SAN DIEGO SUPER BOWL XXII HOST : Business End of Super Bowl Lined Up, Ready to Kick Off : Souvenir Harvest Ripe for the Picking as Public Interest in Game Intensifies

Afraid that with all the attendant excitement you’ll forget who’s playing in the Super Bowl?

Not to worry. Because minutes after today’s conference championship games in Denver and Washington are over, a massive Super Bowl merchandising engine will kick into high gear.

By Monday morning gift shops around the country will be flooded with shirts featuring the “dueling helmets” of the two teams that will meet in San Diego on Jan. 31.

By the time the engine cools a few months from now, it’s estimated that 2 million items--from pens and T-shirts to key chains and mugs, and all branded with the now-familiar Super Bowl XXII logo--will have been sold to fans across the country.

Crescendo on Super Sunday

While selling of the new items begins in earnest Monday, the merchandising of the Super Bowl will increase almost daily for the next two weeks, reaching a crescendo on Super Bowl Sunday.

Just minutes after The Game passes into history, two San Diego companies will rev up nearly a dozen high-speed printing machines that will churn out tens of thousands of shirts bearing the final score and the winning team’s logo.

Fewer than two hours later, distributors will be trucking those shirts to gift shops at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium and wherever else Super Bowl fans will be partying.

By the morning after the game, merchandise will be stacked at least as high as a Super Bowl tourist’s eye on souvenir shelves at Lindbergh Field and the myriad hotels and restaurants where the out-of-towners will be gathering.

And within three days after the game, 43 companies around the country will be distributing about 75 Super Bowl items--including shirts, hats, trinkets, pens and ceramic goods. The football league’s licensing arm has even authorized a company to manufacture an official “party pack” that contains napkins, cups, plates and eating utensils.

It’s all part of the business of the Super Bowl, as much a part of the event as the game itself. And while the selling of this year’s Super Bowl has been ongoing for several months, it’s now, when interest in the game is approaching its greatest intensity, that the souvenir harvest is ripe and ready for picking.

To be sure, sales are expected to be strongest in San Diego and the two cities whose teams will compete two weeks from today at San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, but officially licensed products will soon fill retail shelves around the country, from department stores to grocery stores.

While this year’s game will mark the 22nd annual contest between the champions of the American and National conferences, it really wasn’t until the 1984 Super Bowl in Tampa Bay--where the Raiders drubbed the Redskins, 38-9--that the marketing machine first became a truly potent force, according to executives at companies that hold licenses to manufacture Super Bowl products.

“Looking at it very callously, Tampa Bay was the initial Super Bowl where we realized we could make (a lot of) money,” said Brian Edington, an executive with Indianapolis-based Logo 7, which produces a variety of official NFL and Super Bowl products.

NFL Properties, the league’s licensing arm, first approved the so-called “score shirts,” which are rushed into production immediately after the Super Bowl ends--sometimes before the final gun, if the score is lopsided--as it was in the 1986 Super Bowl in New Orleans won by the Chicago Bears.

“Like just about everything else, it was consumer driven,” Edington said. “The feedback from previous years was always ‘Gee, I wish I had a score shirt.’ ”

Not surprisingly, the NFL works hard to ensure that non-licensed merchandise stays off the market. During each NFL season, a trademark enforcement squad tackles about 1,000 “knock-off” companies--counterfeiters who try an end run with bogus merchandise.

“The Super Bowl seems to bring out the best of the counterfeiters,” according to Bill Barron, the Los Angeles-based general manager of NFL Properties, the league’s marketing, licensing and publishing arm. “They come in from all over the country, plus you get the (local) mom and pop operations.”

The NFL will soon ask a local court for seizure orders that “empower (us) to remove this stuff from the market,” Barron said. The NFL also will operate a “legal hot line for fans to report knockoff merchandise,” Barron said.

The first wave of official Super Bowl XXII merchandise appeared on retail shelves in early 1987, when companies carrying licenses from the league’s NFL Properties division introduced items adorned with the “generic” Super Bowl XXII logo.

San Diego, as host city, got into the act early in 1987 when it won NFL authorization to sell its own brand of “official” Super Bowl merchandise. However, by agreement with the league, those products have been pulled from retail shelves to make way for the league’s official products.

More Than 75 Items

This now includes more than 75 items to choose from, including key chains, pins, pens, mugs, cups, pennants and earrings as well as the party pack.

Based on past Super Bowls, fans will purchase just about whatever the NFL decides to license. And the NFL caters to those with modest budgets as well as fans who fancy expensive gifts.

This year’s product list includes everything from a $1.50 pen emblazoned with the Super Bowl XXII logo to an 18-karat gold replica of this year’s Super Bowl ticket that retails at $3,500, or a 14-karat replica ticket that retails for $2,500.

Jessop’s Jewelers in San Diego has yet to sell its first solid gold ticket but it has sold “lots” of sterling silver replica tickets that retail for $90, according to a spokesman. The company “expects to build an advertising campaign around the gold ticket as the game approaches,” the spokesman said.

Other veteran Super Bowl retailers take a more practical view. “There’s a saying in this industry, to the effect that if you can’t wave it, wear it or drink from it, it won’t be a big seller,” said Bob Hood, whose San Diego-based Gateway Promotions is distributing merchandise in Southern California.

