Safest Bet of Series Was Football Sales : Collectibles: S.D. company works overtime manufacturing baseballs featuring pictures of players from World Series teams.
Fotoball USA owners were rooting for the Oakland Athletics to win the 1990 World Series, but it really did not matter to them that the Cincinnati Reds emerged victorious. Whichever team won, the San Diego company expected to come out smelling like a rose long after the last crack of the bat.
The 2-year-old company is licensed by Major League Baseball to manufacture special edition Fotoballs and roster balls for the World Series. The Fotoballs are actual baseballs imprinted with color pictures of either players from the A’s or the Reds, and bear the 1990 World Series logo nd team seal.
Two days before the Oct. 16 start of the World Series, employees at Fotoball USA began working overtime at the company’s Rose Canyon plant, cranking out more than 3,000 series balls a day. The company does not expect to slow down until sometime this week, said Michael Favish, Fotoball’s 42-year-old president.
The roster balls are imprinted with the team seal and a player roster. To commemorate their four-game sweep of the series, the Cincinnati Reds’ balls are stamped World Champions as well as 1990 National League Champions. The Oakland balls bear the 1990 American League Champions stamp. Working 12-hour shifts, the company has been filling orders as fast as it can, said Derrick Favish, Michael’s 38-year-old brother and business partner.
The balls were sold for about $13 at the Oakland Coliseum, Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium, via The Home Shopping Network on cable television and in gift shops around the country, Favish said. On Monday, orders were still coming in, and at last count, the company had sold 20,000 balls.
Watching the series out of the corner of his eye on an office television last week, Favish said sales of World Series balls will represent about 10% of the company’s estimated $2.3 million in sales this year. The company, which opened its doors in March, 1989, grossed about $860,000 in 1989 revenue.
During the rest of the year, the company’s 23 employees are busy pumping out player balls and roster balls of league teams and limited-edition autograph balls, Favish said. The company has also diversified into Fotopucks, hockey pucks with players’ pictures, team crests and career highlights; football Fotoballs; and Fotosweats, or sweatbands imprinted with baseball players’ pictures.
The autographed baseball series includes balls signed by Tony Gwynn of the Padres; Johnny Bench, Cincinnati Reds’ Hall of Fame player; and Jerome Walton, a Chicago Cubs’ outfielder. “We did a limited, hand-signed edition of the Wayne Gretzky Fotopuck which sold out in six weeks for $199 a piece,” Favish said.
The Fotoball concept got its start in 1985 with a soccer ball, he said. “I built the first prototype on my living room floor.”
Favish, a native of South Africa, had sold his interest in a Beverly Hills art gallery the year before. “I was kind of at loose ends for a couple of months, and this thing came up and I had some time to spend on it. That was very fortunate because it took a lot of time and effort.”
“I played soccer as a child, and I was very involved with my kids’ youth programs in Los Angeles. The idea for imprinting balls came from a toy soccer ball that had animal characters on it. One of my brothers said, why couldn’t somebody put players on it instead. A penny dropped, and I started fiddling around with paints and tapes and all the things that make a prototype.”
But selling the soccer-ball concept proved too difficult because the main market at the time was in Europe, Favish said. So, Favish turned his energies to finding a color process to print photos on baseballs. “That in itself was a full-time task,” Favish said, adding that printing on a soccer ball was child’s play compared to a baseball.
It was a much easier task to print on the 32-panel soccer balls before they were assembled, he said. “Baseballs couldn’t be done that way. You had to print on the baseball once it was already fabricated in the round. So, to come up with a process, took my brother and me half of 1987 and all of 1988. I’m a real fusspot when it comes to quality.”
The brothers went to Italy to work with engineers there to fabricate the printing machines to their specifications. They had to draw from several different types of machines because what they needed did not exist, Favish said. “The machines are one of a kind.”
The company has an international flavor, Favish said. “We’ve got an American sports product being made by two South African guys using Laotian labor, Italian machines and balls made in China. We’re all equal rights here.”
The company now has three major league baseball licenses, three National Football League licenses, and two National Hockey League licenses.
Professional sports licensing is a major industry, Favish said. Last year, 325 companies that bought rights from major league baseball grossed more than $1 billion from retail sales, he said.
But getting a license is no small feat, Favish said. The products are closely scrutinized by the league for quality and design, and the company has to pay an advance royalty based on expected sales, usually never less than $25,000, he said. Then the company pays the league 8 1/2% in royalties once sales begin.
“People are always wondering where my Ferrari is. It’s not ready to be driven up to the front door yet,” Favish said. “The bigger you get, the more money you need. (It) costs plenty to do what we do. You have to have balls to print on, you have to have packaging to put the finished product into. We need additional staff, shipping crates and cartons. The number of employees has grown from three to 23.”
“Going from a two-product line to a nine-product line is like starting a new business,” Favish said. “You don’t just put nine products in your product catalogue and rake in the money. It’s not that way.”
Getting the products to market is the company’s biggest challenge, Favish said. Using a network of representatives and distributors, the baseball Fotoballs are sold in outlets ranging from Wal Mart stores and airport gift shops to baseball card stores and sporting goods stores.
Favish said his company is targeting sales of $4 million next year. “Whether we achieve it or not will be a function of our ability to bring the products to market,” he said.
