Get Your Gear Licensed
If you are a sports fanatic and want to have the best gear around, you will want to find a distributor that offers officially licensed items. If something has been officially licensed it means that the team is proud to put their name on it, which shows that it is a top notch product.
Almost every piece of sports gear that is available for sale has been licensed through the team that is represented on it. This is done because the team owns the rights to the logo, and nobody else is allowed to use it for profit unless they have permission from the organization.
Getting permission does a couple of different things. First off, it allows the user to put the logo on anything that they want; of course it has to be approved by the licensing department for each team. Most organizations have no problem letting the public use their logo as long as it is for a tasteful reason. A professional team or university will never allow anybody to put their name on anything that may put their organization in a bad light. This would only give them bad publicity, which is something that they are definitely not looking for.
One thing that many people are not aware of is that when you get your gear licensed through a team or organization that you will have to pay them royalties on each sale. This is something that everybody has to do, and you might as well budget for it before you even get started. Nobody is going to let you use their name for free, and professional sports teams and universities are no different. The good thing is that the royalties are not so high that they will make a huge dent in your profits. Typically, they will run anywhere from 5-10%. This means that if you sell a shirt for 10$, you will have to pay 1$ to the organization for each one that you sell; the rest is yours in the form of pure profit.
Overall, if you are going to sell sports gear make that you go through the necessary steps to get it licensed. This way you will never have to worry about problems arising down the road. It is not a very difficult process to complete, and after you do a couple of teams you will know the steps and breeze through the rest.
Article Source: http://www.articledashboard.com
Linda Polansky writes about NFL Logos and Sport Gear