328 | Turning Sports Updates Into Automated Revenue | with Jamie Mottram

Jamie Mottram

Identify something they're excited about, and then make it even more exciting. Take a good thing and make it even better.  That's what we were doing then and that's what we try to keep doing now.  

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to the show Jamie Mottram. Jamie is the president of BreakingT, the fastest licensed sports fan apparel brand in the land. Jamie, welcome to the show.

Jamie Mottram

Hey, thanks for having me. The company sounds pretty badass, doesn't it? 

Chase Clymer

It does. But for those that don't know anything about the company, what is BreakingT doing? What are you guys selling? 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah, our core product is hot market sports fan apparel. So sometimes the hot market is predictable. Sometimes it's unpredictable. We're basically reacting to what happens in the world of sports and turning it into merchandise in real time so that fans can be buying it the same day it's trending and wearing it shortly thereafter. 

Chase Clymer

Oh, that's amazing. Now, take me back in time. You're the president. When did you join the company? What was your role? What problems were you brought in to solve? 

Jamie Mottram

Well, we needed somebody to work on BreakingT. I was the first employee. So we just needed somebody to care every day about the company, about the brand, about the products and its customers. So this was late 2017. I had spent a career in digital sports media and doing a lot of what we do now in t-shirt format as blog posts and Instagram videos and podcasts, stuff like that.  

But BreakingT was in a kind of proto state where intermittently, we would put out new products inspired by current sports events, but it was nobody's daily concern. It was our co-founders kind of side project that they'd been working on for a couple of years and trying to build out as best they could. But they felt like it had a lot of potential and they needed somebody to come in and realize that and focus on it and build the company. So I was that person in fall of 2017. 

Chase Clymer

Amazing. And then what are you allowed to share as far as the size of the business when you joined? Was it profitable yet? Like what was going on? 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah, I mean, it was not necessarily profitable or or not profitable. Like there was really no overhead cost associated with the business. But it was a low six figure revenue for that 2017 year. And then 2018 was our first seven-figure year. 

Chase Clymer

Well, all right. Now, how do I do that? If I'm listening to this show, what's the secret sauce? I know it's not that easy. But what do you remember doing differently or just doing for the first time in that first year? 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah. Well, it's easy to go from 0 to 1. That was easier than where we are now, trying to grow off of that 7, 8 years later. We weren't necessarily creating  excitement or enthusiasm or energy. We were kind of just identifying what those waves were and hopping on. We're looking at what's trending in sports and that was really my job from day one was do what you do in the sports media world, running sports content organizations like newsrooms and apply that to commerce and merchandise.

You know what's happening in sports today? Okay. Had a crazy shot. This guy's going viral because he said some crazy stuff. This team just signed a new quarterback. Which of those things could you commercialize in the form of merchandise? Like which of those things would fans like to wear? Would they like to wear a quote that's going viral where the Washington quarterback just screamed, “You like that?” after a big game.

Well, yeah, you like that. It's fun. Like, let's put it on a shirt in team colors. So I was just looking at that every day. We had one artist who is really talented because I don't do art well,  but we had one really good artist  who could take these things and turn them into products for us. had a  production partner, a printer that would  fulfill all our orders and get them out in timely fashion and high quality and just do that every day.

And we would build up hit after hit, and those things would decline inevitably after the first few days. And then you find another one. And that was the beauty and why BreakingT really works with sports is like the excitement regenerates. 

And there's so many fan bases and so many different tribes of people that you can kind of tap into and identify something they're excited about, and then make it even more exciting. Take a good thing and make it even better. That's what we were doing then and it's what we try to keep doing now. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah, I've got  a not necessarily a logistics question, but I'm fascinated by just the velocity in which you are releasing new products. I think we could talk about that for the entire episode. But  I do want to cover some other territories. But my question is how long are these products live and are you keeping them live forever or are you archiving them after the demand goes down? 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to do this and I don't know what the best way is. I know just how we've done it as we were launching and really the product only existed in digital format. Here's the digital mock-up of a shirt with this graphic on it. And if you want to buy it, great, we're going to print it and send it to you. So we would put something up for sale for a day, two days.