2.2 Million Products Sold

Gateway is distributing everything from pens to expensive rugby shirts and satin jackets, which will sell for between $50 and $70. The NFL sold 2.2 million officially licensed products in the wake of last year’s Super Bowl, according to the NFL’s Barron. T-shirts and sweat shirts accounted for nearly 65% of those souvenirs, with the sale of hats, mugs, glasses and cups accounting for another 25%.

Super Bowl fans are expected to spend between $200 and $300 per day while in San Diego, and a percentage of that will go for souvenirs.

Last year’s Super Bowl crowd at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena spent an average of $5.50 at the game on souvenirs, not including food and beverages, according to one manufacturer. Another manufacturing executive suggested that a “good” Super Bowl will generate per capita sales of between $7 and $10.

However, that same source added that “there’s no such thing as a bad Super Bowl. It’s all relative.”

And, that per capita figure does not include the game program, which once again will cost $5.

Programs Popular

The NFL sold 701,000 game programs last year, and has preliminary plans to print at least 620,000 of the 192-page magazines for this year’s game. The ever-increasing popularity of those programs is underscored by the fact that collectors will pay a minimum of $1,500 for a full set of programs from past Super Bowls.

Before today’s games, Super Bowl merchandise manufacturers have had to limit themselves to distributing products bearing the generic, red white and blue NFL logo.

“Come Super Bowl week, some outside distributors will be setting up merchandise tables in all the major hotel lobbies,” according to Jerry McCabe, special markets manager for National Pen, a San Diego-based company that is manufacturing pens, beer mugs and coffee cups for the Super Bowl. “That’s in addition to the merchandise already in the gift shops.”

“People are amazing,” said McCabe, who last year watched Denver fans empty merchandise tables at the swank Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. “They bought anything with Denver’s logo and the Super Bowl on it.”

‘Dueling Helmets’

Before the day is over, two other San Diego companies will be churning out thousands of officially sanctioned National Football League T-shirts and sweat shirts that will be emblazoned with the “dueling helmets”--the logos of the teams that will meet in Super Bowl XXII in San Diego on Jan. 31. The T-shirts are expected to cost about $15, with sweat shirts about $25.

“We’ll start the printers when the second game is over and go 24 hours a day for two or three days,” according to Steve Taylor, president of Rancho Bernardo-based Silk Screen Shirts Inc.

Silk Screen Shirts last week took delivery of 170,000 blank T-shirts, which will be imprinted immediately after both today’s contests and the Super Bowl.

This week other companies around the country also will be producing shirts, most of which will be sold in the cities that will be heading to San Diego.

But “there will be an early surge of demand” even in San Diego this week, according to Ken Klempan, president of Koala Arts Inc., the second San Diego-based company that will begin printing NFL-authorized shirts as soon as today’s games are over.

Demand will build as the Super Bowl gets closer, especially the week before the game.

‘Outrageous Business’

“Business (in San Diego) will be outrageous,” Edington predicted. “It’s true what they say about this being the only time in your selling career that you’re an order taker and not a seller.”

Merchandise will be available during the week before the game at the stadium--as well as on the Monday after the game, according to a spokesman for ARA Leisure, the Philadelphia-based company that is building 70 souvenir stands at the stadium.

Just how many shirts Koala Arts and Silk Screen Shirts eventually print will be determined largely by which teams meet on Jan. 31.

“From a business standpoint, the best team would be Cleveland, because of its relative size and the fact that the city hasn’t had a winning tradition in recent years,” according to Roger Atkin, a New York-based executive with NFL Properties, the licensing arm of the National Football League.

Denver, which lost last year to the New York Giants, would also boost sales. Super Bowl fever in that city has led retailers to place preliminary orders for 200,000 game programs, Barron said.

But officially licensed retailers in San Diego lost a healthy chunk of potential business on Jan. 10 when upstart Minnesota knocked San Francisco out of the playoffs.

“That cost us a couple of thousand T-shirts,” acknowledged Taylor, who has subcontracted with Buffalo, N.Y.-based Trench Manufacturing Co. to produce shirts for sale in California. Koala Arts has a similar agreement with Indianapolis-based Logo 7.

Koala and Silk Screen Shirts won’t chance starting their presses early on Super Bowl Sunday because “a last minute touchdown (in a close game) would make the items worthless,” Klempan said. However, both firms plan to prepare the artwork, including the team logos, before the game.

And, if one Super Bowl team builds a heavy lead, Logo 7 might do what it did last year--authorize its local subcontractor to start printing shirts as early as half time, in order to have merchandise at the gates when fans leave.

Logo 7 did that last year, but Edington cautioned that, “You could roll the dice and have a lot of worthless shirts.”

7,000 Shirts Per Hour

Silk Screen Shirts’ seven printing machines will turn out about 7,000 shirts per hour, while Koala Arts will produce about 6,000 shirts per hour.

Klempan believes San Diegans will be buying up the shirts just as fast as out-of-towners, if only because “this is our first Super Bowl . . . they’ll want a souvenir or a commemorative item.”

He compared the Super Bowl challenge to a recent order from the National Basketball Assn. for playoff shirts, and the Padres’ 1984 order for World Series T-shirts. His Koala Arts churned out 90,000 of the popular Padres shirts.

As a result, he and the firm received extensive notoriety. “We had the three TV networks here along with (United Press International) during the World Series,” Klempan recalled. “I bet we get the same kind of coverage this time around.”