News
Email
Print
Sure as Shooting: T-shirt printers in King quickly went to work, but not until game's final minute
Journal Photo by David Rolfe
Jeana Douros prepares UNC T-shirts to be packed into boxes by (in back, from left) Patrick Fry, John Elolf and Rebecca James.
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: April 8, 2009
No lead is safe when it comes to starting the presses on printing championship T-shirts.
That's why Mike Steele, the operations manager of NVizion Inc. and a North Carolina fan, waited until there was just one minute left in the Tar Heels' NCAA title victory over Michigan State before giving the OK to his 30-employee crew to begin a printing all-nighter.
Not that Steele is superstitious or lacked confidence after the Tar Heels built up a 21-point halftime lead and thwarted Michigan State's second-half rallies. Steele said he knows that jumping the gun in printing authentic championship T-shirts can be costly financially if the other team rallies to victory.
Just ask the companies that ahead of time printed 2008 Super Bowl championship T-shirts touting a perfect 17-0 season by the New England Patriots, only to have the New York Giants put on a rally to knock off the Patriots in the last minute. Many of those Patriots T-shirts ended up being donated to a mission effort in Nicaragua being run by World Vision, a Christian youth-advocacy group.
"We know that anything can happen in sports," said Steele, who runs the screen-printing company in King.
NVizion printed two national-championship designs for 14 consecutive hours, ending about 2 p.m. yesterday, to fulfill the order for as many as 25,000 T-shirts. He said that couriers began showing up for orders at 3 a.m. yesterday. Most of the T-shirts printed by NVizion are being sold in Wal-Marts across the state, as well as other retailers, Steele said.
Steele said that NVizion, along with several other companies in North Carolina, successfully bid on the contract to print NCAA championship T-shirts on a geographic basis. He said that the company would have had the same printing order 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 ones the company filled in 2003, when North Carolina won the NCAA title, and in 2004, when the Carolina Panthers won the NFC title en route to playing in Super Bowl XXXVIII.
■ Richard Craver can be reached at 727-7376 or at rcraver@wsjournal.com.
Email
Print
