Swaggerville is booming

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This article was published 01/09/2011 (5463 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s quite possibly the most popular marketing scheme ever associated with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

And the Winnipeg Football Club is not making a single dime off of it, donating all the profits to honour their former assistant head coach Richard Harris instead.

If it seems like you’re suddenly seeing Swaggerville merchandise all over town, that’s because you are.

The Bombers announced Wednesday that they made history in the Bomber Store at Canad Inns Stadium in August, setting all-time records for sales in a single month, as well as setting an all-time single-day sales record — all of it due in no small part to the huge success of the Swaggerville phenomenon.

Jeff Bannon, the club’s manager of brand development, told the Free Press on Wednesday that between 20-25 per cent of the club’s merchandise sales in August were for Swaggerville specific items. Bannon says the items are selling almost as quickly as the Bombers can stock them and the club has already had to reorder three times from the Winnipeg-based supplier. They’ve also now expanded the Swaggerville line from just T-shirts to also include long-sleeve shirts and hoodies, with tuques and hats still to come.

If it sounds like a lot of money, it is. Bannon said the club shattered the franchise record for merchandise sales in a single day last Friday, ringing up $83,000 in total sales at the Bomber Store. That’s more than $20,000 better than the previous single-day record of $62,000 and Bannon says it is becoming a problem just trying to keep up with demand, with requests for Swaggerville merchandise over the past month coming from as far away as London, England.

“Right now, I’d like to add more cash registers in the Bomber Store,” said Bannon, “but we just physically can’t. So we’re doing the best we can.”

Bannon said the club has already sold almost as much merchandise as they expected to sell this entire season. So with all that Swaggerville merchandise flying off the shelves, you’d think the Bombers must be getting rich, right? You’d think wrong.

Because it turns out that the Winnipeg Football Club and the corporate core of Swaggerville — Bombers players Jovon Johnson, Jonathan Hefney, Odell Willis, Clint Kent and Alex Suber — have collectively agreed to donate at least 90 per cent of the profits from the sales of Swaggerville merchandise this season to charity.

Bannon said all of the football club’s share of those profits is being donated to the Richard Harris Legacy Fund, a brand new charitable foundation being set up in honour of the club’s late assistant head coach that will provide two local scholarships a year.

Bannon said the players are donating almost all of their profits to charity, too. In addition to the Harris Fund, the players have also asked that portions of their profits be given to the Canadian Breast Cancer Society and the Children’s Hospital Foundation.

“They’re not doing any of this for the money,” said Bannon. “When I sat down with them and they told me about the charities they wanted to give the money to, I was blown away.”

Hefney said he only is where he is today because of a football scholarship and he loves that the Swaggerville concept, started as an inside joke in 2009, will now provide similar opportunities to other players — and all of it in memory of Harris.

“My mom couldn’t afford to send me to school,” said Hefney. “For me, it was either get a scholarship or go to the military. So if we can send some kid to school for free and honour coach Harris like that, we should do that.”

The players were the first to manufacture Swaggerville merchandise, printing 500 T-shirts and then selling them via Twitter as a way to raise money for the fund for Harris, who died of a heart attack at the Bomber offices July 26. They had no concept at the time of the marketing monster they were about to create.

“We had no idea how out of whack it would get,” said Johnson. “And now, the opportunity is definitely there to make some money for us, I guess. But we didn’t really ever care about that. At the end of the day, we wanted to show how much we cared for coach Harris and how much he cared for us.

“Because I know if he was still here, he’d be all for us doing something like this.”

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca