DETERMINING FATE
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The fate of the Penguins’ quest for backto-back Stanley Cups may still be in the balance, but Kevin Nord’s already crunching the numbers to prepare for the Pittsburgh hockey team’s potential victory.
He’s got 200,000 gold towels sitting in a facility, ready to be shipped off within 48 hours of the end of the Cup final finale.
Mr. Nord heads Pro Towels, the O’Hara-based towel supplier that claims to be the largest company of its kind in the promotional product industry. A Pittsburgh staple for 20 years, its work can be widely seen.
The thousands of gold rally towels waving furiously in Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena when the Penguins and Predators squared off? That’s Pro Towels. The towels that the Golden State Warriors hand out for free at their basketball games? That’s also from this company.
Stevan Ferguson, who runs Pittsburgh Imprinting, the Sewickley-based promotional products merchandiser that Pro Towels sometimes partners with to distribute its towels, said the task ahead of Mr. Nord is a logistical “juggernaut.”
“They’re looking one, maybe two weeks down the row when they go over all the different scenarios,” Mr. Ferguson said. “So even though the game is maybe three, four days away, Pro Towels is going over the production schedule with us. There aren’t too many people in the industry who can do what Kevin does.”
To hear Mr. Nord tell it, Pro Towels, if in a crunch, can turn around an order within just 48 hours.
“There’s 48 hours between games,” Mr. Nord said. “We’ll get the artwork, and we’ll start printing at 10:30 that night.”
Why the crunch? Even when a team has its artwork prepared ahead of time, Mr. Nord said Pro Towels won’t start printing towels until it is absolutely sure a team has won its game, shrinking the window it has to get the orders done.
“Most teams have sponsors, so if they have the sponsor before the next game, we’ll most likely have it, but we’re still not going to print it, even if they have it beforehand,” Mr. Nord said. “I’m not going to print it and risk them not winning, because then I’ll have 18,000 towels on my hands.”
Usually, though, an order will take anywhere between 1-3 weeks to deliver. Pro Towels is mainly in the towel business, supplying anyone from sports teams to financial institutions with rally towels, beach towels, golf towels and more. But it produces other items as well: Tshirts, decorative blankets, and flip-flops. Mr. Nord said towels remain the company’s most popular item, with blankets a close second.
According to Lauren Slee, a company spokeswoman, Pro Towels brings in more than $17 million in annual revenue. The corporate headquarters is in Pittsburgh, where the company was started, but the magic happens at a facility in South Carolina, where it produces its towels.
The process works like this: Pro Towels will get a piece of artwork from a team and will decorate blank towels from its facilities. Once the towels are finished, they’re shipped off to the teams immediately. The towels are mostly used as giveaways by the teams, Mr. Nord said, which is why you’ll often find Pittsburgh’s stadiums awash in gold during sports events.
Technically, the Penguins aren’t Pro Towels’ direct clients. Mr. Nord said Pro Towels works with a middle-man, a distribution intermediary like Mr. Ferguson’s company or BDA Merchandise to supply products to the teams.
“We deal with distributors, so in the professional products industry, we don’t sell to the end users, we sell to distributors,” Mr. Nord said. “We’ll supply them with the towels, and they’re the ones who end up talking to the leagues directly.”
The company has grown to several locations across the country since its inception, including South Carolina, Vancouver and Las Vegas.