A Locker Full of Fashion Accessories Specially Pitched to Stylish Team Players

Having scored a home run with her baseball-shaped backpacks for the Dodgers, young entrepreneur J.J. Matis, 30, is ready for a new sport, team, and, of course, bag. She has signed with the Lakers to be featured at Staples Center’s team shop. Her basketball-shaped backpacks with the Laker logo will debut next month.

Matis used some old-fashioned self-promotion to get the attention of Staples Center merchandising manager Alan Fey, wearing her basketball bag to Lakers games all last season. “People would come up to me all the time. I became known as the bag lady,” she said. Finally, after months of persistence, she got a meeting with Fey, who said he placed an order last week.

Her backpack business grew out of a project Matis did while earning her marketing MBA at California Lutheran University in Sherman Oaks. The assignment was to come up with an entrepreneurial idea that would fly in the real world.

“I decided to do sport merchandising. I found it so interesting and thought there would be a lot of money to be made,” said Matis, who graduated from Cal Lutheran in 1999.

“I’m a huge sports fan, but I was never that impressed with the products at Dodger games or basketball games. I never saw anything cute! So I thought about a bag, and one night I came up with the idea: a ball bag.”

In 1997, she fashioned a prototype for a baseball-shaped backpack out of vinyl with shoestrings for seams, and a logo cut out of an old Dodger hat. She carried the bag to as many games as possible, and one day, an usher convinced her to show her creation to the team’s merchandising manager.

By 1999, Matis had a business plan, an investor (her dad) and a license application to mail to Major League Baseball Properties Inc. in New York. Shortly after, she won a purchase order for 200 backpacks from the Dodgers.

Matis is thrilled to have won over the Lakers, but in no way does it mean her game is over. She said, “I’ve got bags for every sport.”

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I was happy to get a holiday card from John Heffron and Joel Zimmer, the two L.A. comedians who created That Guy Game, which I wrote about in an August column. Remember the game of 52 stud cards, each with retro-looking pictures of types of men such as the “fake tan guy,” “mullet guy” and “married but not tonight guy”?

The rules of the game (a bachelorette party dream) call for the cards to be dealt equally to all players, who then hit the town in groups to find guys that match their cards. A player is required to bring the guy back to a group leader as proof before discarding the card. The player with the fewest number of cards in hand at the end of the night wins.

There’s a new version of the game for sale at https://www.thatguygame.com, with hilarious additions such as “rugs or plugs guy,” “the guy . . . um . . . girl . . . guy,” and “unibrow guy.”

Heffron and Zimmer have become quite the studs themselves these days. They wrote that two studios are in a bidding war over the rights to a TV show based on the game.

Congrats, game guys. If only I had thought of it. . . .

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SoCal Confidential runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Booth Moore can be reached at booth.moore@latimes.com.