Photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images
Right now, thousands of hats, t-shirts, sweatshirts and face masks proclaiming the Los Angeles Rams as the next Super Bowl champion are in boxes. A parallel stack of merchandise celebrates the victory of the Cincinnati Bengals.
If the Rams take home the Lombardi Trophy on Sunday, all that Bengals merchandise will instantly become unsaleable, at least in the eyes of the NFL.
If the Bengals manage to beat the Rams at home, Rams merchandise will transform into portable lies as soon as the whistle blows.
The rarity of some of these products increase their value to collectors.
A jersey celebrating the Bengals as Super Bowl XXIII champions of 1989, who lost to the 000ers of San Francisco, is currently listed on EBay for $10,000 Dollars, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.
Either way, a non-profit organization called Good400 expects to receive a large shipment the next week.
From 2015, the organization based in Virginia has been handling the losing team’s Super Bowl loot, doing the same for the NFC and AFC championship games, as well as the World Series.
Shari Rudolph, director of marketing for Good400, said the process is Pretty simple: The NFL sends retailers the address of an organization warehouse where they can ship the losing team’s merchandise.
The Good10 employees group it together and, once they have enough to fill a container, they send it abroad in collaboration with non-profit organizations that distribute it to people who could use free clothes.
Where in the world does it all end? “This donation is a bit sensitive, so we don’t disclose the exact places they go,” Rudolph said. “What I can say is that they end up in countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and South America.”
Rudolph said the total amount of merchandise from the ‘champion’ but losing team is relatively small on the scale of Good’s total operation360, which handled $1.3 billion in donations at 2021.
“It is usually only a few thousand items for each event that are produced in advance”, Rudolph pointed out.
Still, enough fans are willing to shell out on the site that it makes sense to print a stack of surplus T-shirts, even if half of it inevitably turns into charitable donations.
Up and down the rest of the Super Bowl shopping economy, smaller vendors have found ways around the problem.
BreakingT has built a business out of speed printing t-shirts, jumping on memes, trends and moments that would be too specific for the big players to capitalize on.
A new jersey could commemorate a winning play, he said Jamie Mottram, president of BreakingT, but “it could easily be that Cooper Kupp and Robert Woods have a really emotional moment on the field that is going viral.”
The company uses an in-house software tool to track what’s happening on social media with all the major college and pro teams to find out what grabs fans’ attention, then calls out the artists for them to come up with a new design in a matter of hours and it goes to the league in question for license approval.
Then the design goes up in line. Only once the orders start coming in does the printing start.
The company generally relies on its in-house printing facility in Virginia to produce its products.
In the run up to the Super Bowl, Mottram said the Bengals team has outsold the Rams 4 to 1.
“If you’re a Bengals fan, you’re losing your money and your mind right now,” he said, but the company has several “if he wins” orders with retailers across the country.
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