When it comes to moment merch, there’s no moment with more urgency than hustling behind the scenes at the NFL Draft with about two minutes to personalize a jersey that will be presented in-person to a brand-new professional football player. Since 2012, the team at heat-printing experts Stahls’(asi/88984) has been doing just that, thanks to a partnership with jersey maker Nike. “It’s a crazy calm when someone is picked,” Zach Ellsworth, strategic product manager at Stahls’. “For the most part, it’s hectic, but smooth.”

The key to smooth operation, Ellsworth says, is preparation. Though Stahls’ only brings three or four employees to draft day, the whole facility is involved in preparations for the main event. The NFL provides a list of players’ names with predictions of who is likely to be chosen in the first round, Ellsworth says. In the weeks leading up to the draft, workers at Stahls’ decorating fulfillment center create and cut nameplates to match each jersey font and color – which adds up to 256 names in 1,400 different combinations.

Employees from Stahls’ (asi/88984) work behind the scenes at the NFL draft each year to ensure player picked has a personalized jersey for their new team.

In addition to preparing the heat transfer material in advance, Stahls’ does frequent trial runs to work out any snags before the draft. “You only have one opportunity to do it at the event,” Ellsworth says.

High school sports are another arena where decorators can provide moment merch to an enthusiastic clientele. Tom Rauen, owner of Envision Tees in Dubuque, IA, has been providing championship gear for local high school teams when they make the state playoffs. After a team wins the district finals, Rauen says, Envision typically has no more than three days to collect apparel orders, then print, bag and ship the items so players, their family and their fans have new gear in time for the playoffs.

“It’s a really fast turnaround, and we used to do it with paper order forms, but it took us a lot longer to tally them all up and sort it out and hit the deadline to get the clothing from the vendor on time,” he says. A few years ago, Envision Tees switched to using InkSoft webstores platform to allow players and their families to order everything online.

Not only has it streamlined the process for both the decorator and the coaches, it’s also enabled both Envision Tees and the schools themselves to make more money. “The old way of doing it was a school would call up and they wouldn’t have any idea of sizes or anything else and would just kind of guess,” Rauen says. “They would make some money, but end up with random sizes left over.”

Now, everyone gets exactly what they want in their correct size, and Envision is able to offer higher-margin items, like hoodies and performance fleece. In the old days, an 800-shirt playoff order would bring in around $4,000. These days, “The same 800-shirt order ends up being $8,000 to $10,000,” Rauen says.

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