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If you’ve ever bought an official Summerfest T-shirt, hat or other branded gift, it’s gone through Dan Elias first. As vice president of The Specialized Marketing Group Inc., he’s managed the merch for the Big Gig for 17 years, and his 75 staffers are on the grounds every day of Summerfest running the show.

As you can imagine, this is a major operation with crazy deadlines and lots of logistics. As Summerfest 2016 begins to ramp up, we spoke to Whitefish Bay's Elias about everything that goes into making the merch that festgoers want to buy.

OnMilwaukee: What’s involved in making the merchandise for Summerfest? How long have you been doing it?

Dan Elias: I've been managing the Summerfest event merch operation since 1999. This has been a project for a good chunk of my adult life. It's fun and it's challenging. The hours are long, but it's such a great event to be a part of, you know? I was with a different company through 2011, and I had 2012 off. Then we took the contract back up in 2013, so this is the fourth year with TSMGI (The Specialized Marketing Group Inc.).

So every piece of Summerfest merchandise goes through you guys?

Exactly. We're an extension of the brand, and our role is to design, develop, procure, set up the stores, staff them and sell them. Then we obviously share the revenue with Milwaukee World Festival.

Summerfest has its own look and feel, but then your designers take it from there?

We work with a lot of freelance designers. We have an in-house design team that contributes, and over 19 years, we've developed some great relationships with some very, very strong graphic artists. It's a challenge, because if you go to the stores, you'll see that we have, like, 45 different garments, and most every garment has a different design. There are some that are shared, though.

We have to do that every year. Every year we have to come up with a new look, and we really try to give the product a retail feel. These are not promotional t-shirts like what you see that would be given away. We create the store to look like a store.

These are things that people would want to wear and buy, right?

You need a certain level of affinity toward the event in order to buy it and wear it, so we do get a lot of people that are first-timers to Summerfest that really want something that commemorates their visit. But the biggest majority of our customers are people that come year after year and have such a strong affinity for Summerfest because it's such a big part of the local community. Keeping those people interested and satisfied and happy is a real challenge.

Is it important for each piece to say 2016 on it, for example?

Not necessarily. We always have some products that are dated, that commemorate the year, but not all of them. We're designing to appeal to adults and for families. We have kids’ products, but the biggest factor in what's popular or what sells is weather.

So if it's a chilly day, you sell a bunch of hoodies?

Exactly.

Other than apparel, what do you sell?

We have a lot of gift items. We're always trying to come up with unique gifts. This year, we have a couple of things that we've never done before. We designed a holiday ornament that's shaped like a miniature guitar, and it has the Summerfest brand on it.

What else is really hot this year?

Interestingly, the best-selling shirt from last night was this long sleeved T-shirt that's garment washed. It looks faded and vintage-y. It has a stars-and-stripes design to it that we designed to be consistent with something you would see from Vineyard Vine. These students, high school and college kids, really love the pigment dyed or garment dyed apparel, so the color is called crimson. It's kind of a faded red, and it has a print on the pocket and a print on the back. Even though it wasn't really that cold yesterday, that was our bestselling item.

What else?

Routinely, every year, our bestselling T-shirt is the headliner T-shirt, and that's a real labor of love because in order for us to list the headliner on the shirt, we have to get a rights agreement signed by their representative. Either the manager, their tour manager, their business manager, their agent or their event merchandise manager. Someone has to sign it. Otherwise, we can't list it, and with 140 or so headlining artists, it takes us months to put that together.

It's the last thing that we print because we are waiting until the very end to get those final couple of approvals, and Selena Gomez was the last one that we got. We printed that shirt. We finalized the design on Friday, and they were printed on Monday, and on the shelf on Tuesday just in time for the event yesterday. That, from a souvenir or commemorative item standpoint of the world's largest music festival, that's it. That's the shirt that has the headlining artists on the back.

Because you guys don't do the individual band shirts, right?

Correct. We don't handle their band merchandise. That's another company. Forever we always wanted to do it, and I think it actually was when Don Smiley came in. He's like, "Why don't we do it?" That's what people would really like. You go to a concert, and the tour shirt with all the cities that they visited.

I bet it’s popular.

This is the shirt that has all the artists. Now this year, we have about 95 out of 140 or so, and it's not because we got 50 rejections. We got about eight or nine rejections. The rest of them we just never got an approval, and our marching orders are if it's not a yes, they don't go on the shirt.

How many physical locations are there at Summerfest where you can buy merchandise?

We have four locations. Our biggest location is in between the Miller Stage and the Harley Stage, in the Market Square. We have a location at the mid-gate. We have a location that's attached to the U.S. Cellular Stage, and then we have a really great tent location right by the south gate.

How many people are working at these?

We employ 60-75 staffers throughout the run, all TSMGI employees.

Is there an online presence to this? Is there an e-commerce part through Summerfest.com?

Yes, through Summerfest.com, there is a Summerfest store. Now we've disabled it during the event because we take all the product that we have in stock, and we put it out on the shelves. We really can't guarantee orders while we're selling it on site. We take orders prior to, and then I think on Monday we turned the store off. Then whatever is left over will be available in the store, but traditionally the most popular items are not left over. Our goal is not to have a ton of inventory at the end.

Do you have some inventory at the end?

Yes, we always do, and Summerfest also likes us to have some, so we may need to go back in and rerun some items just so that they're available. We'll see a good level of activity the first couple of weeks following the event, and then it really tapers off. Then we see a nice, little bump around the holidays, and we see a nice, little bump about a month prior.

There are other T-shirt companies on the grounds like Brew City Beer Gear. How does that work?

We do work in harmony. I know George, and I know the Kepplers that run it. We have a good relationship. They focus on branding Milwaukee, and our focus is on branding Summerfest. We are the official merchandise supplier for Summerfest. Everything that we have is for the event.

If it has a smiley face on it, it runs through you.

Exactly.

What's your favorite garment since 1999 that you guys have created? Is there one that you just love that you wear and means a lot to you, or you had a say in the design?

That's a tough question. My favorite is always the one that sells the best. But we've had two over the years, and the one that sold the best was the Smile On T-shirts for the 40th anniversary. There was an entry component, so if you wore the shirt, if you bought the shirt through one of the sponsors or was given the shirt by one of the sponsors, it gave you gate entry. The shirt was also featured in the advertising.

How did that sell?

It was like 10 times what we normally sell on a good-selling T-shirt. That was by far the best, but my second favorite was a design that we came up with that really kind of personified the experience. It was a shirt that had a Summerfest branding on the left chest, and on the back it said "Find a Stage," and then on the next line it said, "Grab a Beer," and then on the next line it said, "Dance On A Table."

People looked at the shirt and said, "You know what? That's me. That's exactly what I do. I find a stage, I grab a beer and I dance on the table. That's what Summerfest is."

How many of those do you think you sold?

That year, probably 2,000, and the Smile On shirt, we sold 23,000.

Wow, that's a lot.

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