Industries — Programmes 06

Team & spirit wear

A store opens for two weeks. Four hundred parents order in the last forty-eight hours. Every jersey needs a different name and number, and all of it has to ship before the first game.

The season

Eleven months of quiet.
Then all of it at once.

Spirit wear isn't a steady business. It's a queue of stores that all open and close in the same six weeks, and the shop that handles the rush without hiring wins the next season too.


01 — Launching the store

A week of setup for
two weeks of selling.

Every team wants their own store, their own colours and their own products, and every one of them is built from scratch. By the time it's live the window has shrunk, and the booster club is already asking why it isn't up yet.

  • Stores built from a template and their own artwork, live in an afternoon rather than a week
  • Product images and mockups generated automatically on the real garment as you add each imprint
  • Open and close dates set up front, so the window closes itself without anyone remembering
  • Pricing, margin and any fundraising uplift set per store before it opens
  • Last season's store duplicated in a click when the same club comes back

The second season with a club should cost you almost nothing to set up. Right now it costs the same as the first.

Store · Riverside HS Soccer
Built fromlast season's storeDuplicated
Productsjersey, hoodie, tee, joggers, cap11
Mockupsgenerated on saveAuto
Opens04 Sep
Closes18 Sep · automatic
Booster uplift$4.00 / item
Setup time2 hours

02 — Rosters, names & numbers

Four hundred garments,
none of them identical.

Names and numbers arrive as a coach's spreadsheet, a group text and four late corrections. Somebody retypes all of it into a production list, and the one that's wrong is the one you find out about when a parent opens the bag.

  • Name and number captured at the point of order, by the person who has to live with the spelling
  • Held as structured data on the order line, not as a note in a comments box
  • Duplicate numbers within a team flagged before production, not after
  • Roster imported where the club already has one, typed where they don't
  • Production gets a clean list in run order, with placement, height and thread against each

Personalised goods can't be resold. Every mistake is scrap, and every remake comes out of the same window.

Roster · Riverside HS Soccer
HERNANDEZjersey · back10
OKONKWOjersey · back7
PATELjersey · back7
Duplicate numbertwo players on 7Resolve
Numerals8 in · tackle twill
Names entered bythe parent, at checkout

03 — The close-out rush

The store shuts and
the season lands at once.

Two-thirds of the orders arrive in the final forty-eight hours. Then the window closes and four hundred individual orders have to become one buy, one production plan and four hundred correctly bagged packages, in the same week as the other six stores that closed.

  • Store orders rolled into a single blank purchase by style, colour and size
  • One production plan per store, scheduled onto the presses and machines that can actually run it
  • Personalised items grouped so the embroidery runs in one pass rather than four hundred
  • Bagging and distribution lists generated per player, per team, per pickup
  • Overflow routed to an outsource partner when the week's capacity is already gone
Close-out · 18 Sep
412
Orders
7
Styles
1
Blank PO
3
Prod. runs
68% of ordersplaced in the last 48 hoursSpike
Embroidery318 personalised pieces, one passGrouped
Screen printover capacity, week 38Route out
Bagging listsPer player

04 — Mockups & sign-off

Everybody on the
committee has a view.

The coach wants the crest bigger. A parent volunteer wants a different hoodie. The athletic director signs off, then somebody's mother emails about the shade of green. It's four rounds of art before a store that runs for two weeks even opens.

  • Mockups on the real garment, in the real colourway, generated rather than mocked up by hand
  • Approvals as a workflow with a dated decision and a named approver, not a thread
  • Versions kept, so the approved artwork is unambiguously the one that goes to production
  • Reminders that fire on your schedule and stop the moment somebody responds
  • Artwork analysed on arrival — colour count, stitch estimate, whether the crest survives at that size
Approval · Riverside crest
Round 1crest 3 in · declined"bigger"
Round 2crest 4.5 inApproved
Approved byA. Reyes · 22 Aug
Locked versionv2 to production
Stitch estimate11,200 at 4.5 in

The stitch count moved with the size. The price moved with it too, before the store opened.


05 — Many stores at once

Thirty schools.
One person holding it.

Each store has its own window, its own artwork, its own contact and its own deadline, and they all overlap. The person running them keeps the calendar in their head, and the first sign of trouble is a store that closed a week ago and never got produced.

  • Every store on one board with its window, its status and what happens next
  • Closed stores that haven't been ordered or scheduled surfaced automatically
  • Production load across all stores visible against the weeks you actually have
  • Per-store revenue, margin and fundraising uplift, without a spreadsheet at season end
  • Next season's stores duplicated and re-dated in bulk
Stores · autumn season
Riverside HSclosed 18 Sep · in productionOn track
Kingsway Aquaticsopen · closes 24 SepLive
St. Aldan's Hockeyclosed 11 Sep · not scheduledOverdue
Meridian Trackartwork awaiting approvalBlocked
Week 39 capacity118% committed

06 — Ask it anything

The one you actually
talk to.

The other agents work the stores and the queue. Reggie sits in a panel beside whatever you're doing, knows how the software works and can query your live data — so the answer is about your season, not a help article. And it doesn't just answer: it does things.

  • Ask which stores made money last season and which ones cost you the week
  • Ask what's closed, unscheduled and running out of runway right now
  • Tell it to do the job — pull the list, draft the note to the booster club, create the task
  • Anything that reaches a customer or changes a record sits behind a confirmation, and every action is logged
  • Chat history is kept, so last season's thread is still there when the club comes back

It also writes the brief that lands in your inbox each morning — in plain English, in the format you asked for.

Reggie · this morning

“Which stores closed more than five days ago and still aren't scheduled?”

St. Aldan's Hockeyclosed 7 days ago · 214 itemsUnscheduled
Northgate Wrestlingclosed 6 days ago · 88 itemsUnscheduled

“Schedule St. Aldan's into week 40 and tell the booster contact.”

ScheduledWeek 40 · embroidery
Email draftAwaiting your OK

It scheduled the job. It did not email anyone until you said so.

Watch it do the job.

Send us one real enquiry — the email, the purchase order, the artwork, the messy bits — and we'll run it through the agents in the first ten minutes of the call. That's a faster argument than anything we could write here.