Kind of gauge demand and then do a large batch print to fill those orders and maybe meet something extra, kind of predict conservatively how it'll continue to sell. But then once that inventory dried up and once sales had kind of dried up, that was just sold out and we're onto the next, Bill Belichick style, we're onto the next. 

And we did it that way, only printing in large batches and having limited supply for individual products. We did it that way for the first few years. And then we started diversifying the ways in which we are producing the garments and started introducing print on demand to the equation. So we still do both like the larger batch prints, but printing on demand as well, one at a time for specific orders has enabled us to continue selling things forever.

That great moment when the Packers beat the Bears in 2018. You can still buy that shirt on BreakingT, even though you might be the only one this week.  

Chase Clymer

I guess a question I think some people out there would have is just like, why isn't everything just print on demand if it's so easy? I think I know the answer, but I want to hear from you.  

Jamie Mottram

The costs, really. We also have a thriving wholesale business to our retail partners. The machinery that we use to print in large batches to do screen printing. We're using that  for retail anyway,  for our Dick's Sporting Goods, SCHEELS, and Rally House and these different sports retailer partners of ours. So we have that operation, we have that capability already. So we also apply it to our hot DTC sellers. If a DTC seller is selling, like we've got 200 units sold of a specific graphic.

We'd rather screen print that because just the print cost associated on a unit basis is like half of if we were doing direct to garment individual prints. So you can also do it a lot faster. Like the screen print, we can print off thousands of shirts in a day for an individual graphic. Easy peasy. DTG, that's going to take a longer time. Just the manpower of loading each shirt individually onto a machine. So anyways, it starts to get a little boring and a little complex. Try to keep it simple. But we can have it both ways. 

Chase Clymer

Sometimes I surprise myself with my guesses on these answers. And I was 100% right. It came down to time and unit cost. Still talking about the early days of BreakingT. So you have an awesome engine to create and ideate on merch designs in a unique way that people haven't seen for a unique niche, this fan base and this audience. Now, how are you going about putting these products in front of these fans?  How are you finding new customers and retaining these customers? 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah. There's all sorts of ways. At this point, now we have a pretty robust customer database that we can segment out. If your team just got a new quarterback then you're going to hear from BreakingT about it in your inbox and maybe through SMS. Or maybe if you follow us on social channels, you'll see it organically. These are kind of  the things that I guess you fall into  the banner of organic. And that's been a strong and growing channel for us throughout. Email has continued to grow for us across the seven plus years I've been doing this. 

But we also have affiliate marketing where we'll partner with different, it used to be like every team we had like a blog partner. We'd find the best blog about  the Packers, Ohio State,  whoever, whatever team it is,  that they've got at least one blog, if not a whole army of bloggers.  We're going to partner with them, have it be an affiliate model. And it's not only just revenue sharing on referred sales,  but also collaborative, like coming up with creative concepts and ideas. Because like if you're an Ohio State blogger, like you are a diehard, you know everything that's going on, you know all the flavors of it that don't necessarily work for other schools that probably don't work for other schools. So that was cool because it was like not only bringing customers into the store, but improving our products too. And like leveling up. 

Chase Clymer

They would have just insane niche idea. Like you're like, I've never heard that phrase before. It's like, yeah, you're not from here.

Jamie Mottram

Right, that sounds dirty. It's not dirty, is it? But yeah, so we would get in front of customers that way. And we still do that, but it's kind of broadened and evolved. So sometimes those affiliate partners would be like social influencers or podcasters, sometimes athletes, media members,  so we have that affiliate business. And then we do a lot of paid like everybody else through Meta, Google, and Amazon. 

