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Athletic Apparel Co. Stays Ahead of Game

When Matt Lehrer’s parents started Teamwork Athletics Apparel in the late 1980s, it was a part-time side business making baseball jerseys and pants. They ran a manufacturing sales rep firm focusing on sporting goods, and after a uniform supplier pulled out, they decided to give it a try themselves.

Lehrer laughs thinking about those early attempts, which came after reaching out to a distant cousin who worked in a jacket factory in Los Angeles for advice.

“It took them a bunch of tries to get things right,” he said. “They put a lady’s sleeves on men’s jerseys the first time.” But the family soon found success by building a deep inventory of stock products, allowing them to get orders out the door within days. By 1993, they devoted all their energies to Teamwork, which now posts more than $50 million in annual revenue. A sister company, MTO

Commerce, launched last year focusing on made-to-order clothing such as sweatshirts and active wear.

Lehrer stepped down as CEO of the San Marcos-based Teamwork late last year, but is still the CEO of RBIII, Teamwork and MTO’s parent company. David Caserta, Teamwork’s former COO, is now CEO and is in charge of day-to-day operations at Teamwork and MTO.

Customized Products

Teamwork’s business is split in two: stock products and customized clothing. A stock baseball jersey might sell for $13 to a distributor, who then sells directly to Little League parents or adult players and screen prints the team’s name on the clothing. Teamwork’s customized clothes use a process called sublimation, which infuses ink into the clothing and allows for more intricate designs. It also costs about twice as much, but doesn’t necessarily take that much more time.

“We can make the fastest ones in under 20 minutes,” Lehrer said.

Sublimation is a chemical process that turns solids into gases without becoming a liquid in-between. Customers upload their complicated designs to Teamwork’s website, calling for color gradients, fine details and logos that couldn’t be done with screen printing.

Teamwork prints the designs onto proprietary paper with a clay compound, allowing it to soak up a lot of ink. Another machine fuses the dye from the paper into white polyester fabric, integrating the ink with the cloth instead of merely printing on top of it. Sewers then stitch the jigsawlike pieces of fabric into jerseys or other items. Teamwork has five patents for speeding up the sublimation process.

This is the process also used by MTO to make its customized outfits, such as jerseys for Rihanna’s recent Monster tour, which sell on the artist’s website for about $120.

Shipping Deal

Caserta said the “bread and butter” of the business is still stock uniforms, though sublimation is growing far more quickly. Teamwork made its mark in the mid-1990s by negotiating two-day shipping rates with UPS nationwide, charging uniform buyers just $2.99 above ground rates for the speedier delivery. Nearly overnight, call volume jumped from about 5,000 per month to 110,000, with more than 100,000 other callers unable to get through, according to Lehrer.

That speed was vital for uniform distributors, who say they often have to fulfill orders days before a season starts.

“People procrastinate and wait,” said Fred Baum, owner of Baum’s Sporting Goods in Tucson, Ariz., and a longtime Teamwork customer. “People don’t have all their kids signed up for March Little League yet, and some leagues will wait for everyone until they order, and they won’t give us enough time.”

But by the early 2000s, stock uniforms had razor-thin margins as Chinese competitors entered the market. Lehrer said a jersey he sold for $8 was being sold for $3 by some competitors. So he turned to sublimation to find ways to add value to his products and saw other companies taking up to two months to fulfill orders. Teamwork now has five patents for speeding up the sublimation process.

The Sister Company

Customers eventually started asking for more than just uniforms, which led to MTO’s formal creation last year. Lehrer sees the potential to cut down the capital tied up in inventory sitting in stores or warehouses. A large department store may only be able to carry two styles of yoga pants in two colors each on a store floor. But if the retailer used MTO’s clothing creation tools, it could offer hundreds of colors and styles online.

“It’s certainly an avenue of what we’re doing that had game-changing opportunities — there are not many places baseball pants can go,” Lehrer said. “MTO Commerce is taking everything we’ve learned over the past 20 years and have patented to bring something out to the marketplace that really does solve a problem.”

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