The University of Miami will blitz vendors selling unlicensed T-shirts at Hurricanes football games this fall. The crackdown on counterfeit paraphernalia will be the first in the school's history, which is part of Miami's attempt to boost revenue from licensed products.
Miami hired Collegiate Licensing Co. of Atlanta to market Hurricanes items, collect royalties from manufacturers and seize unlicensed souvenirs from rogue vendors. Collegiate Licensing, which also represents Tennessee, Penn State and about 180 other schools and athletic conferences, will collect a percentage of the Miami products it sells.
For years, Miami's campus bookstore ran the school's licensing program. But the university recently outsourced its bookstore to Follett's, a national retailer, and it decided to do the same with licensing, said Patrick Nero, Miami's associate athletic director.
The move came in part because Miami realized it didn't have the expertise or the people to keep an eye on vendors, manufacturers and retailers. Miami's revenue from licensed products has dwindled from $2.5 million a year in the early '90s to about half that now, Nero said.
Collegiate Licensing will monitor manufacturers to make sure they pay Miami for all of the Hurricanes products they sell. That's something Miami previously ignored, Nero said.
"We just don't have the staffing to do that," he said. "We were taking people at their word. We probably left a lot of money on the table."
Collegiate Licensing also has the pull to get its clients shelf space in department stores, Nero said.
"Our hot markets tend to be New York, Chicago and Los Angeles," he said. "We don't have people who can run out to a manager at a Burdines or a Sears in one of those cities to talk to a store manager about shelf space."
And, in the fall, Collegiate Licensing representatives will go to half a dozen Hurricanes games, including the Kickoff Classic at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, where Miami plays Ohio State.
The company will confiscate Hurricanes products that don't bear the Collegiate Licensing tag and the manufacturer's name, said John Christie, university representative for the Atlanta company. The seizures might be accompanied by arrests, Christie said, although that's up to local law enforcement.
The confiscations protect consumers from shoddy merchandise and shield licensed manufacturers from being undercut by unlicensed makers of products, Christie said. The Hurricanes have attracted more rogue manufacturers than most universities, Christie added, largely because the school never has cracked down on them.
The Florida State Seminoles have been a Collegiate Licensing client since 1982, said Faye Harris, Florida State's director of trademark licensing. The school is pleased with the company's work, she said.
"They give us national distribution and national exposure," Harris said.
Collegiate Licensing's Christie said the industry sells product worth $2.5 billion a year. Sales have suffered as college apparel has gone out of vogue, but he predicted that the cyclical industry eventually will turn around.
When it does, Nero wants the University of Miami to be ready. The school's football team has regained some of its cachet, and the basketball team recently cracked the top 25.
"The timing is good, with the rise of both the football and basketball programs," Nero said.
Miami would have ranked 20th on Collegiate Licensing's list of top-selling schools in the second half of 1998. Michigan ranked first, North Carolina second and Kentucky third among the company's clients.
Jeff Ostrowski writes for the South Florida Business Journal.
