Tuesday, February 27, 2007
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Banners
Will Miller, Shawnee senior, wanted a banner for his apartment like the one hanging in the north end of Allen Fieldhouse. “Pay heed, All who enter: Beware of the Phog.” He looked for one at bookstores and sports shops and couldn’t find the banners anywhere, so he decided to do something about it.
Miller talked to the Athletics Department and developed a design and a business plan that it approved. He then worked with the Collegiate Licensing Company to become an officially licensed vendor of the banners.
The banners are now available on his Web site, www.payheedbanners.com, and several bookstores in town will soon carry them.
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Everybody I talked to at the University was pretty excited about it because it wasn’t available anywhere.
-Will Miller
The banners come in two different designs and two sizes. A small banner costs $34.95 and a large costs $144.95.
Johnny’s Tavern, 401 N. 2nd St., and Wayne & Larry’s Sports Bar and Grill, 933 Iowa St., both display the banners in their bars, but Miller said most of his business came from students and fans in the Lawrence and Kansas City area.
Not just anyone can get licensed to sell official University of Kansas merchandise. The process took Miller more than four months. He gives 9 percent of his profits to the Athletics Department for royalties, which is the standard fee.
Paul Vander Tuig, director of trademarks and licensing at the University, said the licensing process could take anywhere from two weeks to several months, depending on the time it took for the licensee to develop a promising business plan, develop a specific design for approval and purchase product liability insurance. He said he considered whether similar products already existed when considering a proposal and gave an example of basketball T-shirts as a product with a highly saturated market. Other officially licensed products that use the University’s image or the Jayhawk logo include apparel, flip flops, coffee mugs and license plates.
While those products were licensed to multiple vendors, Miller’s idea was the first of its kind.
Vander Tuig said another original idea came from a company in Topeka that applied for a license for a branding iron designed to imprint the Jayhawk logo on steaks or burgers. The Athletics Department approved the design and the company eventually expanded to include the logos of other schools.
According to the Collegiate Licensing Company’s Web site, www.clc.com, the University of Kansas is the 23rd most frequently licensed school in the country, fourth overall in the Big 12.
Miller said he hoped selling the banners in bookstores in Lawrence and Kansas City would make more people aware of his product. Last year he designed “KUnit” T-shirts, a play on the rap group G-Unit, and sold them online. He said that experience made it easier for him to set up his business selling banners. Miller said he spent nearly a $1,000 on start-up costs for the business, including a $300 application fee, $400 for product liability insurance, a $100 royalties advance to the University and money spent on advertising. He said he covered the start-up costs and was now making a profit. He plans to graduate this spring with a aerospace engineering degree and will continue to run the business alongside either a job or graduate school.
Kansan staff writer Kyle Carter can be contacted at kcarter@kansan.com.
— Edited by Katie Sullivan
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