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Sports branding and marketing firm Neohatch is introducing a program with Northeastern University in which the Boston-based firm will act as the exclusive on-site event merchandising partner for the school's athletic department and will operate a merchandise Web site, as well.
In both cases, Neohatch will receive most of the revenue, but the athletic department's share is considerably more than the single-digit amount in traditional licensing deals with manufacturers.
Neohatch will create new merchandise using completely redesigned department marks, including a Husky logo that Neohatch designed and that is being turned into the official live mascot by Glenn Street of the Street Characters mascot training company. Neohatch will aggressively push the merchandise at all forms of athletic events, such as the New England Track and Field Championships next May, and is even developing extensions of the mascot logo to represent departments of the school, such as law and sciences.
The program fills a void for the athletic department, whose revenue from on-campus sales of merchandise has lagged because of its dependence on the campus bookstore for on-campus sales.
Dave O'Brien, Northeastern athletic director, and Thomas S. Duane, president and chief creative officer of Neohatch, would not disclose the department's current revenue, but Duane said an aggressive program could net at least 10 times and as much as 20 times current revenue in coming years.
"We realized the athletic department was suffering from a kind of laissez-faire attitude on the part of the bookstore," Duane said. "The bookstore doesn't know how to develop interesting outside merchandise and doesn't have the ability to show up at football, hockey, soccer games, etc., and sell it aggressively. And right now, there's no one on-site at 'Welcoming Day,' when the students arrive at school in the fall and their proud parents are dying to buy items that represent the school."
The bookstore remains a licensed vendor of athletic department wares. Meanwhile, the academic-themed merchandise is not sanctioned by those departments; it's a thematic extension of the athletic department's additional new "humanoid Husky" logo. For instance, the science Husky carries a bubbling beaker in hand. Neohatch is assuming the inventory risk for the programs.
The program grew out of a logo redesign done for the athletic department by Neohatch for Woolf Branding, a division of the Boston sports marketing firm Woolf Associates, which closed earlier this summer.
Neohatch retained several former Woolf executives and carries over all of Woolf's branding clients, such as the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and the (Lynn, Mass.) North Shore Spirit minor league baseball team.
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