Inside Fanatics’ response to Nike’s MLB debacle and what it means for new NHL jerseys

NEW YORK — As the tweets and aggregated stories started popping up the morning after the Super Bowl, the images pouring in from spring training sites across Florida and Arizona, Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin had the same thought everyone else did. He saw the pictures of jerseys that were a different shade of gray than pants. He saw comically small lettering on the name plates. He saw pants so thin you could clearly see the tails of the tucked-in jerseys through them. He saw massive sweat stains spreading across pitchers’ jerseys as they long-tossed in the sun. He saw pants with cartoonish blowouts, massive tears caused by simple slides.

Nike’s new Major League Baseball uniforms were an unmitigated debacle right from the start. And Rubin’s first reaction was the same as almost everybody’s:

“My immediate reaction was, ‘We f—ed this up,” Rubin told The Athletic.

It quickly became clear that Fanatics hadn’t. Not exactly, at least. A series of frantic phone calls and emergency meetings over the next couple of hours assured everyone at Fanatics what it already knew: Fanatics had made the uniforms to Nike’s exact specifications, in the same Pennsylvania factory in which Fanatics had produced the previous MLB jerseys since buying Majestic in 2017. It was Nike that decided to scale back the lettering by a third, rendering them impossible to read from any sort of distance. It was Nike that wanted to cut back stitching by 25 percent, leading to the blowouts. It was Nike that wanted to switch to a fabric it had used in track and soccer uniforms, leading to the amorphous sweat stains creeping across players’ torsos. It was Nike that decided to switch the gray dye in the pants, deeming it “within a level of tolerance” in comparison with the dye used in the jerseys, said an industry source who was granted anonymity so they could speak freely. It was Nike that felt it couldn’t simply keep producing the Majestic jersey and slapping a swoosh on it, because, well, how is that a Nike jersey?

But it was Fanatics that took all the heat. From fans. From players. From reporters. From seemingly every corner of social media. Fox Sports pointed its finger at Fanatics in a story. So did Forbes. So did Barstool. So did countless other outlets and aggregators.

It was nothing new. As the behemoth of sports merchandise, with 22,000 employees moving more than 100 million units of jerseys, hats, shirts and other gear every year, Fanatics has become a punching bag for disgruntled sports consumers. Search its brand online and you’ll find a seemingly never-ending stream of mismatched logos and misspelled names and misshapen graphics — some of them Fanatics’ doing, some of them from third parties which Fanatics simply sells, some of them from other companies entirely. Doesn’t matter. You get sports gear these days, you assume it’s Fanatics, for better or worse.

With market domination comes marked aggravation. That’s life in the big leagues.

But in the actual big leagues, Rubin saw his company getting massacred for something that, truly, wasn’t its fault. Fanatics had its doubts about the changes Nike was making, but in the end, it was Nike’s product. If there’s blame to be shared, it’s that Fanatics didn’t push back hard enough. Once the story blew up, Nike’s PR strategy, according to an industry source, was to lay low and wait for it all to blow over. So Rubin — a boisterous and combative sort who’s not the sit-on-his-hands type — had to simply bite his lip and take it. And feel it. And agonize over it.

“Any time we have any part in letting a player or a fan down, we feel like we’re losing, right?” Rubin said. “So whether we designed a product or not, I’d say it’s still extremely painful. If someone tells you, ‘Hey, jump off a cliff,’ and you jump off a cliff and die — you still jumped off a cliff and died. So I’d say yes, it was extremely painful.”

Rubin briefly pushed back and put the onus on Nike at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in early March, but otherwise kept his mouth shut. No easy task for Rubin, who equates his business success to being a “star athlete” in the public eye, and who’s never at a loss for words.

“If you’re a well-known business person, if you’re successful, taking some abuse is part of the territory,” Rubin said. “But the noise around baseball might have been 100 times more than all the noise cumulatively we’ve had in the history of our company.”

And as if those meetings inside the spacious Fanatics office suite in New York’s West Village weren’t tense enough during those first few weeks of what the company internally deemed “Jerseygate,” they were just months away from one of the biggest moments in company history — the release of the first pro jersey designed by Fanatics itself, with the Fanatics logo sewn in.

And let’s just say, after witnessing the baseball disaster, the NHL had some concerns.

