Softball and
baseball’s favorite newspaper since 1987
Zubaz on
the comeback trail
By
Wally Shaver
Most baby boomers
and Generation X’ers remember them well – Zubaz, those zany, zebra striped
pants that exploded on the scene selling millions beginning in the late 1980’s.
Guess what, they’re back. And an expanding audience segment
driving their resurgence are softball players.
“We’ve been back at
it for about a year and a half now,” said Dan Stock, who with Bob Truax, founded the original Zubaz
company along with the tag-team pro wrestlers, the Road Warriors. “We just
started talking about getting the line back together a little while ago and the
next thing you know, here we are.”
My hockey-playing
buddy Sherm will be real happy. Ever since the late
1980’s, Sherm has always worn a pair of Zubaz over his pads. He’s the only guy I know who still
wears them and when a pair of the striped pants finally wears out, he magically
shows up with a brand new pair. “I’d been hoarding a few over the years” was
his explanation.
No problem going
forward. “Back when we started the company out of our gym in 1988, we found
softball and broomball teams were wearing them because they were so darn
comfortable. It just spread from there. We think the team market is still one
we can hit and we can wholesale them for $20 a pair. That’s pretty cheap and
it’s easy for teams to pick up on,” added Stock.
The new edition of Zubaz has an entirely different business model than the
first go around. Back in the late 1980’s when Zubaz
was founded out of the Tri City Gym in
As Stock relates,
“We literally started out of the back room of the gym. We hired a seamstress to
do the cutting and sewing. Our first
print was a zebra design. It quickly became our signature design. The Road
Warriors were training out of our gym and started wearing them in pro wrestling
and became partners in the business with us.”
“We initially sold
them out of our gym. We then expanded into the JC Penney store near us in
Along the way came
licensing deals with the NFL, NBA,
“Things were really
going well at that time,” said Stock. “We even licensed the designs to other
companies who made hats, bags, shoes, shirts. It was going everywhere. But as
we were growing, we just couldn’t keep up with the financing and had to bring
in other partners. It was beyond what we could do.”
When it finally fell
apart in 1995, the private financing simply dried up. “Our lead investor had a
major downturn in another part of their business. That dried up the cash
available to keep us going, ordering product and carrying inventory as well as
receivables. Bob and I had very little ownership left and the brand just
stopped being produced. I went back to running the gym and Bob stayed in the
apparel business.”
Ten years later, the
revival started. “We reacquired the name from another party to get the rights
back and decided to give it a whirl,” commented Stock. And
with it, a new approach to marketing – e-tailing.
“We learned earlier
that when you set up payment with retailers for 30-days net, they have a tendency
to stretch it to 60 and 90 days. This really hurt our cash flow and led to us
bringing in investors in the first place. This time, almost all of our sales
are Internet. People can just go to zubaz.com.”
Word of mouth
advertising, Internet search engines and basic guerilla marketing is the new
marketing mantra. This time around, the lads started slowly selling retail out
of The Press Gym in Little Canada, while targeting high school and college
kids.
“We sold millions of
pairs back then and so people knew about them. The recognition was already
there. Now the kids are wearing them to school – they really don’t care what
they wear. But you know, they’re so darn comfortable.
People try them on and they love the comfort. We added the team deal on our website
and like last time, we have softball and broomball teams wearing them again and
we think it’s a good market. You get one team going to a tourney and there are
30 other teams seeing these cool looking pants wondering where they can get
them.”
Sales are coming
from all across the
Besides the word of
mouth advertising and Internet click-throughs, the
St. Paul Saints have a Zubaz night coming up. “Saints
players and staff have been training with us for eight years in the gym and we
came up with this idea. It will be July 16 and they’re going to do something
with the bases (striped, I bet), they’ll have a monkey
coming in and something with the pig. The Saints folks mentioned it to some
other teams and we’re suddenly getting calls from other minor league teams who
like to do some of these wacky and crazy promotions. Who knows? If this grows
into something, that’ll be great!”
I’ve got a hunch
they’re going to do quite well. And this time around, they won’t have to worry
about slow-paying retail accounts.