SPOKANE, Wash. – Everybody who signs up for Hoopfest gets a shirt. If you win, you get another. There are several other shirts available for purchase for those who want them, but where do all these shirts come from?
The answer: Zome Design’s warehouse in Spokane Valley. Each year, they make between 20,000-30,000 shirts for Hoopfest alone.
That’s player, champion, volunteer, and retail shirts on top of the several hundred embroidered volunteer hats that they also make each year for Hoopfest.
Keep in mind, this comes at a very busy time of year for their warehouse.
Zome also makes merch for summer, church, and basketball camps, for Pride, and for the local USL teams.
Needless to say, supplying the shirts for Hoopfest, especially when you have to hide the design from the public, takes a lot of coordination.
“So between Hoopfest staff, the volunteers, and then our paid staff here at Zome, there’s quite a few people that go into making one of the greatest events in the United States, I would say,” said Brayden Jessen with Zome Design.
Unfortunately, we cannot show you any of the designs until Sunday. That being said, the “Loser King” shirt (for winners of the loser’s bracket) has a very clever theme to it that is worth sticking around for, even if you lose one of your first games.
