Challenging giants in team apparel

LEAGUE OF ITS OWN: Custom sports-apparel company Squad Locker caters to the local-team market. Above, CEO Gary Goldberg, right, speaks with embroidery operator Freddy Medrano. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
LEAGUE OF ITS OWN: Custom sports-apparel company Squad Locker caters to the local-team market. Above, CEO Gary Goldberg, right, speaks with embroidery operator Freddy Medrano. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

The Internet has found local team-sports apparel. Long the domain of neighborhood sporting-goods shops or mom-and-pop screen printers, sales of uniforms and clothing for small teams – from Little League to corporate softball and high school wrestling – are migrating online like so many other consumer products.
And one Rhode Island business isn’t leaving the market to Amazon or any other national Internet retail giant.
Squad Locker, a two-year-old company founded by Gary Goldberg, CEO of East Providence allergen-protective bedding company CleanBrands LLC, is making a major push in the market and recently expanded into a new Warwick facility.
Goldberg grew up around textiles. His family founded Duro Industries in Fall River and he owns a sports-clothing brand called Turfer Athletic.
Goldberg decided to move into the local team-uniform business with Squad Locker when his three children began playing youth sports and he found buying gear for them cumbersome.
“I started to notice a disconnect between the process of buying your kids team gear, plus what the schools go through to acquire their team apparel, and the modern retail model online or in the large-format retail space we have come to expect,” Goldberg said. “Order processing, timeliness – that modern consumer experience – there is a huge vacuum in the youth and adult team space.”
While giant retailers, either online or brick-and-mortar, dominate both sporting goods and sports apparel, they have little interest in making or selling small batches of products connected with local teams.
With knowledge of textile manufacturing, supply-chain management and online retailing from CleanBrands and Turfer Athletic, Goldberg decided he was in an advantageous position to modernize the local team market.
At squadlocker.com, local teams can set up a “team store,” where players buy officially issued gear (uniforms, warm-ups) and fans, parents and anyone else can buy a selection of team-logoed clothing such as T-shirts and sweatshirts.
In the traditional method of ordering custom apparel, a season’s worth of team uniforms and clothing would all be printed in one batch, forcing all orders to come in at the same time.
That system usually leaves a coach or “team mom” to collect checks, round up stragglers and otherwise manage the order to avoid too many or too few articles being printed. Squad Locker’s online system allows each player or fan to order and pay for what they need when they need it, saving time and effort.
The company is able to produce items on demand, not only because of its online systems but thanks to the modern digital textile printing equipment in the new 37,000-square-foot Bald Hill Road facility. Smaller, traditional uniform shops use screen prints or other analog equipment that makes single orders impossible.
The custom-clothes printing business has taken off in recent years for a number of Internet companies using the speed of the Web to produce a nearly endless variety of designs for small-batch sales.
A local example is Providence startup Teespring, a Betaspring alum, which makes “crowd-funded” T-shirt campaigns for nonprofits.
In addition to the efficiency of the Squad Locker system, the company also offers teams a 10 percent cut of all sales from their team store.
“Normally, if someone buys a sweatshirt from a local sporting goods store of the local high school, the team gets nothing back,” Goldberg said. “We give 10 percent back that they can use to offset their equipment budget.”
Although Goldberg has spent more than a year beta testing and working out the kinks of Squad Locker, the company already has 991 team stores signed up for groups in all 50 states. They range from bar-league combatants to large, public high schools and small colleges. Any sport that uses commercially available clothing can be accommodated by the website.
Squad Locker’s investment in the Bald Hill Road building is a sign of the growth Goldberg expects in the near future.
By the end of 2013, he said he expects to have more than 3,000 team stores set up and double the annual sales from 2012 to $8 million.
Squad Locker just signed an agreement with Adidas to offer that brand’s products, Goldberg said, in addition to brands like Champion and Turfer Athletic.
While the company seeks a national footprint, Squad Locker is working to make ties locally with the Rhode Island Interscholastic League to pitch its system to member athletic directors. •COMPANY PROFILE
Squad Locker
Owner: Gary Goldberg
Type of Business: Custom sports apparel
Location: 240 Bald Hill Road, Warwick
Employees: 22
Year established: 2011
Annual Sales: $4 million

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