Sunday, February 04, 2007

Chicago Bears: Superbowl XLI champions

What do they do with all those sports merchandise (t-shirts, caps, mugs, etc) printed with the above mentioned banner?

That is what I was wondering when the Colts won the Superbowl last Sunday. As soon as the Colts won, someone came and gave Tony Dungy a cap that had the Colts insignia. Wow, that is fast delivery, I thought. Did someone print it (or embroider it) within a minute and get it onto the field? Nope.

If I were the manufacturer of those apparel, this is what my plan would be:
- Come up with a ballpark number "b" for each item. This would be derived from historic data of merchandise sales ON the day of the event.
- Manufacture that many of each of the merchandise with logo of each team in the finals as winner.
- Of course, make tonnes of generic merchandise that doesn't proclaim a winner (T-shirts that just say "Superbowl XLI winner").
- Spread this loot around for sale.
- On the night of the Superbowl work overtime (and on overdrive) and produce the actual required number of items (again, use historical sales data) for sale in the coming days. Roll this out the very next day.

Now, after the game, we end up with lots of merchandise with the loser team's name on it. What do we do with these? Discard it as trash?

Turns out that the scrap merchandise is sent to under developed countries as donation. NFL has inked a deal with Gifts-in-kind, and is donating the merchandise. Isn't that a wonderful idea! I can now see this happening in a lot other areas too.

I only hope they are not doing the same with banned/expired materials/drugs and shipping them as donations to needy countries ("Here you go. Here is some extra asbestos that you can use").