It's all in the name - Electoral College Sportswear & Accessories - Free-Spirited Enterprise - Brief Article - Company Profile

Nation's Business, August, 1996

We've been intrigued by a couple of small companies we ran across recently--companies whose real products are, when you think about it, names.

Names can be worth a lot, of course; the value of a name like 'Walt Disney" or "Pepsi-Cola" is beyond calculation. And everyone knows that some consumers like to flaunt the names of the companies whose products they buy.

It's actually a little odd that no one flinches at wearing athletic shoes, jackets, or shirts with the manufacturer's name prominently displayed. Wearing such clothing barns you into a sort of walking billboard; logically, the manufacturer should pay you for providing advertising space.

Instead, you're more likely to pay a premium for that name--and you do so willingly because you think that the clothes involved are of a higher quality, or maybe because you think that wearing a certain brand tells the world that you boogie with the best. Whatever.

In most such cases, you're still buying a product, and the name is incidental to it; but it's just a short hop from there to buying a product because the product is the way to get the name. If you buy a T-shirt with "Planet Hollywood" on it, it probably won't be because you need a T-shirt. It'll be because you want to be associated with Arnold, Sly, Demi, and Bruce, and buying the T-shirt is as close as you can get to that without being arrested for stalking.

But what if Planet Hollywood didn't exist as a restaurant chain, but only as a classy logo?

That thought came to mind when we got a little catalog from a company called Electoral College Sportswear & Accessories, in Glenburn, Maine. There is a real Electoral College, to be sure--the one that elects the president. But it's not the kind of college that is covered in ivy--which is what the catalog evokes, tongue in cheek, as it announces that "America's original party school now has its own collegiate sportswear!"

Inside, the catalog offers T-shirts, sweat shirts, and caps that permit you to declare your allegiance to good old EC--college that is, as the company's letterhead proclaims, "America's Most Selective Four-Year Institution."

Marcia Diamond, a former seventh-grade teacher who worked for four years in the '80s as press secretary to former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine, started the company last year. Electoral College merchandise is being sold in four retail stores now, she says, as well as through the mail, and she hopes for more outlets.

She wants to expand the line, too, to embrace all the kinds of things that might be sold in a college bookstore--"everything from bumper stickers and window decals to college chairs, which we've already had requests for." And there's always the possibility that some members of the real Electoral College might want to wear an EC sweat shirt when they gather next December to cast their votes.