Program
Spirit wear fundraising for football programs
Team stores for high school football programs and booster clubs. We build, print, ship and promote it. No inventory, no setup cost, 20% back to the club.
Football is the only program on most campuses whose merchandise sells to people with no child on the roster. A varsity roster might be fifty, but a Friday night crowd is several hundred, and a meaningful share of them are alumni, grandparents, siblings and neighbors who came for the game and would happily leave wearing the school's name. That changes what a store should stock, because designing only for the fifty is leaving most of the audience unserved.
The second thing football has that the indoor sports do not is weather. Games are outdoors, at night, in the back half of the year, and the stands get cold. Outerwear and blankets sell in October for reasons that have nothing to do with school spirit and everything to do with a parent sitting on an aluminum bench for three hours.
The practical consequence is that a football store wants to be open before the first home game rather than at the start of the season. Demand tracks home fixtures, not the calendar, and the largest single day is usually homecoming.
When the demand actually arrives
Demand starts at the first home game and peaks at homecoming, then falls off sharply once the season ends unless the team is still playing in the postseason. A store that opens the week of the first game misses the two highest-volume weeks of the year.
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 football program
Not a general list of spirit wear. These are the items that move for this program specifically, and the reason each one does.
- Hooded sweatshirts. The single highest-volume item in football, because the stands are cold and a hoodie is what people reach for. Order the size curve wider than the roster suggests, since most buyers are adults in the crowd rather than students.
- Stadium blankets. Almost exclusively a football item. Nobody buys a blanket for a gym, and they sell to grandparents at a rate no other product matches.
- Beanies and knit caps. Low price, high attachment rate, and they sell to people who already own a hoodie from last season.
- Player-name shirts for families. Parents of a numbered roster want the number. This is the one football item that genuinely is for the fifty, and it converts at close to one hundred percent among families.
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.
- Helmet reconditioning and recertification, which is a recurring cost most non-football parents do not know exists
- Practice and game equipment that the district budget does not stretch to
- Travel for away fixtures and postseason play
- Field and sideline equipment, from chains to headsets
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 football 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 football clubs
- Should the store be for the whole program or one per team level?
- One store for the program, in almost every case. Varsity, JV and freshman families all want the same school marks, and splitting the store splits the audience without giving anyone anything new. Where a separate store earns its place is for a specific event, like a playoff run, where the design is genuinely different.
- When should we open it?
- Before the first home game, not after. The two biggest weeks are the opener and homecoming, and a store that goes live in week four has already missed one of them. Ordering opens as soon as artwork clears, so the constraint is usually district approval rather than anything on our side.
- Can we sell at the gate as well as online?
- The store is online and orders ship direct to families, which is what removes the inventory risk and the volunteer shift. Clubs that want something at the gate usually keep a small number of a single item for that, bought separately, and treat the online store as where the range lives.
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.