Chief among them, of course, were the dozens of sporting-goods and department stores that peddle school-related shirts, hats and other gear. What many people didn’t know was that quite a few of those championship T-shirts and sweatshirts were printed at one of the nation’s leading producers of customized sportswear, Gear For Sports, which employs about 600 people at its world headquarters in Lenexa.

“It’s been a very good year for us in part because of KU,” says Greg Johnson, vice president of creative design for Gear For Sports. “We have a company store, a little retail store close to our production facility, and it remained busy for quite a while after the championship.”

Gear For Sports offers a full line of quality, branded sportswear products, including T-shirts, sweatshirts, polo shirts, pants, outerwear, headwear and accessories. The company uses state-of-the-art product design, graphic art and decoration capabilities to customize an array of apparel with logos and insignia. Gear sells its products under several world-famous brands: Champion, Under Armour and Gear For Sports.

School and athletic team logos account for the vast majority of Gear’s business, although it also counts the U.S. military and golf pro shops among its thousands of customers. In fact, Gear has more than 8,000 regular customers representing more than 12,000 retail locations.

ts biggest business is in college bookstores, which accounts for slightly more than half of its regular customers. Jayhawk, Tiger and Wildcat fans understand a massive volume of sportswear is sold through their respective schools’ bookstores. But for every KU and Mizzou, there are dozens of small universities, community colleges, junior colleges and even high schools that don’t have the buying power the bigger institutions have. Selling to these smaller entities is one of the primary things that sets Gear For Sports apart from other manufacturers.

“Our average order is between 48 and 72 pieces,” Johnson says. “Many college bookstores have a small floor and a small backroom or no backroom. We, in effect, are the warehouse or the backroom.” To address this role, Johsnon says, Gear For Sports has developed a flexible decoration model and state-of-the-art production processes that allow it to customize and deliver smaller volumes on frequent re-orders. This process allows it to fullfill its customers’ needs while remaining profitable.

The company employs 63 full-time in-house graphic artists and 13 in-house product designers. It has an active library of more than 1 million distinct designs, including school logos and mascots. The Gear team creates more than 80,000 new custom graphics each year. There are no fewer than 35 different processes for decorating shirts—screen printing, embroidery, tackle twill, fusion, knock-out and wet processing, to name a few.

Regardless of how our favorite local teams are doing, spring is the best time of the year at Gear for Sports, thanks largely to the madness of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Not only is Gear called upon to create champion-specific designs for dozens of teams as they advance through the Sweet 16 and into the Final Four, but it has a specialty division, Event 1 Retail Services, which sells customized apparel at specific events, including at all 830 NCAA championship events, and Big 12, Big 10, ACC and SEC conference championships.

“We love this time of year,” Johnson says. “We’ve been involved in March Madness for many years. Event 1 is kind of a cool aspect of our overall business.”