As rumors circulated this week that Bill Belichick could become the new football coach at the University of North Carolina, Jamie Mottram knew that his company needed to be prepared.
Mr. Mottram is the president of BreakingT, a sports fan apparel company that specializes in viral moments. Juan Soto signs with the Mets? BreakingT went straight to its production facility for a fresh heap of “Juan Solo,” “Juan Gone” and “Do the Soto Shuffle” T-shirts. Jake Bates nails a game-winning field goal for the Detroit Lions? Perhaps BreakingT can interest you in a “Legatron” hoodie.
Keenly aware that Mr. Belichick’s unconventional move to the college ranks had the potential to set the sports world ablaze, Mr. Mottram was thrilled when Sam Franco, BreakingT’s product manager, came up with a nifty nickname: Chapel Bill, which was, of course, a play on the school’s location in Chapel Hill, N.C.
“That’s great!” Mr. Mottram recalled telling Mr. Franco. “That’s so clever.”
Yet by the time Mr. Belichick’s hiring became official on Wednesday, Chapel Bill was not merely an idea that was floating in the ether at BreakingT’s corporate headquarters in Arlington, Va. The nickname already belonged to the world — and, more specifically, to apparel shops in Chapel Hill that pounced on the news.
“It seemed like everybody had the same idea,” Mr. Mottram said.
Such was the rush to find ways to capitalize on one of the most prominent football coaches in N.F.L. history coming to a university more closely associated with basketball. The two main options: a play on his name or a reference to his addiction to short-sleeved sweatshirts.
Mr. Belichick, who coached the New England Patriots to six championships in his long N.F.L. career, was known for being as gruff as he was dominant. He would stage monosyllabic news conferences and then patrol the sidelines in hobo-chic apparel, with the sleeves often shorn around his elbows.
It was such a signature look for Mr. Belichick that Bubba Cunningham, North Carolina’s athletic director, put on a blazer with cutoff sleeves at Mr. Belichick’s news conference on Thursday.
“Any hoodie cutoff at this point is going to be a seller,” said Melissa Pate, the owner of the Shrunken Head Boutique in Chapel Hill. “We’ll cut the sleeves off anything.”
On Wednesday, a television news reporter popped by the store to ask Ms. Pate some questions, including: Did the store plan on selling any short-sleeved sweatshirts?
Sure enough, just before the shop closed that evening, a patron poked his head inside.
“Hey, do you guys have the cutoff hoodies?” he asked.
“And that’s when I was like, OK, this is definitely a thing,” Ms. Pate said.
By Thursday morning, local news crews were swarming the shops of Chapel Hill’s Franklin Street, and Ms. Pate commissioned her brand manager, Alana Adams, to get creative on social media. In an Instagram post, Ms. Adams trimmed the sleeves on a North Carolina hoodie to Belichick-ian specifications before slipping it onto a mannequin.
“Get your cuff off hoodie now at SHRUNKEN HEAD,” the post reads.
At the same time, Ms. Pate said, her team has been brainstorming other Belichick-related ideas. Among them: T-shirts with phrases like “Beat Duke” (at Thursday’s news conference, Mr. Belichick claimed those were his first words as a baby) and “I didn’t come here to leave” (something he said in response to speculation that he was using this job to land another N.F.L. gig).
Chapel Hill Sportswear, meanwhile, had a huge advantage over many of the local businesses that were trying to cash in on the Belichick hype: The store has its own screen-printing equipment. Holly Dedmond, the store manager, said that she and her team started the process of printing their own “Chapel Bill” T-shirts and sweatshirts on Thursday morning so they would be available for purchase by the start of Mr. Belichick’s early-afternoon news conference.
Though the garments are in Carolina blue — and please don’t make the mistake of describing that particular color as “powder blue” — Ms. Dedmond said she had purposely avoided including North Carolina logos on them because the licensing approval process probably would have delayed their rollout by about a week.
And while the sleeves on the sweatshirts are still intact, they are, of course, customizable.
“You can easily take a pair of scissors to them,” Ms. Dedmond said.
The debate now, she said, is whether to special-order sweatshirts with the sleeves already shorn, so that the seams are more finished and look a bit nicer. But would that jibe with Mr. Belichick’s no-frills approach?
“We’ve got to figure that out,” Ms. Dedmond said.
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