Exerpts from The Globe and Mail's Report on Business article "Hard Core Logo" on Dan and Brant Fahey, Toronto 2002...
If there were such a thing as an emporium just for logos—a place where the registered trademark had been separated from the thing itself, it would look like the warehouse run by Maraca Canada, a Mississauga, Ont., firm that distributes licensed merchandise for clients like the Molson Indy and the National Hockey League. Dan Fahey, Maraca’s co-founder, is walking me through aisles brimming with the flotsam of the brand revolution. He’s a burly 61-year old with a loping gait and close-cropped grey hair. Fahey’s chatter manner speaks to his Gaspe-Irish roots and a by-the bootstraps career spent among the yakkers in sports marketing.
Over here, he says, that pile of Bridgestone jackets was for an employee recognition program. A bit further, cartons of Tuborg Beer glasswear and bottle openers for bar contests. Fahey points out Maraca’s miniature Allied Van Lines truck for parades. Zillions of Moosehead coasters. "Snowjam" lanyards. NHL paraphernalia. Shirts. Pens. Key fobs. A Santa cap emblazoned with the Sunoco diamond. Stuffed into a crate we find a 15 metre long inflatable snake, the possible purpose of which escapes me. On the loading bay sit skids of boxes headed to the Vancouver Indy and World Youth Day. Maraca’s clients include everyone from Mario Andretti to the Pope—everyone, that is, with a brand to peddle. He grabs a plastic gizmo the size of a deck of cards, which bears a soft-focus. Illuminated image of John Paul II. It plays a recording of the pontiff singing mass. "What would you call this thing?" Fahey mutters to himself. "I have no idea…"
If consumer products are the engine of the modern economy, then brands function as the lubricant. Yet many companies have fallen into the trap of believing that if you simply brand it, they will buy. Fahey and the dozens of entrepreneurs in Canada’s $1.8-billion-a-year promotional products industry know better: For more than a decade, they have been on the front lines of a commercial revolution that has come to place far more stock in the cover than the book. Firms like Maraca exist because of the primacy of that most intangible of all corporate assets: reputation. Indeed, these businesses specialize in understanding how those symbolized reputations are exported into a society that often seems punch-drunk on the virtues of sponsorship, image and imputed association.
Maraca operates in a borderless sub-economy straddling events management, sports, licensing, consumer branding and corporate philanthropy. Even social trends: "Casual Fridays changed the industry totally," says Sandie Nelles, partner in Reaction Promotions Inc., a Toronto-area company whose clients include major firms like Hewlett-Packard. A decade ago, she says, it was all golf balls and office mugs. Today, it’s open neck brushed twill shirts with the corporate trademark discreetly emblazoned on the breast pocket—perfect for Fridays. And the clients want quality, especially the brand-on-brand look (e.g., the company logo on a Roots shirt). That’s become the gold standard for such, and it has contributed to something of a boom for Canadian clothing manufactures, which tend to produce a greater share of higher-quality products than the offshore suppliers. "People have gotten away from the $9 golf shirt where the guy gets it as a gift and then polishes his car with it," says Laura Hansen who runs Image Group Inc., a Vancouver firm whose clients include PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Fahey can slap just about anything the manufacturer’s sales reps bring in their sample bags—be it a $1.50 T-shirt or a $1000 leather jacket; a plush toy mass-produced in China; or a customized piece of Inuit sculpture that can be worked up into a commemorative gift. But it’s also about timing: These firms must deliver their wares to the unforgiving deadlines imposed by events such as charity golf tournaments. Maraca even mans the merchandise kiosks at the events themselves. All this spring it ran the World Youth Day store in downtown Toronto.
It is a cottage industry at heart. Even a big player like Maraca is only a $5-million-a-year business with 30 full time employees and a few hundred more part-timers, who staff the kiosks at events. "You can have a mom-and-pop operation and still be successful," says Hansen, whose firm brings in $6 million and grew from four employees to 18 in under a decade. "You need to be as automated as your clients, so you have to keep up with technology."
What you need, Fahey notes, is connections. His own career began with the Montreal Olympics, where he organized flights for the athletes. From there, he joined Alan Eagleson’s Team Canada tour, then the World Hockey Association, and finally the Edmonton Oilers, where he was in charge of marketing during "the glory years.’ (On his right hand is a diamond encrusted Stanley Cup ring that looks to weigh a pound.) For a while Fahey ran marketing for the Canadian Football league, but he and his son Brant, a political science grad who’d gone into advertising, were at the same starting to make good money out of their part-time mail order business. In 1989, they decided to go full-time, and never looked back.
Maraca’s growth is a connect-the-dots tale: from the NHL to the beer companies to the Molson Indy to various Formula One events to the tire companies and the gasoline marketers and eventually back to the beer promoters. That’s how the World Youth Day contract came about. Maraca is responsible for sourcing the colourful T-shirts, the emblazoned key chains and all the other memorabilia (expected to generate about $800,000 in sales). The company was also hired to run the non-food kiosks for the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims expected in Toronto in late July. The organizers, who worked for the Toronto Archdiocese, tapped some of the companies that mount the Toronto Molson Indy, who in turn, put WYD onto Fahey. "We know the power people, the golf cart guy, the outhouse guy. D’you follow?" Fahey calls it a "religious Woodstock" With Youth Day," he says, "everything’s larger than life. It’s not sports at all but the logistics are the same."
As is the merchandising: "It’s all licensed," Brant says. "The Pope’s image. The WYD logo. Believe it or not, the Vatican has a licensing department."