The first thing you notice about the new Fanatics NHL jerseys is how heavy they are. Not in a burdensome way, but in a material way. They’re substantial. They’re significant. The way every vein in every lobe of the Maple Leafs crest is ridged, the way the captain’s “C” on Connor McDavid’s Oilers jersey carries literal weight, the way the lettering on the back of Connor Bedard’s Blackhawks jersey is stitched. There’s an attention to detail that comes with a seven-year rightsholder contract that costs tens of millions of dollars.

The only difference between this jersey and the Adidas jerseys worn in the NHL for the past seven seasons is the removal of the Adidas shoulder dimples (“debossing” in industry parlance) for a more traditional look, an upgraded NHL shield with a hologram finish, and a reinforcement of the lower forearm to address players’ concerns about “board burn,” wear and tear caused by collisions along the wall and standard board-battles. Well, that and the Fanatics logo sewn in above the name plate, replacing the Adidas logo. Only the Los Angeles Kings and Anaheim Ducks, who were granted exemptions because they had rebrands in the works for years, will have a truly new look in the fall of 2024. Any other drastic changes won’t happen for at least two more seasons.

The Toronto Maple Leafs’ Fanatics NHL jersey. (Courtesy of Fanatics)

The jerseys are still made by SP Apparels in the same hallowed Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, factory that has been making NHL jerseys for half a century. The quality is evident. There’ll be no hockey version of Jerseygate.

But the league wanted to be sure. The NHL Players’ Association wanted to be sure. And Fanatics needed to be sure. The jerseys had been completed long before the baseball nightmare and had been taken to all 32 NHL locker rooms to be seen and felt and approved by all 32 head equipment managers and hundreds of players.

After baseball, though, all parties knew they had to do it all over again, to assuage any fears and prevent a similar catastrophe in hockey. They had to do it in a hurry, too, because the season already was nearing its end. The league and Fanatics started by making a presentation at the general managers meetings in Florida in mid-March. Prototypes of the jerseys were sent out to all 32 team presidents. Rich Villani, the NHL’s head of consumer products, crisscrossed the continent with Fanatics to make sure as many people saw the jerseys as possible.

“Fanatics was great, they met the moment, they mobilized,” said Brian Jennings, the NHL’s vice president of marketing and chief branding officer, who said the league strongly encouraged Fanatics to make a second tour of the league’s locker rooms. “It debunks and demystifies the process. You see the jersey, the fabric, the fit and all those things. The game on the ice and our players’ performance is sacrosanct, that’s where it all begins.”

In the end, Fanatics and Villani went back to all 32 locker rooms in a two-month span this spring, meeting with every equipment manager and as many players as each team desired. They even met with special “jersey aficionados,” influencers from beyond the NHL world, to solicit feedback and ease concerns.

“Our team ran a playbook that we have from when we bought Majestic; it’s an incredibly detailed and incredibly rigorous process that involves feedback from players and equipment managers and everyone else,” said Andrew Low Ah Kee, who was hired in September as CEO of Fanatics Commerce to reimagine the company’s oft-derided consumer division and repair the company’s poor reputation among fans. “When we had the baseball experience, we actually asked the teams to go back and do it again. We said, ‘This is what we heard, this is what’s coming. Is everyone bought in and aligned on this?’ And everyone said yes. It was validation of the process and the experience.”

With baseball, it was ultimately Tony Clark and the MLB Players Association who spoke up and threw Nike under the bus, forcing Nike’s hand to address the new uniforms’ shortfalls. That moment was somewhat redemptive for Fanatics, but the way it usually goes with stories like this, the original news is always above the fold on A1, and the correction or clarification is buried on Page 16. But it still was instructive to be reminded how important the relationship with the PA is.

An NHLPA source said that the players are “pleased” that Fanatics made player input a priority on the new jerseys and are “very confident” in how they’ll turn out, adding that “Michael Rubin and his team have done a fantastic job throughout the process.”

With the league’s blessing, Fanatics decided to move up the jersey reveal to draft week, three months ahead of schedule, to stem any doomsaying from fans and pundits who saw what happened with baseball. The jerseys won’t officially launch until September, when, for the first time in a decade, fans will be able to buy the actual jerseys worn by the actual players made in the actual Saint-Hyacinthe factory. For those not looking to take out a second mortgage just to buy a hockey jersey, there’ll be three other tiers of jersey — the same one that Adidas had made its top-tier jersey, the more affordable Fanatics replica “breakaway” jersey (which Fanatics said makes up about 80 percent of jersey sales and isn’t changing at all), and, for the first time, NHL practice jerseys.

