DANIA BEACH, FLA. (WSVN) - A South Florida printing company began packing up and shipping out coveted Super Bowl merchandise as soon as the game ended.
Sunday’s long-awaited showdown between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles may be over, but for the staff at Atlas Embroidery and Screen Printing in Dania Beach, their night was just getting started.
“I’ll get a phone call that says, ‘Roll them,'” said Adam Cohen, Atlas Embroidery’s executive vice president..
That’s because Atlas Embroidery, a production partner of Fanatics, is one of the businesses making the official Super Bowl championship shirts.
“It’s a mini Super Bowl, yeah. It’s a good shot in the arm for us, absolutely,” said Cohen.
They’re used to covering big events.
“Stanley Cup playoffs or Stanley Cup champions merchandise, NBA playoffs, NBA champs, Super Bowl, obviously, and [Major League Baseball] World Series,” said Cohen. “Four times a year, we set up for all the major championships, and then all year long we’ll run regular merchandising for major retailers, also for Fanatics.”
The Chiefs took the lead with only eight seconds left in the game, defeating the Eagles 38-35 and winning their second Super Bowl in four years.
On Sunday and into early Monday morning, 20 employees will be working through 6 a.m. to get the first boxes of shirts out to retailers.
The staff will continue to work nonstop through the middle of the week on them.
“It’s old-school screen printing, each color on the garment, printed on the garment, is an individual screen on one of these presses that you see behind me,” said Cohen. “They go around in the carousel format, the first colors laid down through the seventh, eighth or ninth, depending on how many are on these graphics. We cook them thought a big oven over here to my left, and they come out ready to go out to retail. We have all the NFL holograms to prove they’re official Fanatics licensed merchandise, and at the end of the dryer, after they’re dry, they come through, there’s a hologram put on them, and then they’ll be ticketed, tagged, bagged, labeled and set for retail.”
Cohen said the league and Fanatics picked out the design.
“They send us the merchandise, they tell us what to do, and our job is to get it done on time,” he said.
Atlas Embroidery will be making tens of thousands of these shirts over the next few days.
“It’s nice to be in the middle of something so high-profile, obviously,” said Cohen. “For the employees, it’s good, lots of extra overtime plus, I guess, some pride with running something so important.”
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