Quidditch Shirt Goes Viral at Missouri State Store
6/29/12
Mark Brixey is very familiar with how well merchandise from the popular Harry Potter series of books and movies sells because his kids are part of that generation. The director of the Missouri State Bookstore, Missouri State University, Springfield, even decided to stock a small run of a specialty “Quidditch” tee shirt in his store.
What caught Brixey off guard was the response.
“I was honestly floored,” he said of selling more than 90 shirts and needing to reorder within the first 24 hours, despite the fact most students are off campus on summer break. “It’s pretty sparse around here, but there’s been a lot of buzz on these Quidditch shirts.”
The shirt, supplied by Russell Athletics, is a simple maroon tee with Missouri State in white block letters trimmed in yellow above a yellow bar that has the word “Quidditch” spelled out in maroon. Below the bar is a pair of crossed Quidditch brooms.
For the uninitiated, Quidditch is a semi-contact sport invented by author J.K. Rowling for the Harry Potter series and played by wizards and witches. It features two teams of seven players riding flying broomsticks and uses four balls and six elevated ring-shaped goals on each side of the playing field, called the Quidditch pitch.
Harry Potter fans quickly came up with their own version of the game that is played on the ground. More than 200 colleges have teams affiliated with the International Quidditch Association that compete in tournaments.
The Missouri State store used its Facebook page to promote the new tees with a post when they arrived on June 14, followed with a photo of the tee the next day. The store raced through 93 shirts at $14.99 each, plus added 60 new “likes” on its Facebook page within the first 24 hours the shirts were in stock.
The initial post was then used on the university Facebook site and picked up by the student-run Overheard at Missouri State and Missouri State Tip Jar Facebook pages, chalking up another 300 new likes to the total. Since adding the tee shirts to his stock, Brixey has fielded calls about the shirts from area Quidditch clubs and found a merchant in Columbia selling black Mizzou Quidditch tees.
“I knew this Harry Potter generation would spend money on this kind of thing, but I didn’t know it would get picked up and pushed out the way it has across the campus by different organizations,” Brixey said. “This tells me that the time we spend on Facebook is important. That’s where the students are at and it’s a reasonably inexpensive media to use to connect to these students.”
By Dan Angelo
Assistant Editor
The College Store magazine
(800) 622-7498, ext. 2259
dangelo@nacs.org |
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