Article: What Is Fanatics? And Why Did the Wild Partner With Them?

[Bekki Antonelli]

View full article

[Citizen Strife]

As someone who has worked for the Hockey Lodge for several years, I will hope that fans both during games and not will understand that this decision was probably done way above the store and managements heads, in a bigger version of the TRIA patch thing.  

People who work for the Hockey Lodge always pride themselves on keeping the store and arena looking as best as possible despite what is probably a thankless job at the best of times.  The main store sometimes has 250-300 people shopping wall to wall at times.  That isn't to excuse what reputation Fanatics has.  All I will say is none of it should come at the feet of people working hard day in and day out to make the store, warehouse, and other functions as great as possible.  I love working there, and the people I work with, regardless of what apparel they sell.

I'm fairly curious how this changeover affects the store as a whole.  I suppose I'll know soon.

Edited September 18 by Citizen Strife

[Up North Guy]

Bekki, I know nothing about you so I won't say anything too stupid (I hope). My experience and everything I have read about Fanatics is absolutely terrible. Lack of quality control is one thing but intentional design and manufacture subpar apparel is not excusable. In short, Fanatics is complete trash in my opinion. And Becky, you do write as though you are on the Fanatics marketing team. I agree with CS above and hope fans won't take their frustrations out on the good folks who work at the Hockey Lodge.

[mnfaninnc]

18 hours ago, Up North Guy said:

And Becky, you do write as though you are on the Fanatics marketing team.

I didn't think she wrote as part of the Fanatics marketing team, but I'll bet that is exactly where she sourced the content. I thought it was informative, especially going through the history of the company.

18 hours ago, Up North Guy said:

Lack of quality control is one thing but intentional design and manufacture subpar apparel is not excusable.

This has also been my experience in dealing with Fanatics. Their t-shirts are often crooked (as are most brands anymore), thin and look like the guy on the commercial whose clothes were half washed. Their screen printing lasts shorter than most companies, and their selection is very, very corporate.

What do I mean by corporate? Each teams' selection of merchandise is very similar with no real imagination. This is a huge problem for people who want some personalized stuff based upon a player's personality. Instead, you just get generic vanilla selections that look like every other team.

And, because they get the NHL (or other league) seal, young, imaginative designers do not get a chance to market officially licensed, more market intuitive merchandise, and we're left with stale options.

For example, in our state, there is not a front license plate so we get to use vanity plates on the front. It helps a lot trying to find your car if you have a popular model. I was looking for a reverse retro vanity plate this past summer. Not only did I not find a plate, but I also did not find a picture of it which would indicate that none were made.

The same thing happened while looking for golf bags a couple of months ago. There were no reverse retro bags. I think they would have been a hit along with the vanity plates. Did anyone have that idea? Who knows, they didn't have licensing to produce the image, though. Did Fanatics have the imagination to produce these items? NOPE!

I would have thought if the Hockey Lodge had wanted some more imaginative merchandise, they could have produced it locally. You know, stuff like Dolla Bill Kirill and other personality stuff. I would have thought the official store of the Wild would have been able to do a lot, but CS above may correct me. Now we are settling for generic merchandise in generic size runs where the best that the lodge can do is screen print names and numbers on the back of generic Wild jerseys. 

I'll give another example. In this area we had a movie theatre that offered menued dining and drinks brought to your seat. Cinebarre was the name, it has since closed (Covid was tough on this company). When I was in Austin, I absolutely loved going to the Alamo Draft House. Same concept but they were independent, and as independents they did a whole lot of experimenting with fun stuff such as cult movie night and with their menu. Cinebarre was rolled out in a cookie cutter way with the same menu everywhere and it was very generic (though the drinks may have changed). ADH was able to do things Cinebarre was afraid to do. It was much more fun and a way better experience. Cinebarre represents Fanatics in this example. I guess the biggest thing is that ADH was on the ground floor listening to ideas from their staff and customers. Cinebarre brass was too isolated to even hear of good regional ideas. Managers had to uphold the corporate standards in case of a visit. 

I do imagine that there will be processing advantages for subbing out to Fanatics, but the customer experience will suffer for it. But, as has been said above, this is not the fault of the employees manning the store, so please don't get frustrated with them.