Execs from Jacksonville-based Fanatics said that they now "are opening what they call their 'holiday playbook' that will see a massive influx of workers to handle an anticipated hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of orders in the next month," according to Drew Dixon of the FLORIDA TIMES-UNION. Some media accounts "have placed the value" of the company at $3B, and it "keeps growing." Internet Retailer magazine ranked Fanatics at No. 42 "among the top Internet retailers in the U.S." with $990M in '13 sales. Fanatics’ "spectacular success has become the story of business opportunity in Jacksonville -- how it’s possible for a small, entrepreneurial company here to blossom into an economic engine in a national industry." Beyond the "hiring wave this year, Fanatics revamped that mammoth warehouse." There also is a "massive data control system that helps route the bins along their conveyor-belt trips." The company "added a manufacturing facility of about 200,000 square feet ... where it’s leasing the space for the Fanatics apparel division that personalizes and customizes products." Fanatics VP/Operations Lonnie Phillips "was hired over the summer from Amazon, where he was director of operations for the Midwest and the Southeast." Phillips said that Amazon "went from six 'performance centers' to 60 just during the time he was with that company." He is "in the midst of the type of explosive growth happening now at Fanatics." Fanatics CEO Doug Mack: "We’re not really one site, we’re a platform between ourselves, our league partners, teams, universities and media partners. We have somewhere around a thousand (web) sites that we’re running. From that, we get all kinds of great information about trends: What are people searching for? What are they buying? What are they looking at on the sites" (
FLORIDA TIMES-UNION, 11/23).