Low Ah Kee termed the three regular jerseys “good, better and best.”

“And ‘good’ still has to be good,” he said.

So the pros are going to get a high-quality product. No surprise there. The baseball fiasco was the exception, not the rule, when it comes to these provider changes. But what about fans? We’ve all seen the social media posts. A Nashville Predators hat that says “New York Rangers” on the back. A logo that peels off on the first wash. A French “LNH” logo reserved for Montreal Canadiens jerseys on a Florida Panthers sweater. Misspelled names, shoddy materials, poor printing jobs. Everyone seems to have a tale of woe. Heck, The Athletic’s Sean Gentille is a four-letter word among Fanatics employees for a column he wrote in the wake of the company becoming the NHL’s new jersey provider.

There’s a Twitter account called “@FanaticsSucks” with more than 25,000 followers, retweeting individual fans’ purchasing misadventures to the world. Sure, some of the mistakes have nothing to do with Fanatics, but the company has become a catch-all for all sports merchandise, the way “Kleenex” is a synonym for “tissue.”

And make no mistake, plenty of the mistakes are made by Fanatics.

Low Ah Kee said Fanatics got 99.7 percent of its holiday-season gear delivered on time, which he said was the best in the history of the company. But that still means thousands of unhappy fans.

“If you do the math on 100 million units, if you have a 0.3 error rate, that’s still 300,000 errors,” Rubin said. “And a subset of those people go to social and they’re noisy. Sports fans are passionate. And the passion that drove them to buy the merchandise is the passion that made them noisy. You can look at that and say that’s not fair because we got 99.7 percent right. Or you can look at that like we do and say we failed the 0.3 percent. We have an incredibly high overall satisfaction rate, but it’s still not high enough.”

When a fan bought a Jack Hughes Stadium Series jersey earlier this season, he received a jersey with a name plate that read, “JACK HUGHES.” First and last name. Fanatics didn’t make it, but the third-party vendor sold it through Fanatics. Low Ah Kee said Fanatics moved quickly to give the fan a refund and a credit for another, equally expensive product. Late last summer, some Eagles fans received a Jalen Hurts shirt from Fanatics with a crooked No. 1. Some of them took to Twitter, and the local CBS affiliate did an entire story on it. Rubin said the company sold 4 million units of Eagles merchandise, and 36 of them were crooked Hurts shirts. That would be a 0.0009 error rate.

“Fans were killing us,” he said.

Low Ah Kee was hired shortly after that episode, and he quickly added consumer ratings — a standard for almost every online seller out there, but a new concept for Fanatics — to the website. He said any product, regardless of whether it’s actually manufactured by Fanatics or not, is yanked from the site if its rating falls below a 4.0 out of 5. Vendors who repeatedly produce inferior merchandise are, in Low Ah Kee’s terms, “fired.” Social-media complaints are supposed to be responded to in 20 minutes or less and never more than an hour. It’s a start.

(Eventual) vindication in the baseball disaster helped the company’s reputation. A smooth rollout of the new NHL jerseys will, too. Fanatics already has won the sports merchandise marketplace. But it’s the lessons learned in these frantic, sweaty and oftentimes excruciating last few months that could determine whether Fanatics ever wins over its critics.

“Historically, we might have thought getting 99 percent right, or 99.9 percent right, was good enough — it’s not,” Rubin said. “We’re not perfect, but we want it to be perfect. We’re so much better than we were six or nine months ago. And every month, we’re going to keep getting better. So you can look at baseball and say, hey, that really stung. Or you can look at it and say how do we use that to be better? … In the end, when you look back at Fanatics in five years, I think you’re going to say the very difficult experience we went through with baseball made us a much better company.”

That’s the positive public spin, the sanitized soundbite. There’s a blunter version spoken within the company, a hard lesson learned over the past few months about ownership, about accountability, about perception in the Internet age.

“Next time we see something we don’t like,” one Fanatics executive said, “we ain’t f—ing doing it.”

(Photos courtesy of Fanatics)