Ross Tannenbaum, Fanatics Authentic’s president, can be expansive when talking about his company’s debut this week of its NASCAR trackside merchandise tent superstore. Unless, that is, he’s asked if the venture is the most logistically daunting effort in company history.
The e-commerce giant has been on the venue sales side for years and already runs merchandise sales at events like the NHL Winter Classic. But the sprawling, near-ceaseless traveling circus that is NASCAR is a whole other matter, so for the logistics question, Tannenbaum had only one word to offer, along with a chuckle.
 |
| Fanatics Authentic’s NASCAR tent superstore will make its debut at Pocono this week. |
“Yes,” he said before jetting to Pocono Raceway to prepare for the superstore’s launch six months into Fanatics’ 10-year deal with NASCAR.
After spending those first six months learning about the “overwhelming” number of intricacies that go into the sport, Fanatics launches the tent system at Pocono with sanctioning-body and Fanatics executives confident of how it will be received. So far this season, Fanatics had been using the sport’s pre-existing hauler system until it was ready to transition to the new model, which has been both heavily anticipated and, in some corners, derided since the concept was revealed in January.
Critics of the new system point to the loss of the festival-like atmosphere of the individual merchandise haulers for drivers and teams, which has been in place for decades.
But Tannenbaum is preaching patience.
“Remember, we’re bringing knowledge, understanding and history of doing this in college venues, hockey venues and everything else — and have a really strong feeling that we’re heading down the right track,” Tannenbaum said. “What we learned a lot of in the first five months is how to potentially use haulers as we go forward — some of them to add additional locations to the track — but everything still tells us the same thing: The tent is the best outcome for this.”
Officials are tempering expectations while calling this year’s tent store just the precursor to what will be an even more robust experience starting next year, when the system will be rolled out fully. Nonetheless, Tannenbaum expects fans to enjoy the much-touted benefits — air conditioning, increased product offerings, customization opportunities and less friction in the sales process — starting this week.
“If I was going to rank this on a scale of 1-10, wanting to [eventually] be a 10, we’re probably going to be a 3 or 4 at Pocono, and we’re going to learn a lot once we launch and continue to make numerous changes,” Tannenbaum said. “My goal is to be close to a 7 or 8 — maybe 8½ — by the Daytona 500 next year.”
Over the first half of the season, Fanatics has been weighing whether to go with a small-, medium- or large-scale version of its tent system — and the company ultimately decided to go medium for the rest of the season.
“What we figured out as we started going to these tracks is we have to get really good at managing traffic flow, understanding where people are parking and coming from, and to do that, you have to have multiple locations,” Tannenbaum said. “So it made a lot more sense to build the medium-sized superstore and bring that same one to every track, but then creating different environments with more or less product depending on the size of the race.”
He cited the difference in size between Richmond International Raceway and Daytona as an example of how Fanatics will need to tailor the approach. RIR’s relatively small footprint plus the way traffic flows in and out of the facility mean the main superstore may be only what’s needed that weekend. But for next year’s Daytona 500, the much more spread out Daytona International Speedway “is going to require numerous locations.”
Just as it originally anticipated, Fanatics is still looking to have roughly 40 full-time employees and 100 temporary workers man the operation at every race, but Tannenbaum said the company will overcompensate with temporary workers to start and eventually whittle that down to what it sees as the proper number of employees. The customization center that has been heavily touted will not be ready to roll out until October, but the on-site computer kiosks that should help speed up and digitize the check-out process will be ready for Pocono.
The company also has been working on new ideas for the superstore — from fresh product offerings like NASCAR “jerseys” that mimic the kind seen in stick-and-ball sports to eyeing a way to have select brands sell their own apparel at the store starting in 2016.
Steve Phelps, NASCAR’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, thinks the possibility of incorporating brands is a good one and emblematic of the nuanced approach Fanatics is looking to bring to the sport. Phelps added that he thinks one big benefit from moving to the new system is that NASCAR and Fanatics now will be able to see in-depth analytics of which products are selling best at the track.
However, one thing that has not changed from the first six months of the season, according to Phelps, is Fanatics’ plan to make sure to incorporate lesser-known drivers into the superstore.
“We’ll have more drivers represented at Pocono — I don’t know if ‘ever’ is the right phrase, but it’s far more than the drivers who are being represented today,” Phelps said. “Are we going to have a very big Dale Earnhardt Jr. presence? Yes, we will. With that said, it’s important that a driver like Landon Cassill is represented. Making stars out of all of our drivers is something that’s important to us.”
