Ugly sweaters earn pretty penny

PITTSBURGH — Ugly is the new black (and gold).

It’s either a sign of how popular ugly Christmas sweaters have become, or it’s another sign that sports fans will buy anything with their team’s logo, but one New Jersey company is having a lot of success selling intentionally ugly sports-themed holiday sweaters this year.

Forever Collectibles of Somerset, N.J., expects to sell out of all 300,000 sweaters it made this year, featuring teams from all four major professional sports — football, baseball, hockey and basketball — and colleges. The sweaters, new to the market this year, will generate more than $10 million in revenue for the company.

The sweaters are especially popular in Pittsburgh, which should come as no surprise for a city with a football team that occasionally dresses like a colony of angry bees and where “Sunday best” means a Hines Ward jersey. Forever Collectibles has sold out of its wholesale Pittsburgh inventory of Steelers, Penguins and Pirates sweaters, and it has been out of its Steelers sweaters for the past seven weeks.

The sweaters are still available at places such as NFL.com and NHL.com. The sweaters — which feature snowflakes, Christmas trees, candy canes, bold plaid patterns and team logos — retail for anywhere from $59.99 to $119.99, depending on the style. Sweaters with player names are more expensive, as are button-up cardigans.

“I think they’re fun, I think they’re silly, but they also support a team in a creative way,” said Matt Powell, sports industry analyst at The NPD Group. “There’s a whole lot of layers to what makes it work.”

People started finding beauty in ugly Christmas sweaters late last decade, when young people — in search of irony — threw ugly Christmas sweater parties around the holiday season. They scoured websites such as eBay and stormed thrift shops in search of the bold and not-so-beautiful designs abandoned in decades past.

“This is the opposite of the old saying: Ugly is in the eye of the beholder,” said Anne Marie Blackman, who started selling ugly Christmas sweaters on eBay in 2008. Blackman was a stay-at-home mom looking for ways to make some extra money to help her two sons’ college fund when she noticed ugly Christmas sweaters trending on Google in 2008. She sold 50 sweaters that year and eventually launched her own website: MyUglyChristmasSweater.com.

The trend has grown so much that Blackman was able to entirely pay for her sons’ tuition — both attended George Washington University in Washington — with the profits from the Oldsmar, Fla.-based business. She has more than 10,000 sweaters in her inventory this year and expects to sell about 8,000 this holiday season.

She is facing more competition now than she did when she first started selling the sweaters, as big department stores and other apparel outfitters have entered the ugly market.

The trend grew large enough that last December it made its way to the offices at Forever Collectibles. About half of the company’s 100 employees dressed up for Ugly Sweater Day.

“I had no clue about this,” said Forever Collectibles owner Mike Lewis. “All these people came in, and they looked absurd. The clothing they were wearing was hideous. It didn’t hit me at first.”

His employees eventually explained to him what was going on. And at the end of the day, one of them approached him with the idea of marketing ugly sweaters for sports teams.

At first, Lewis did not think the idea would fly. Forever Collectibles was not an apparel company, and the leagues have relationships with dozens of apparel companies. But after realizing there wasn’t anything similar on the marketplace, Lewis had some of the company’s designers mock up some ugly sweaters to pitch to the National Football League.

To his surprise, the NFL gave the company its approval in January.

“We were shocked,” he said. “So once they let us do that, we went to the other leagues — baseball, basketball, hockey — colleges, and they all said, ‘Let’s go.’ “

He had reason to be shocked. Not only do those sports leagues typically deal with other companies for apparel needs, they also are rather restrictive with the type of products that they approve for use of their trademarks, said Powell of The NPD Group.

“Traditionally, the leagues have been very conservative about tricking up their marks,” he said. “They’re worth millions of dollars, so they don’t want to damage the idea in any way.”

The ugly sweater line has turned into a significant piece of revenue for Forever Collectibles, which generates $100 million in sales annually. Lewis said the company limited its supply this year to help increase demand.

The challenge moving forward will be keeping the line from growing stale, Powell said, so that the company isn’t selling the same sweaters year after year. It also will have to monitor the popularity of the ugly sweater market, in case the style proves to be nothing more than a fad.

But Blackman doesn’t see this as a trend. She sees it as tradition.

“Now, I just think it’s part of the season,” she said.