How we failed Curt Schilling

by Mike on March 24, 2009

There are not many people who can quickly move a million dollars of product, just by wearing something in public.

Curt Schilling can. Or, at least, he could have. But we failed him.

Back in the spring of 2004, Schilling was Boston’s big man about town. Still smarting from the painful loss to the Yankees in the 2003 ALCS, the Red Sox fan base (and media) welcomed their new free agent ace and hung on his every word. There was revenge to be extracted, and the tough, intimidating Schilling would dispense it in a rough-and-tumble way. That was the theory, anyway.

That’s the way it evolved, too. Schilling quickly took to the airwaves, starring in a storied Dunkin Donuts commercial in which he comically worked on his Boston accent. He wanted to fit in, and the Boston fans wanted to fit him in.

All of that came together in the biggest sort of way, when Curt Schilling wore one of our prototype YH caps to a Boston Bruins game on April 20, 2004. The image was captured by a Boston Herald photographer, and the picture later made ESPN SportsCenter and too many newspapers and magazines to count. Curt the Yankee Hater had arrived. And Boston was loving it.

On April 21, 2004, we opened our NJ-based website for business for the first time. Hundreds of miles away, the Herald newspaper with the Schilling picture was just hitting the newsstands. For several hours that morning, we were oblivious to the whirlwind that was about to descend upon our lives.

We never planned for anything big to happen with our YH caps. We loved the YH cap samples we had seen and developed over the cold winter months. But it was like the type of love you have for your own baby. No one else ever cares as much as you do. YankeesHater.com was borne out of a practical joke, and that was enough satisfaction for us. We figured we would open the website, play around for a while, and then close it down after selling a handful of caps.

Schilling’s donning of the YH cap, however, created a different fate for us. Honestly, if we had $1 million of inventory available on April 21, 2004, we could have sold it all within a couple days. And without the help of a national channel of distribution. As it turned out, our starting inventory was gone in a few hours. Caps went to Japan, the Netherlands, Aruba, Canada, the UK, Iraq and every state in the U.S.! Sure, we had touched a serious nerve with the YH cap. But without Schill, none of this would have been possible. We only wish that we had the infrastructure in place to properly gauge his popularity. We didn’t, but it sure was fun to try to keep up with the orders anyway. It took us months to catch up.

With the economy seized up, it takes a perfect product to get a consumer to spend money these days. For one day in time–April 21, 2004–we had the perfect product, fueled by the inadvertent actions of the perfect (albeit unwitting) and unofficial endorser.

Thanks for the memories, Curt, and may your retirement be robust and happy!