Usually when you hear stories about championship gear after the Super Bowl, it’s what happened to the loser’s champion t-shirts, and they usually go to a third-world country or to some place where kids don’t have shirts. Well, the New Orleans Saints championship gear after they beat the Indianapolis Colts is being made in the greatest, most hilarious place of all. Can you guess where?
A mad rush was on Monday to churn out New Orleans Saints Super Bowl champs shirts in an ironic place: Indianapolis.
But even as employees at the Adidas Group plant on the Eastside mourned their home team’s loss, general manager Blake Lundberg couldn’t help but smile — just a bit.
“From a business standpoint, the Saints’ win is tremendous for us,” he said. “It will be a very nice long week for us.”
Adidas has the contract to manufacture licensed gear for all NFL teams through its Reebok subsidiary. And pre-order sales for Saints’ Super Bowl merchandise was quadruple that of the Indianapolis Colts.
Lundberg expects demand to remain high as vacationers head to New Orleans for Mardi Gras — and clamor for all things Saints.
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They will ship out 130,000 shirts a day, compared with a typical 65,000 to 70,000.
That means overtime for Deobalek Thomas, who was forlornly pulling long-sleeved gray Saints T-shirts off the screen printing press Monday, while wearing his 2007 Colts Super Bowl champions shirt.
“I would have rather worked three days and had the Colts win,” he said. “These aren’t the shirts I wanted to do.”
It’s like the Saints punched them in the crotch by beating them in the Super Bowl, and now they’re having Indianapolis make them their t-shirts depicting the Saints punching them in the crotch. Does that make sense? It did in my head.
[...] I’m sure that the Super Bowl defeat was hard on just about everybody in Indianapolis. But for the poor bastards that have to work overtime all week to pump out all the “NFL CHAMPIONS Saints 31 Colts 17″ shirts, it’s an extra twist of the sack. <secondstringfullback> [...]