Program
Spirit wear fundraising for basketball programs
Team stores for high school basketball programs and booster clubs. We build, print, ship and promote it, with 20% of every order back to the club.
Basketball sells to a smaller crowd than football and a more consistent one. A gym holds a few hundred rather than a few thousand, but there are far more home dates, the audience is largely the same people each time, and they are indoors and comfortable rather than trying to stay warm. That produces steadier demand across a longer window and a lower peak.
Because the crowd repeats, novelty matters more here than it does in football. Someone who bought a hoodie in December has no reason to buy the same hoodie in January, which is why basketball stores do better when a second design lands mid-season rather than when one range sits unchanged from November to March.
The other feature of basketball is that boys' and girls' programs usually share a gym, a schedule and a large part of the audience. Running one store for both is almost always better than two, and it avoids the awkwardness of one program's page looking busier than the other's.
When the demand actually arrives
A long, even season with many home dates and no single dominant week. Demand builds through the first month, holds through the winter, and lifts again for any postseason run.
Timing is the part clubs get wrong most often, and it costs more than the range does. The full argument is in when to launch a spirit wear store.
What sells for a basketball program
Not a general list of spirit wear. These are the items that move for this program specifically, and the reason each one does.
- Shooting shirts and warmup tops. The item basketball families associate with the sport, and the one that reads as team kit rather than generic school apparel.
- Hooded sweatshirts. Still the volume leader, but bought by the regular gym crowd rather than a one-night audience, so a single design tires faster than it does in football.
- Gym and travel bags. Practical, bought once, and the category with the highest average order value in the program.
- Mid-season second design. Not an item so much as a tactic. The repeat audience is the whole audience, and a fresh design in January reliably outsells extending the November range.
What the money usually goes toward
Worth naming explicitly when you launch. Families give more readily to a specific cost than to program funds in the abstract.
- Tournament entry fees, including holiday tournaments that fall outside the regular schedule
- Travel and overnight costs for away tournaments
- Officials and scorekeeping for home dates
- Practice equipment and shooting machines
What we handle, and what you do
1. You send colors, marks and rosters
Along with written confirmation from the district that the club may use the school name and logo. That is the entire job on your side.
2. We build and you approve
We design the range and the storefront around what sells for a basketball program, and the range you approve is the range that sells for the rest of the season.
3. We print, ship and support
Each order is produced after it is bought and shipped direct to that buyer. No sorting, no distribution day, no leftover sizes.
4. We promote it
Text and email campaigns to your opted-in families, timed to the points in this program’s season when people actually buy.
5. You get paid
20% of total order value, remitted on a set schedule. A share of what the store sells, not a share of margin after costs.
Questions from basketball clubs
- Should boys' and girls' basketball share a store?
- Usually yes. The schedule, the gym and much of the crowd are shared, and one store with designs for both programs sells more than two thinner ones. Where the programs have genuinely separate booster clubs, the remittance can still be split.
- How do we keep it selling through a long season?
- Change something in the middle. The basketball audience is the same people at most home games, so the constraint is not reach but novelty. A second design released mid-season consistently does better than leaving one range up for four months.
- Is there a point in opening for the postseason only?
- There is, and it works better here than in most sports, because a playoff run is short, urgent and specific. It works best as a design added to an existing store rather than a store stood up from nothing while the run is happening.
Other programs at the same school
Most clubs we work with run more than one. Each of these has its own season and its own range.