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I used to work for Fanatics.com. Together with UnderArmor, they outbid Majestic for the MLB jersey contract. Majestic had had the contract since the 70s. Majes
by thedevelopnik 5y ago
I used to work for Fanatics.com. Together with UnderArmor, they outbid Majestic for the MLB jersey contract. Majestic had had the contract since the 70s.
Majestic immediately filed for bankruptcy. Which was good news for UnderArmor and Fanatics, because they didn’t have any ability to make baseball jerseys. So they bought Majestic for a dime on the dollar since it was bankrupt.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoThanks for sharing such a great example. I don't know quite how to estimate the scale of how much of this is going on, but I think it's pretty clear society in bulk is relatively blind to this family of tactics, or to use PR terms, inoculated against reacting to it.
- mrweasel 5y agoIn this case tou could argue that Majestic was poorly managed, given that it apparently survived on a single contract.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y agoThere are plenty of mid sized business that depend on an anchor client. Obviously that's not a great long term situation. But it doesn't really distract from the particular dynamic we've been talking about in this subthread, which is a more aggressive and predatory version of competition that captures the deal then uses the courts to capture the already invested capital infrastructure from the side that lost the deal. This sort of tactic is enabled more by people who can market to investors via manufactured signals vs the idealized lassie faire market reality of the transaction. I'm not pretending this is a trivial problem to solve, but I think it is very much a real problem, and the "they were fools and the market simply beat them" narratives fail to capture what's really going on here imo.