Collegiate Pacific entered into a multi-year exclusive marketing and distribution pact with New Era Cap Company. Under terms of the Agreement, Collegiate Pacific will launch its New Era Team Sports Division on July 15, 2006 and act as a single point solution of marketing, order processing and distribution to the Institutional and Team Sporting Goods markets on behalf of New Era. Collegiate Pacific will inherit the existing New Era Team customer base with the exception of a few excluded accounts. Collegiate Pacific will maintain its ability to sell competing products upon customer request.
Commenting on the relationship, Adam Blumenfeld, President of Collegiate Pacific, stated: “We are honored to serve as the exclusive marketing and distribution agent to the Team Sporting Goods Segment for a brand as iconic and well recognized as New Era. Making the New Era line of team products proprietary for our salesmen, catalogs and re-distribution partners is another important step in setting the Company and its offerings apart from others in the Industry. Along with the recently announced exclusive alliance with Nolan Ryan, this relationship goes a step further in establishing our foothold in baseball and presents significant opportunity for the sale of New Era baseball caps in conjunction with our existing broad SKU base of baseball uniforms and equipment. Simply put, it allows us to provide a complete head-to-toe, one-stop-shop solution for our customers.
“This partnership allows New Era to focus on what they do best, which is manufacture the highest quality, most innovative product in the Team Cap industry while leveraging Collegiate Pacific’s core competency — the thousands of direct touches we make daily into this marketplace. Collegiate Pacific is comprised of 175 road sales pros covering 23 states; nearly 2 million direct-mail catalogs; a family of websites, a 20 man team of outbound phone salesmen, and a growing network of nearly 2,000 team dealers all acting in concert to penetrate the market.
“We believe this alliance further validates Collegiate Pacific’s core value proposition. We are best positioned to act as a national conduit for major, branded manufacturers like New Era looking to position their product in front of the institutional and team customer base. New Era simplifies its business process by dealing with one customer and managing one receivable, while Collegiate Pacific will use its multiple marketing tentacles to broaden awareness of the New Era story and product line. It’s a perfect fit for both Companies and with our ability to simultaneously service the grass roots and Team Dealer markets it showcases what Collegiate Pacific’s multi-channel marketing platform is designed to do. We welcome existing New Era distributors as well as newly interested parties to contact the Company to learn how they might participate in what will be an exciting and aggressive campaign.”
