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UNC's NCAA victory means business for T-shirt company
Journal photo by David Rolfe
This is one of two championship designs being printed on t-shirts by the NVIZION incorporated company, Tues., April 7, 2009, following the UNC victory in the NCAA basketball championship last night.
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Published: April 7, 2009
Updated: 04/07/2009 04:20 pm
KING -- North Carolina's fifth NCAA championship title appeared all but assured at halftime last night when the Tar Heels holding a 21-point lead over Michigan State.
But Mike Steele, the operations manager of NVizion Inc., a screen-printing company in King, was not about to start the presses even though he knew an all-nighter was ahead of him and his crew of 30 employees after UNC's 89-72 win.
Not that Steele, a Carolina fan, was superstitious.
Rather, he knows that jumping the gun in printing authentic locker-room title T-shirts could have cost the company tens of thousands of dollars for merchandise that could not be sold.
Just ask the companies that printed Super Bowl championship T-shirts in anticipation of a 19-0 finish by the New England Patriots last year; instead, the New York Giants in the 2008 Super Bowl came back late in the game to beat the Patriots and win the title. Many of the Patriots T-shirts ended up being donated as part of a World Vision mission effort in Nicaragua.
"We didn't start printing the (North Carolina) T-shirts until there was 1 minute left in the game," Steele said. "We know that anything can happen in sports."
Steele and his crew plan to keep on printing until about 2 p.m. today to fulfill the order of up to 25,000 championship T-shirts. He said that couriers began showing up for orders at 3 a.m.
Most of the T-shirts are being sold in Wal-Marts across the state, along with other retailers, Steele said.
Steele said that NVizion, along with several other companies in the state, were successful in bidding on the contract to print NCAA championship T-shirts for this season. He said they would have done the same if other teams from the region had won the title.
"If Michigan State had won, we'd have had to pack up and go home," Steele said.
"I would have been tickled for the business if anyone else local had won because our business was down 30 percent last year," Steele said. "But having it be UNC makes it all the more worthwhile with the lost sleep.
"And hopefully some retailers will benefit from the boost in business as well," he said. "Money's tight, but Carolina fans will make room for this kind of purchase to show their pride in the victory."
He said that the 25,000 order was larger than the orders the company fulfilled in 2003, when North Carolina won the NCAA title, and in 2004, when the Carolina Panthers won the NFC title en route to Super Bowl XXXVIII.
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