This week, we’re taking a look at the world of bootleg sports merchandise, including its rise during the NBA Finals and World Cup, its negative effects on fashion and the lessons brands should take from the bootleg demand.
If you want an authentic New York Knicks jersey, your best bet is to buy one from the official NBA store or at Madison Square Garden. But if you want a T-shirt of Bart Simpson celebrating the team’s NBA Championship win or a cartoon depiction of Knicks star Jalen Brunson dunking over an alien, you have to look deeper.
The NBA Championship and the World Cup have brought out a wide variety of homemade, bootleg and unlicensed sports merchandise. Official merchandise prices have been increasing, so much so that Fanatics, a major supplier of that merchandise, has been accused of colluding with leagues to drive up prices.
A good bootleg Knicks T-shirt can be found for $20 or less, while a T-shirt from the official Knicks store is $60. Compared to officially licensed products, bootleg merchandise is more accessible and often has more aesthetic variety, putting pressure on licensed apparel merchants to step up their game to compete.
“The popularity of bootleg merchandise often reveals something the licensed market is missing, whether that is a lower price, a faster response to a cultural moment or a design that feels less corporate,” said Eric Turney, owner and sales and marketing director at licensing company The Monterey Company.
Casey Wheeler, a Knicks fan based in Brooklyn, bought a pair of official Knicks T-shirts from Fanatics right after the team won the Eastern Conference earlier this year. But he said he was disappointed with the quality and the price: over $100 for two T-shirts. Instead, he started scrolling Instagram for unofficial merchandise, saving his favorites until he had a list of dozens.
Not long after that, Knicks Knacks was born. Knicks Knacks is Wheeler’s 1990s GeoCities-inspired website where he collects links to his favorite unofficial merchandise from independent sellers and designers. Within a few days of its launch, the site was posted on Reddit and received a few thousand visitors. Over subsequent days, as the Knicks’ win streak continued, the site blew up, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors and receiving a flood of submissions from sellers wanting to have their products featured — to date, he’s received thousands of submissions.
Many of these products come from small designers and shops that sell only on Instagram or a bare-bones Shopify site. And despite the products’ illicit nature, many are of good quality. One listing formerly on Knicks Knacks was for a 100% ring-spun cotton T-shirt.
Wheeler, who sends visitors to other websites to make their actual purchase, has received no money or commission from the sales and has largely avoided legal issues so far.
“I only put up about 15% of the [product] submissions I get,” Wheeler said. “Once it blew up, I started reaching out to some of the people whose designs I had up, just to make sure they were comfortable being on the site.”
After several sellers received cease-and-desist letters from the NBA, others began requesting that their products be removed from the site. Wheeler has since removed most of the egregious trademark-violating designs, leaving only the more gray-area products. The site now has a pop-up thanking visitors for making it a success.
“For now, I guess it’s back to buying cheap bullshit from Fanatics,” the note says.
Knicks Knacks’ brief but rapid rise shows that the desire for bootleg merchandise is strong. Wheeler said that unlicensed merchandise is free from the brand-safety restrictions that official gear must follow and is closer to what the fan communities that produce it really want.
“No disrespect to the designers [of officially licensed merch], but by the nature of the work they do, it has to be the least offensive version,” Wheeler said. “It has to appeal to a broad market. There’s been this Nike-fication of sports merchandise that’s all just hardcore athletic tees. That’s not what people want to wear.”
The designs collected on Knicks Knacks can be meaner, like one showing a crying Victor Wembanyama; funnier, like several that reference common memes among Knicks fans; or reference other trademarks, like Hello Kitty, “The Simpsons” or Wu Tang Clan.
But bootleg merchandise has a cost. Turney said that bootleg merch takes sales away from licensed businesses, especially around major events like a championship series.
“It can also weaken the value of an official license when an unlicensed seller can offer a cheaper, more eye-catching product without paying licensing fees or meeting the same production standards,” he said.
NBA merchandise generates around $1.15 billion per year, but some estimates put losses from bootleg merchandise at over $350 million. The NBA has cracked down on sales by issuing legal threats, and at World Cup matches, police have seized thousands of unlicensed items being sold outside of stadiums this summer.
Experts told Glossy that the best move for brands and licensors isn’t just to crack down on unofficial sales but to understand why people gravitate toward them.
“The real threat is the official product feeling corporate and late, while the culture happens on the sidewalk — not the handful of lost sales,” said Jackie Swanson, managing partner at Gartner Consulting. “And every bootleg tee is still a walking billboard for the team, which is why leagues rarely fight the sidewalk as hard as their lawyers say they should.”
Instead, Swanson said officially licensed merch should — and in some cases already does — draw inspiration from the creative designs produced by the bootleg community. Some of the Knicks’ official Championship T-shirts feature the same photo-collage style as classic ’90s bootleg rap and basketball T-shirts, for example. The leagues and teams have also begun collaborating regularly with fashion and streetwear brands in an attempt to elevate their merchandise, including a full NBA collaboration with Kith this year for the All-Star Game.
Swanson pointed to examples like Dapper Dan, who started by bootlegging Gucci products in the ’80s and has since done multiple official collaborations with the brand, as an example of how bootleg culture can inform and entwine with fashion.
“Bootleg aesthetics — the homemade photo-collage rap tee, the unlicensed mashup, the slightly-wrong logo — carry an energy that committee-approved merch sands right off, so leagues and brands are now copying the copies to feel real,” she said.
News to know
- Nike’s earnings this week beat expectations but revealed a significant drop in its China sales. After a 12% decline in sales in the region, CEO Elliott Hill said he is “fully committed to winning” China back.
- The CFDA released the calendar for this season’s upcoming New York Fashion Week, which includes the first live show from Diane von Furstenberg in over a decade and the American debut of designer Conner Ives.
- Saks Global has emerged from bankruptcy and renamed itself to Exemplar Luxury Group. The change comes as it intends to focus on high-end luxury retail, largely exiting from the off-price market.
