About MOA Team Supply
We are one of the nation's largest custom chenille and embroidery businesses selling wholesale varsity letters, varsity patches, award patches, and letterman jackets directly to the public with very low minimum quantity requirements. We have a reputation for delivering faster than virtually all of our competitors and being unique in that a vast majority of the products we sell are manufactured right here in the United States.
Our typical customer is a school athletic director, coach, club, or business.
MOA Team Supply History
During July of 2009, MOA Team Supply was formed as a division of
Mount Olympus Awards, one of the largest and most successful online retailers of letterman jackets, varsity jackets, patches, and other personalized products.
It was created to address the growing number of clients who wanted wholesale chenille products, including varsity letters, custom patches, letterman jackets, and team uniforms.
With our work highlighted in national media outlets such as GQ Magazine, Rolling Stone, the Disney Channel, on network television, and in major motion pictures, the requests continued to accelerate and upon further study, we knew we could serve this market better than all of our competitors. As we contemplated launching the team business examined the ability to leverage our existing infrastructure of sporting goods vendors, fate intervened and helped us make our decision. A high profile sports uniform company responsible for manufacturing the baseball jerseys worn by a professional, well-known MLB team realized they couldn't do the product justice and worried about their reputation if they botched the job. In a panic, this company turned to Mount Olympus Awards to create the finished product. We had them designed, shipped, and delivered in a matter of days. The MLB team took to the field in a televised game that weekend wearing our jerseys, completely unaware that the company from which they had ordered their uniforms was unable to get the job done. They got the credit. We cashed the check.
The 3 Guiding Principles of MOA Team Supply
Management immediately began putting the plans in motion to launch our own brand and MOA Team Supply was born with three guiding principles:
1. We will be ruthless on pricing, using our low-cost business model to save our customers hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars per team order. Unlike a traditional retail store or regional network of salespeople, we can sell at margins substantially below their regular prices and still make attractive profits for our shareholders. This is the number one secret to our success.
2. We will never compromise quality, preferring to sell higher quality goods than the average sporting goods store. To put this philosophy in everyday terms, if we were in the jewelry business, we would want to be Tiffany & Company or Borsheim's. The world is full of mall-based retailers selling mediocre merchandise. That is not how we want to do business. Many of our competitors, for instance, import letterman jackets and team uniforms from Pakistan and sell them for $99 to $129 per jacket despite clearly inferior material, craftsmanship, and manufacturer guarantees. For some people, those types of products may be the rational choice given their resources or personalities. For us, we only want the best, even if it means we have to turn to better priced, American-based jacket companies, some of which offer lifetime warranties, higher quality leather grades, and premium wool.
We realize our way of thinking may not appeal to everyone's budget and that some people don't care about quality. In the words of Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger, that's just too damn bad. Our graphic designers spend hours creating the perfect product, whether you order a single custom jacket or a set of professional basketball uniforms, to the point that they will measure the arc of letters to the millimeter to ensure they are perfect. If you aren't looking for that level of quality in your merchandise, we aren't your people. Move on down the road and we really do wish you the best.
3. We must be able to deliver custom uniforms and products in a fraction of the time. In our opinion, it is stupid that most sporting goods companies take eight weeks or longer to deliver custom merchandise. Most of this originates from antiquated systems that haven't been updated in decades. Several of the original founders of our parent company, Mount Olympus Awards, were involved in technology and finance. By designing the back-end systems to automate most of the work that had been traditionally done by hand, we are able to drastically slash production times and manufacturing mistakes to a degree that other sporting goods companies can't touch. This data gives us a tremendous competitive advantage.
A perfect example came in late 2008, when one of our managers made a decision to pull virtually all of our business from a major domestic letterman jacket manufacturer because he found out that the company was ordering raw materials on a weekly basis in the midst of the busy season, indicating that the firm was having cash flow issues. Using his knowledge of the industry, he calculated that it could not survive through another summer and if we remained, our customers would be stuck with non-delivered merchandise that would span months, if they were lucky. The call, although bold, was made and we silently switched our entire order system to other manufacturers, moving hundreds of thousands of dollars in wholesale purchases to alternate sources. Six months later, the company filed for Chapter 7 liquidation, leaving its customers in limbo and reportedly defaulting on deliveries. Our customers were unaffected, allowing us to take even more market share.
More Information About Us and Our Philosophy
We really do believe that if you do your job better than everyone else, more diligently than others, and you are ethical and honest, you will win. Business, like any sport, is a competition. We are an organization dedicated to winning. Every day, we show up on the field and bring our best players and game.