BSN Sports
BSN Sports
One of my first jobs after college was with LIDS Team Sports. Remember Lids, the hat store from the mall?
In 2008, they started a custom embellishment and sporting goods division. I was their first designer. My job was to help them build an art department that could serve a national sales team and a 300,000 square foot production facility servicing every high school, private sports club, and college in the country.
On my first day, we had dozens of printer paper boxes full of back orders- something like a nine month backlog. We started making hires, mostly people straight out of school.
We had essentially nothing. We organized ourselves into a few teams; one created new art, the other focused on separations. For the first while, we attacked the orders we had by throwing as many bodies and as much overtime as we could. We worked late most nights and every Saturday for the first year.
Building a Department
We established standardized design templates that we optimized so our team could make the most requested changes as quickly as possible. We built resource libraries. We built color comp sheets so customers and sales reps could confirm their orders were correct. We built actions and scripts to automate repetitive tasks. We built a training process for new artists that mapped out three months of onboarding, at which point they could hang with anyone on our team. We built a training program for new sales reps that covered everything they needed to know about how to interface with the department. We started a mentorship program that partnered new reps with experienced artists to help them learn the ropes as painlessly as possible. We built an internal performance tracking system so we could identify bottlenecks and shine a light on the artists that were killing it and reward them accordingly.
When we were fully on our feet, we had 26 artists in five teams taking care of roughly 250 sales reps in all 50 states. We covered three production shifts a day, producing screen print (over a million units shipped per year), embroidery (over 600k units shipped), tackle twill (over 200k units shipped), and digitally printed heat press (over 400k units shipped). We supported individual orders, team packs, and custom-made e-commerce sites for nearly 10,000 high schools and colleges. We became the second largest team dealer in the country and were acquired by BSN Sports, who are the largest. We built a lean, mean, efficient machine.
The Design Guide
At the time, we were the second largest team dealer in the country (and the biggest Nike team dealer). We started to focus on ways we could help our sales reps shine. It sounds crazy now, but at the time, none of our competitors had any decent way to show their design options to customers. Our first stab at it was a Design Guide that showed our most popular design and our custom numbering options. We included customer testimonials, highlighted some of our most popular products, and showed off some of our services that coaches and ADs needed but didn’t necessarily come up in meetings. The Design Guide became a key piece of our sales reps’ pitches and was a critical leave behind.
Quickly Customizable
One day, one of our Sale Managers asked for a hand thinking of something that could help them make an impression on an account they were trying to close. They wanted something to prove how much effort we were putting into landing the account. He asked if we could put the school’s logo on the cover of the Design Guide. I said we could do a little better than that.
Our next iteration of the Design Guide was fully customizable. Instead of seeing generic designs, every design was customized with the account’s name, mascot, logo, and colors. The document was done natively in Adobe Illustrator without any plug-ins. After a little training, optimization, and some custom scripts and actions, any artist on our staff could make a custom Design Guide in about two minutes. We printed, bound, and shipped them in house. By this time, some of our competitors were starting to have template books of their own, but no one had the ability to do anything like this.
Variable Marketing Materials
Later, we added a second leave behind. Coaches and ADs spend more time planning and organizing than they do coaching. Our Sales Manager wanted something Coaches would see that would remind them of us. We used the structure of the Custom Design Guide to make a wall calendar that was customized to each account. We included uniform ordering deadlines for each sport, season opening dates, and checklists of everything needed for each team, from tape to jerseys to ball hoppers. Each calendar was customized with the sales rep’s contact info, too.
Sideline Stores
Our ability to rapidly built customized art files and package them into bespoke marketing material was a big deal. We built on that technology to create Sideline Stores - customized online store fronts selling custom art files on nearly every SKU we carried, all printed and shipped individually to customers. We partnered with schools so they’d recieve a portion of the profits to offset the costs of any purchases they made through BSN. We further offered a curriculum for DECA programs that allowed those programs to use the stores as real life teaching tools.
Sidelines Stores were (and are) a massive undertaking for BSN. On top of the actual technology and production processes, we created a custom work management system entirely using Google sheets, a suite of training documents for our sales reps, pitch decks for customers, the actual web stores, and advertising collateral for each school.
While I was with BSN, Sidelines Stores ran through a team of three people (not including production staff). Annually, we set up and supported roughly 1000 new stores and carried a book of roughly $10 million/year.
