Golden Knights fans break Stanley Cup merchandise, food sales records

Congratulations again, Golden Knights fans.

You’re a part of another record, buying the most team merchandise during a Stanley Cup Final series at T-Mobile Arena’s The Armory store on June 13, the night the team clinched the Cup with a convincing 9-3 win over the Florida Panthers.

Sales of souvenirs that night topped the franchise’s previous best, Game 1 of the Knights’ first Stanley Cup series against the Washington Capitals, on May 28, 2018.

It also beat sales during the Los Angeles Kings 2014 Cup win against the New York Rangers.

Fans bought millions of dollars in merch in the team’s final march toward hockey supremacy this year.

Representatives of Chicago-based Levy, the food and beverage partner of T-Mobile Arena and Levy’s retail company, Rank + Rally, said Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final set records for both retail and food and beverage sales per capita for a Cup game.

While the total gross sales and net sales are proprietary and undisclosed, Jim Haskins, the National Hockey League’s senior vice president of consumer products licensing, said VGK Stanley Cup gear sales were 31 percent above the previous record.

Fans still buying

And Haskins said the team and the fans aren’t done yet.

“We get a summary of the status of sales from our retail partners,” Haskins said. “We’re able to traverse the ecosystems pretty well and do it very, very fast.

“We saw right away, even on clinch night, that the metrics were increasing and doing so at a significant velocity. And we’re confident that there’s more to come here, because historically you clinch, you have that moment when there’s this insatiable excitement and energy, so folks are going out and buying products that are directly related to that moment. We’re celebrating in the immediacy, but we’re confident this is going to have a long tail.”

Haskins explained that the league licenses the rights to third-party manufacturers for merchandise and they wholesale it to the team store at T-Mobile, the team-owned store at the City National Arena practice facility, full-line sporting goods stores, department stores, casino outlets and to the NHL website.

Hats are best-sellers

Haskins said the biggest seller for retailers have been the locker-room hats, the VGK caps that proclaimed them as champions and were worn by the team’s players immediately after the last horn sounded at T-Mobile on clinch night.

Fanatics, the company that made the hats, said that while there may be some available online and in some stores, they’re sold out and they aren’t making any more of them.

Right up there in sales were locker-room T-shirts and specially made parade T-shirts that were worn by players and their families the night of the Strip celebration on Saturday night at Toshiba Plaza before thousands of fans.

Another popular item: the championship signature T-shirt that replicates the autograph of every player on the team surrounding an image of the Stanley Cup.

Then, there are the sweaters — that’s what hockey players and fans call the team jerseys they wear. The Golden Knights had several variations, a gray home sweater, a white road uniform, a gold-colored jersey the team chose to wear in its Cup home games and a black reverse retro uniform with glow-in-the-dark logos, numbers and lettering.

“Jersey sales have been unbelievable, flying off the shelf and, in the case of the Knights, it’s a rich portfolio,” Haskins said.

Why were VGK merch sales so successful? Haskins believes there are several reasons.

Popular players

The team is rich with fan-favorite players, so there hasn’t been a focus on one single guy. Mark Stone. William Karlsson. Jack Eichel. Jonathan Marchessault. Alex Pietrangelo. Zach Whitecloud. Adin Hill. All have distinctive followings.

The team’s history and Las Vegas roots have something to do with the popularity.

Rappers, rockers and country music stars were rocking the gear so the support has been broad.

Haskins said fans outside of Las Vegas also have been supportive.

“Outside of Vegas, you have hockey fans throughout the world that recognize how unique and cool this Las Vegas story was,” he said.

Haskins also credits the on-ice excellence and marketing genius of the team for keeping it a top five program within the league in the franchise’s six years of existence.

“The product on the ice has been championship caliber since Year 1,” Haskins said. “It comes from great design. The logo was well done and the color palette and the story behind the black and gold shield and the crossed swords resonated.

“The Golden Knights are blue-chip marketers in the National Hockey League and they thought about those story lines, they thought about the DNA of the logo and how it connected back to those symbols on the uniform and in their logo system that represent power and strength and durability,” he said.

“When you have well-grounded design and story lines, it pops through with consumers. It represents excellence and quality and I think it’s not only a great team on the ice, but a cool uniform and cool logo system and I think that spoke to some of the successful sales also.”

Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.