And with sports, it's pretty easy to identify your audience for any given product. And we've got so many products now, a deep catalog for pretty much any team or school in any sport. So we have these campaigns running for I don't know, literally hundreds of teams across those different platforms. So that's another way we've been able to be pretty efficient and been able to scale out the business. I mean, those are the main ways for Ecom. And I know that that's what we're talking about here. But wholesale is a whole other beast. 

Chase Clymer

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Chase Clymer

Yeah, let's get into wholesale. And that's when we started this show. Even me as an  entrepreneur and a host, like, yeah, I was very interested in Ecommerce. But that's just part one of building a successful business. And I think limiting yourself to only direct consumer Ecommerce experience, you're leaving money on the table. And at the end of the day, why are people listening to this? They want to become better and they want to build something cool. And why limit the conversation to just that online experience? So when did wholesale or these retail partners become a big play for BreakingT? 

Jamie Mottram

It was starting to become big right before COVID. And then it wasn't big for a while. 

Chase Clymer

All the buyers were like, let me call you back. 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah, I handled all of our sales up until I think mid 2019, like summer 2019. Like we didn't have a sales force at all because we were 100% direct to consumers online during those initial years, those first few years. 

But we were having some success like getting into stadium stores. Our first foray into retail was working with like the Washington Nationals, working with the Cleveland Indians, working with different teams for their in-venue retail. Because what we had that they didn't offer was what they referred to as front table merchandise. 

So if a player did something or there was some sort of achievement unlocked that we had merchandise for, they had no other product, they had no other goods that really touched on that. So they would want to come to us and not only bring it in, but bring it in and put it on the front table of the store because it was like window dressing is the first thing people see that greeted them. 

And if you notice this, if you're like in our little corner of the world, most of these like stadium store experiences are like sports fan retail experiences. There's always something special and new on the front table. There's always something that's seasonal, like, oh, these new uniforms that the team's wearing. Here's the jerseys or the special release hat or the green stuff for St. Patrick's Day, whatever, it's always something that's gimmicky, quite often. 

But this is like an authentic way to do that. It's like this is what you actually care about that just happened with the team. So we saw that within venue retail. And then we kind of broadened it and expanded to sports specialty retailers across the country, like Dick’s, SCHEELS and Academy, Lids, and Rally House. But it was still that front table dynamic that was really at play.  

A lot of NFL stars just switch teams. If you're a Steelers fan, you're excited about DK Metcalf. If you're a Steelers fan, you might be a little scared about Aaron Rodgers or whatever it is. If you're selling your merchandise to Pittsburgh fans, you want to have something that speaks to this and isn't just ignoring what's really like the hottest topic. So that's why we're able to build out that business, the challenge is being as fast as we are with Ecom. We need to deliver quickly. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. It's a little harder to update that table across, I'm assuming, hundreds of stores at this point. 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah. Not only do we have to print and ship the goods, and not only do they have to receive them and have them out and tagged and ready for purchase, but they  just need to place the orders to begin with. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. 

Jamie Mottram

There's so many steps in the process that are really built for more seasonal goods. And we're going to buy stuff for summer. And the summer 25 buy is going to happen in spring 24. That's been kind of a common thread with BreakingT is disruption. But I don't necessarily mean it in a good entrepreneurial catchphrase type of way. It's like our speed is disruptive. And we're constantly trying to pull everybody through with us.

Chase Clymer

Yeah, I could almost feel the frustration of a big moment happening. They placed an order a week ago and you go, you have to get some of this. This is going to sell like gangbusters. 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah. And sometimes the industry is right there with us. There's fired up, there's this new capability. Ohio State won the national championship. Their linebacker Jack Sawyers is like a Buckeye hero and he had a legendary moment in the college football playoff. It was a scoop and score to beat Texas. Great stuff. 

