Las Vegas sports teams could be big sellers — even for nonfans
The arrival of Las Vegas’ National Hockey League franchise and the potential relocation of the Oakland Raiders to Southern Nevada present enormous retail prospects for everything from T-shirts to all forms of logoed merchandise.
And it isn’t just about selling stuff to locals.
Exhibitors and retail representatives attending this week’s Sports Licensing and Tailgate Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center say the arrival of a team is a novelty many sports fans won’t be able to resist.
“Las Vegas has a lot of appeal and there will be hockey fans who just love the game that will attend and then buy something,” said Charles Sizemore, CEO of The Memory Co. in Phenix City, Alabama.
“The team (the Vegas Golden Knights) hasn’t even played a game yet, but they’re already generating interest, and that represents significant revenue,” Sizemore said.
About 4,000 people are attending the three-day trade show that ends Thursday and features exhibits with all kinds of licensed products, from stadium seats, tailgating tables and chairs, beanbag games, sunglasses and coffee mugs to shot glasses and all types of game gear.
Panelists addressing retail opportunities in licensing at the show Wednesday said visitors don’t have to be fans to buy into the Golden Knights.
“Certainly Las Vegas will develop a good fan base for the NHL and the NFL, but there’s a lot of potential for those teams to be secondary favorite teams for a lot of people that travel here,” said Brian Skurdal, director of national sponsorships for Lee’s Summit, Missouri-based Forward Sports Marketing.
“‘Oh, there’s a game tonight?’ and they’ll go to the game. They’re absolutely going to take home a hat or a T-shirt or something to their kids,” he said.
“I think from a licensing perspective, it could be one of the top grossing licenses in each individual sport simply because everybody’s going to buy something and it doesn’t have to be your primary team.”
Panel moderator Martin Brochstein, senior vice president of industry relations with the New York-based International Licensing Industry Merchandisers’ Association, said the freshness of the team will be good for immediate sales, but the trick will be in extending sales into the future.
“In the short term, new is always good,” he said. “If I’m from New York and I’m a hockey fan, I may come back with a hat just because all my other hockey fan friends will say, ‘Oh, cool, that’s the new Vegas team.’
“Short-term locally, it’s going to be the same thing: new is always good. The bigger challenge and the bigger issue is building that business off that platform of new into ‘this is who I’m really into and this is where my passion lies.’ The great thing that Vegas has going for it is that I’ve heard there are a few trade shows in town that bring people through so there’s a constantly evolving audience of people who might buy something for the Knights or the Raiders.”
Licensing isn’t a necessity to sell shirts, and Wayne Curtiss, founder and president of Tampa, Florida-based Smack Apparel, sees opportunity ahead for his unusual niche market.
Curtiss’ company sells “momentum shirts” that use satire and parody in clever phrases that play off established rivalries. For example, one of Curtiss’ shirts, playing off the Dos Equis “most interesting man in the world” ad campaign, might produce a shirt saying, “I don’t often hate, but when I do, I prefer to hate the University of Nevada” to a UNLV audience.
His company recently sold 7,000 T-shirts in a day on the Villanova University campus
For Curtiss, it’s a matter of looking at sports trends and considering how fans think. He sees a potential opportunity if the Raiders move to Las Vegas with a shirt that plays into Oakland’s loss of the team.
Show attendees noted that there’s nothing better for a positive sales trend than a championship season, especially for a team that hasn’t sniffed that rarefied air for a long time.
“With the (Chicago) Cubs, we saw business increase 550 percent this year,” Sizemore said. “The best thing for us next year would be for the (Cleveland) Indians to win.
“This year, we were hoping for the Raiders and the Cowboys to make it to the Super Bowl,” he said. “That would have sold well. Now, we’re looking at the Packers because one of the nation’s biggest retailers, Kohl’s, is based in Wisconsin. It isn’t as good for a team that has been there recently, like the (New England) Patriots.”
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on Twitter.
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