Contending college teams aren't the only folks busy after selection day. When it comes to NCAA championships, an invisible army scurries to assemble visible products that fans by the hundreds will don at competitive venues. That army is the NCAA merchandising army.

From T-shirts to sweatshirts, from banners to pennants, from hats to helmets, NCAA merchandising impacts the championship site long before the opening whistle. Not many people stop and think about how the T-shirt they just bought got to the shelves, and that's fine with Event 1, which is the NCAA's official merchandiser responsible for stocking those shelves at championships venues. They want a seamless transition to complete a process that in some cases began months before even the championship teams were selected.

"Much of the work has been done long before selection," said Jason Krakow, general manager of Event 1, a subsidiary of Gear for Sports. "In most cases, merchandising plans have been developed with an understanding of the event -- how many teams, how many locations and the appropriate merchandise to be sent to each location."

But the challenge is filling in the blanks. Krakow said that while the suppliers have a general idea of the art, the details of the event -- from the location in some cases to teams names and color of the garments -- is sketchy at best.

"When selection rolls around, we then begin to match up the details," Krakow said. "Usually within two hours of the announcement all those pieces of information are being pieced together. Artwork is coming out and presses are starting to print shirts. It's a matter of executing all those orders in a time frame that would allow them to be shipped and delivered in time for the local vendor to get it unpacked, organized and ready for sale."

Mutual need

The NCAA and Event 1 found each other a couple of years ago in what became a marriage of timing. The Association's current merchandiser had fallen on hard financial times and had left the NCAA holding an empty merchandise bag.

"We approached Gear and knew they had not only the interest, but the experience, staff, facilities and fulfillment capabilities," said C. Dennis Cryder, NCAA vice-president for marketing, licensing and promotions.

Cryder acknowledged that it is a massive undertaking to be able to respond within sometimes less than 24 hours of an announcement or the conclusion of a competition to assemble merchandise and ship it to the first or next round of a championship. He said the NCAA was looking for an organization that had the complexity and legitimacy to pull it off.

"They already had a presence in several campus bookstores, too," Cryder said. "And through that they had established relationships with athletics departments, so they were a good fit for us."

Gear for Sports at that time had created what became a prototype relationship with the Big 12 Conference. Krakow said it had been common for conferences to contract with independent concessionaires, as the NCAA had done, but those groups wouldn't always deliver quality goods -- and in some cases not even deliver the goods at all.

"What was happening was that products weren't always getting to the locations, and products that were getting there weren't always high-quality products because the concessionaires couldn't afford to buy the quality product, pay the venue people, pay all the expedited freight, pay the host institution and pay the NCAA its retail royalty," Krakow said. "There were too many fingers in the pie."

So Gear for Sports became one-stop shopping for the Big 12. Once that proved successful, Gear developed Event 1, knowing that the NCAA was shopping as well, and knowing Gear would need a connected but separate branch to handle such a national-scale contract.

"We were developed strictly to handle the NCAA business," Krakow said of Event 1's founding. "We've defined our process and our people entirely around addressing NCAA championships."

Not just Final Fours

Krakow said Event 1 has a staff of about 25 full-time employees charged with coordinating nothing but stocking NCAA venues. Hundreds more are centered at Gear's manufacturing and fulfillment plant in suburban Kansas City.

Krakow said most of his staff concentrates on events that certainly don't account for the majority of Event 1's revenues, but he said the NCAA made it clear that the contract is much more than just the Men's and Women's Final Fours. To the NCAA's way of thinking, no one of the Association's 81 championships is more important than another, and though business might suggest otherwise, business contractors can't play favorites.

"If all we wanted to do was the events that generated 80 percent of our revenue, our staff would probably be about a third of what it is today," Krakow said. "We put inventory dollars at risk at every single event. It's a marketplace and we have to try to anticipate what the demand will be, so we certainly don't put the same dollars in place at every single event, but we do commit inventory to each of the more than 600 locations a year. Our commitment is in process, people and inventory."

If Event 1 did just deal with the NCAA's higher-profile events, Krakow's job might be easier, but that's not the point. He said at events like the Men's and Women's Final Fours, the people his staff deals with do merchandising for a living. But as in the case with the majority of championships, staff persons from a particular host institution assigned to carry out the merchandising aspect of the event often are getting their first exposure to the marketing realm.

"At the big events, you're working with professionally run arenas and people who do this kind of vending for a living," Krakow said. "They have receiving people, places to display merchandise, and they have credit card equipment and know how to use it. Our process really is developed for the volleyball coach who gets assigned the task of merchandising at the tennis championship -- it's not what they do every day."

For these people, Event 1 has put together what's called an "event in a box" that has in it a detailed step-by-step manual on how to set up the event, how to organize the merchandise and what it should look like when it's there for sale. It's even got a credit card machine in it and an explanation of how to use it, as well an explanation of how to do the accounting on site.

"We've invested significant resources to help those people through those events," said Krakow. "Those typically aren't events we profit from, but we do it because we're committed to NCAA championships as a whole and not just one, two or three major events."

That commitment has been apparent, according to Cryder. The NCAA has been pleased not only with the nuts and bolts of the process, but with the products as well.

"One byproduct of their relationship with us is that they've been able to establish some relationships with other member conferences that may not have had a merchandiser," Cryder said. "So what was established strictly as an NCAA contract also has had some membership benefits. Gear's been able to grow because of this as well through Event 1, so it's been beneficial to both sides."