Like instant like Buckeye lore, you know? And we had graphics designed for like that night, you know, to celebrate the scoop and score and the legend of Jack Sawyer. And Ohio State to their credit, the Buckeye and IL collective to their credit, they approved those products immediately. So we were able to go to the market and sell while fans were flipping out and that's really powerful. We see that in our conversion rates. They're like, through the roof, like three, four, five X normal. But then there's the flips out of that. The same type of moment might have happened with another licensing entity where we have to wait two, three days. 

Chase Clymer

And the momentum's gone. It's been replaced by the next thing in the news cycle. 

Jamie Mottram

Freaking out. Right. And it goes to market. And you know what? That conversion rate is completely down. It's down to normal. It might as well not even be a hot product. There's so many different dynamics. And that's another thing with what we do. And you've probably spoken to other brands. We're licensed consumer products. So it's not always up to us. We have to wait on approvals and it's not necessarily our say as to exactly what the finished product is going to look like and when it's going to be ready. 

Chase Clymer

Now, you mentioned Amazon earlier. And I am not an Amazon expert by any means. But I am curious, was Amazon always a channel for you? Or did you add it in at some certain point?

Jamie Mottram

We were reluctant at first because we felt like it was going to cannibalize our Ecommerce business. And we also were growing our DTC business so aggressively that we didn't feel like we needed it, it wasn't like the timing was right to kind of branch out. As we leveled off a little bit with DTC and got more and more kind of confident that it was a different audience and a different customer. We started branching out and doing more with Amazon. And that has grown tremendously for us over the past few years. We've had a lot of success with that marketplace. 

Chase Clymer

Did you ever feel it was actually cannibalizing direct consumer sales? 

Jamie Mottram

I feel like it might be. I feel like it might be now. And it's so hard to say. I don't know. Maybe it's not hard to say. Maybe somebody has all the answers. And I don't. I know we want to be where the fans are, where our customers are and potential customers. So we're trying to balance that. We feel like if we weren't on Amazon, and we're not in some cases because of licensing restrictions and distribution channels, issues, not issues, but like rights, you have rights to different channels and we don't have them for Amazon across the board. 

I think it would harm our business to not have our goods listed on Amazon. I don't know at what point it tips in the other direction where we're causing more harm by flooding the zone and putting our listings there. I do think that the scale has gotten to the level where it's starting to have some conflict with our DTC business and maybe our wholesale business. So that's something that we've really struggled to balance and achieve the right balance.  

So far, I think it's been a very positive aspect of our business. And one thing that really motivated me was totally anecdotal. It was going to be my son's 10th birthday and he's a Steph Curry fan. And my mom texted me all these screenshots of Steph Curry t-shirts and like, hey, what do you think Miles would like for his birthday? And they were all shirts from a competitor of ours that she had found on Amazon. And I'm like, mom, we make Steph Curry shirts. 

Chase Clymer

I love your mom.  

Jamie Mottram

Didn't even like to know that she didn't. She not only didn't realize that we have Steph Curry shirts, but she also was looking on a platform where like competitive products are and that we aren't. And we weren't at the time, you know, and it just kind of tipped me off a little bit further and gave me that like personal anecdote of there are certain shoppers that just like their search begins and ends on Amazon. So we don't want to ignore that. 

Chase Clymer

Now if you could make it short and sweet for I know there are listeners out there. They're 100% on probably Shopify or something similar. And they're scared of Amazon. What would you tell them? Should they explore it? 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah. Well, we're on Shopify too. And we're experimenting with merging the two and doing some, can buy with Prime with certain products  on breakingt.com. can buy them with Amazon Prime,  which is fantastic with regard to free shipping that we're not paying for  and fantastic with regard to you can get it by  whatever date, which is usually very near.

And probably before whatever you're buying our product for. A lot of our products are, like event related. You're buying it as a gift for,  you're buying it as something you're gonna wear to a game. So having their capability and that capability of saying you're gonna get it by this date, it's really powerful for our type of product and maybe other goods. But we can't make that promise.  

