go to print on the night of the win.
When the Patriots won the Super Bowl, we had everything set up Friday afternoon when we left, ready for the Sunday night game. We come in immediately after game is over and run shirts all night, and the shirts we did went into Dick’s Sporting Goods and Bob’s Stores. That’s how they get into the stores so early. That’s part of what we do as well.
That’s not really a part of the business you can count on. If your local teams win, it’s a little gravy job, but you certainly can’t count on it as part of your business. But, New England has been pretty lucky over last 10-15 years. We’ve had a lot of championships.
This interview was conducted and edited for length and clarity by Laura Finaldi, WBJ staff writer.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments