And the winner is…

Many people assume that Coed Naked Lacrosse is the best-selling Coed Naked shirt of all time. And it’s not a bad guess, as it was the bestselling design for the first couple of years. It is certainly the most iconic Coed Naked design as it was the original and is still my favorite. But its number 1 status for total sales was surpassed likely sometime in the middle of 1993. Here’s how that happened.

Sometime in 1992 I received a call from one of our small retail customers in Waterville Valley New Hampshire, The Waterville Valley Shirt Company. They had been a good customer since early 1992, buying a variety of our designs and reordering frequently. During this call however, they had a special request, which sparked one of our first significant internal debates of the year. They asked if we could develop a Coed Naked Firefighting shirt, strictly for them. Apparently, the local fire department liked the Coed Naked offerings the Waterville store was selling and asked to have a special design made for the crew at the station.

The crux of the debate was whether adding firefighting as a Coed Naked theme would enhance the brand or whether deviating from our collegiate sports and beach themes would water down the brand or even make it look as though we had reached the end of relevant designs to add. Looking back at this “significant” concern makes me laugh today. You know times were good when this type of issue was rattling our brains.

We spent too many hours contemplating the impact of adding 48 pieces of Coed Naked Firefighting to a small account in Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. I remember this debate going on for a couple of weeks before we finally decided to create the design exclusively for our customer recognizing that having 48 Coed Naked Firefighting shirts in a small store in northern New Hampshire could hardly cause too much damage.

Within just a few days of delivering the shirts to Waterville we had a reorder for 48 more firefighting shirts. Soon after that a third reorder came in.

Firefighting became the number one selling Coed Naked design after its first full month of being in our stock program and was consistently a top three seller for the next two years. In late 1993 Firefighting became the highest selling Coed Naked design ever, surpassing the original, Lacrosse. In 1994 alone we likely sold more than 500,000 Coed Naked firefighting shirts.

Given the immediate success of firefighting we quickly added Coed Naked Law Enforcement, Nursing, and EMT to our new occupation series. They all became top sellers, in fact in March of 1994 Fire, Law and Nursing ranked one, two and three in sales.

Mark Lane

President

Coed Sportswear, LLC