We can print really fast and we can pack it up and ship it out really fast, but it's like going through USPS and like, we have to give you a range. Like it might be Tuesday, it might be Thursday. And we could even say it's going to be Thursday, but like it's not really up to us  that's been the other. And also like what we do from a product standpoint, it's a bit more commoditized like you can get sports t-shirts.

You can get it from other places than BreakingT.com. It depends on what you're selling as well. I feel like if you've got a product that's very differentiated and you have to go to this specific brand to get it, that might make a little more sense to be Shopify 100%. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Very nuanced and great answer from you, Jamie. Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you think would resonate with our audience today. 

Jamie Mottram

You didn't say, hey, Jamie, how do you know everything that's happening in sports all the time? Would you like to know?  

Chase Clymer

I mean, if I could guess, I'm just going to be, Okay, Hashtags and what's trending on social media platforms?  

Jamie Mottram

And it used to be like I was just like looking at Twitter and looking at Sports Center and I'm a sports fan and everybody we hired along the way is sports fans and like we know stuff. 

Chase Clymer

I mean, that's a great job. You're allowed to watch Sports Center at work. 

Jamie Mottram

I love it. I mean, I've got college basketball tournament action on TV right now. It's awesome. But what we've developed is a platform called Crowdbreak where we have dashboards for all the teams and all the sports and all the markets.  

And if we're intentionally looking for something, if we're like, oh man, what do Yankees fans care about this season going into the 2025 Major League Baseball season? We can look in Crowdbreak and see everything kind of sorted for us, like the trending topics, like the highest performing content and the most viral videos. And we can kind of cherry pick different aspects that might inform our creativity and our products.  

So that's like the intentional go get it. But then, if something unexpectedly awesome happens like, I'll just pick a random team, the Winnipeg Jets of the NHL, like that triggers an alert for our team. Something that Winnipeg jets are like over indexing on social media. We know about it through crowd break. And then we can do that intentional part where we kind of understand it and get the flavor of it. And that's how we scale this approach to the hot market, unplanned sports apparel with BreakingT is through the Crowdbreak platform and  listening to all the social chatter. 

Chase Clymer

You and the team developed this? 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah, we developed it. And we use it for sports, but really, it could be for anything. 

Chase Clymer

And did you spin it off into its own entity? 

Jamie Mottram

Should we?  

Chase Clymer

Eat your own dog food. That's the Microsoft way.  

Jamie Mottram

So far, we use it internally and we make it available to partners. And it informs some of our partner ordering behavior. NFL free agency, 100 players to switch teams. Okay, well, what's the top 10? And what order? And how many shirts should we buy? So  that's been helpful to work with partners. But yeah, it could evolve from there. 

Chase Clymer

That's very interesting. Just the IP that you've developed there. I'm sure there's some ways that it could definitely be a viable business in and of itself. I remember interviewing a gentleman and I forgot the name of the suit brand. But the technology in which they developed to  basically take your measurements and have a custom tailored suit made within a week, realized that making the suits wasn't the product. It was the technology. And then they turned around and sold that business for a bunch of money.  

Jamie Mottram

Well, Shopify we were talking about earlier. Wasn't Shopify started by some Canadian snowboarder? 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Toby selling snowboards. 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah. And then it's running all of our stores.  

Chase Clymer

Exactly. Awesome. Jamie, now, obviously, you talked about how  awesome and timely and innovative these tees are. If I want to go check them out, where should I go? What should I do? 

Jamie Mottram

Yeah. BreakingT.com, man. Go to BreakingT.com. Every day, we got new products. I don't know what the new things are going to be tomorrow. I didn't know today what it was going to be until last night happened. We're putting out  new shirts every day. I don't even want to call them drops or anything because they're not planned. It's not like a planned assortment.  It's more like  we're just  watching what happens and reacting to it as best we can and trying to turn today's excitement into tomorrow's new favorite t-shirt. So BreakingT.com will take care of you. 

Chase Clymer

Awesome, Jamie. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Jamie Mottram

Alright.Thanks, Chase. Good talking to you. 

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

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