This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Erik May, 43, who is the president of Flags Unlimited, a business based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Business Insider has verified the sales figures. This piece has been edited for length and clarity.
We’re a small business in the Midwest. Getting asked for Algerian, Moroccan, and dozens of Iraqi flags is certainly uncommon here.
Our flag sales are normally almost entirely US, state, and military flags. So when we started getting more and more inquiries about world flags during our offseason in January and February, I knew something was up.
Then I started putting it all together. The World Cup was coming, and it was about to change our business.
I never expected to run a flag company
I’m from West Michigan, and after 9/11, I joined the military. I thought I’d do a couple of years, but I ended up spending 14 years in the Air Force and served in Iraq.
After leaving the military, I started a few businesses. The flag business was something I’d never thought about. All I knew was that I liked flags and thought the American one was beautiful.
Two of my buddies were buying Flags Unlimited, and I was looking for a new challenge. So together, we took over the business in April 2025. It’s been around since 1985, and for most of its history, it was strictly retail.
When we took over, our goal was simply to survive those first few months and build out the e-commerce side of the business. We certainly weren’t looking ahead to the World Cup or America’s 250th birthday, but we’ve definitely benefited from some tailwinds.
We knew we were in for a chaotic summer
The flag business tends to be seasonal, so we do most of our business between May and September. That’s why it was particularly noteworthy when we started seeing an uptick during our offseason, when we normally budget for sales to be slower.
When we realized the World Cup would coincide with America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, we knew we were in for a chaotic summer. Several months ago, we began adjusting how we operated.
We already had a large catalog of foreign flags, but in April, we started adding more of them to our orders so we’d have them in stock. The challenge is that you can plan, plan, plan, but if one person comes in and buys everything, the plan goes out the window pretty quickly.
There have been challenges in keeping up
Flags are a hot commodity right now. Day to day, we’re processing orders as quickly as we get them, but we’ve run into supply chain issues because everyone is so busy. As demand for flags has picked up nationwide and worldwide, suppliers have been racing to secure raw materials.
Another challenge is that we don’t want to overspend and be stuck with 10,000 America’s 250th flags because they’re probably not going to sell a whole lot afterward. The same goes for international flags. As teams move through the quarterfinals and semifinals, we’ll adjust and hedge our bets on inventory. By the finals, I expect those countries to account for a large share of our flag sales.
Staffing is always an issue. We’ve increased our manpower to match where we think the next few weeks of the World Cup will take us. We hired my wife and two additional part-time employees.
These are all good problems to have, but they still need to be dealt with.
The World Cup has supercharged our business
Sales of our international nylon flags have more than doubled compared with last year, and overall sales are up 130% year over year.
Our e-commerce business is growing rapidly, and that didn’t happen just because I’m a smart guy. There are bigger forces at play than that.
The World Cup, combined with America’s 250th anniversary, has supercharged our business. We’ve seen tremendous national growth, and these events have definitely moved the needle for us. We’ve been fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.
We never saw this coming
To some extent, we were blindsided by this. We didn’t market for it. It just happened.
Soccer wasn’t a big sport in the US when I was growing up, and most of what I know comes from watching “Ted Lasso.” But I’m now well aware that this is the world’s largest sporting event, and we’re fortunate to have it in this country this year.
I think there are a lot of small businesses like ours that are benefiting from FIFA’s decision many years ago to bring the World Cup to North America. Now, the thought of a little flag business in Grand Rapids participating in the World Cup, even in a very small way, feels incredibly surreal.
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