Wearing a bit of nostalgia
The Spokane Bunchgrassers and Centralia Midgets haven’t graced the baseball diamond for over a century, and the Spokane Shockers and Portland Loggers are condemned to the pages of football history.
But brand-new T-shirts sporting the logos of those and hundreds of other defunct teams are for sale on the Web site of a Spokane-based small business.
Robert Shugert, owner and operator of two-year-old Throwbackmax.com, dusts off bygone professional and amateur teams from around the nation and sells vintage-style T-shirts and sweatshirts online to an international clientele.
The idea to sell throwback sports apparel hit Shugert, 38, while searching online auction site eBay looking for snare drums produced by a company with the initials WFL – also the acronym for the World Football League, a failed mid-1970s competitor to the NFL. He noticed original team shirts and pennants for sale, and people were bidding.
Already owner of Spokane screen printing business Maxgraphix, Shugert started making and selling throwback WFL shirts on eBay four years ago. Business took off, so he decided to design his own Web site.
“It just snowballed,” he said.
Maxgraphix once produced shirts for local college and hockey teams, but it now handles printing for the online store.
“We kind of got away from the whole licensing thing,” Shugert said. “Everybody around here is doing GU, you know the Zags and the Cougs. And it got really cluttered.”
Shugert, who said he consulted with a patent attorney, uses Google and sites like www.logoserver.com to research old teams, which he claims are fair game. His “Screwball” department features baseball teams such as the 1912 Boise Irrigators and the 1913 Zanesville Flood Sufferers.
But Jerry Cohen, owner of Seattle-based vintage baseball apparel store Ebbets Field Flannels, disagreed. Cohen contended Ebbets Field, which also operates an online store, has a 16-year relationship as the vintage-apparel licensee for Minor League Baseball.
“Over the years, competitors have wrongly assumed that old Minor League Baseball teams are public domain,” Cohen said, adding that his company has contacted Throwbackmax about that issue.
Major League Baseball Properties Account Executive Hernan Tudela, who manages Minor League licensing, said he is aware of Throwbackmax, and his firm’s legal department is working with Minor League officials to determine what case it could have with respect to some old teams. “They do have a few teams that are under question,” Tudela said of Throwbackmax.
Shugert said he hasn’t seen any evidence to support Cohen’s claims and hasn’t been contacted by the MLB Properties.
Shugert is licensed to produce vintage-style merchandise for all eight Ivy League schools, the only current teams on his site.
Throwbackmax’s best sellers are shirts for the United States Football League, an unsuccessful 1980s NFL challenger with teams including the Los Angeles Express. “Actually, the league did pretty well for three seasons, people remember them,” Shugert said.
Grateful customers sometimes write or send family photos, and Shugert posts them on the site. A friend once spotted someone wearing one of the company’s 1908 Walla Walla Walla Wallas baseball team shirt in Florida.
Fueled by both a retro fashion trend and sports fans, the Web site averages about 6,000 monthly hits, and Shugert sells about 600 items a month, he said. Although would-be customers won’t find Throwbackmax shirts on local store shelves, Atlanta retro sports shop Distant Replays sells some in its shop and online.
“I absolutely love their stuff,’ said Distant Replays owner Andy Hyman. “It’s not overdone at all. And they have some teams you’ve never heard of, and that’s awesome.”
Hyman said hip-hop stars helped popularize retro sports apparel a few years ago by wearing it in music videos.
Throwbackmax products range from about $17 for T-shirts to $40 for hooded sweatshirts.
“Some of these guys are really fanatical,” Shugert said. “Which is fine.”