Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Custom Print Shirts: Can They Help Wrestlers?

By Robert Sutter


Let's say that you are a popular star in professional wrestling; you can be certain that merchandise is going to be made with your likeness intact. The most popular stars in WWE have these pieces of merchandise that you could find at just about any store. Wristbands are up for sale and the same can be said for garden gnomes, of all things. That being said, tees are still the most common and part of me wonders if custom print shirts can be utilized to help growing performers.

If you were to look at the cavalcade of stars developing their characters and wrestling talents in NXT, you can see that not one of them has merchandise made. You can make the argument that they are still learning and their content isn't show on television but I'd like to think that there's something profitable there. When you watch NXT, you can see that some wrestlers gain stronger reactions than others. I can name off of a couple of examples that stand out the most, at least in my mind.

I think that Emma stands as my current favorite character in NXT right now and there are many reasons for this. It isn't just that she is a very talented in-ring performer, even though this is still very much the case. It's the confidence that she exudes when playing a dancing character, one that could have been a comedic throwaway but has grown as a very likable babyface. One of the defining features, at least to me, has to be her Emmalution t-shirt and I wonder why it hasn't been sold yet.

To me, this is where the creation of custom print shirts should be seen and I believe that can help these budding talents. Emma may not be able to gain an immediate reaction on television but the truth of the matter is that her status amongst NXT fans is tremendous. I can only imagine just how quickly the Emmalution shirts would sell out if they were put up on WWE's online marketplace. For more self-contained transactions, though, companies such as East End Screen Printing are worth noting.

In fact, I can only imagine just how many shirts would be sold if NXT decides to open up its own line of merchandise. To me, many of these stars are going to go to greatness once they are called up on TV so why not allow fans to show their support early on? If nothing else, it could prove to be another example of a moneymaker for WWE in general. It's clear that their developing stars have fans of their own; it's just a matter of bringing such stars to the next level.




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