NFL partners up to launch its own kitchen knives and aprons, but why?

When Hedley & Bennett, a kitchen essentials brand known for its unique range of aprons, linens, and knives, set out to partner with the NFL on a collection, its biggest concern wasn’t just figuring out what to design, but really how to create 30 times the amount of products it normally does.

“It’s an extraordinary amount of products,” Jonathan Bernhardt, CEO of Hedley & Bennett, told Retail Brew. “Our typical collab collection is maybe two to four products…it’s just really tough, but it was something that was really important to both us and the NFL to figure out how to do it, and that’s where a lot of the work took place was to figure out ‘How sustainably can you create products for every single market that feel really authentic, really differentiated…with reasonable timelines?’”

It took a year, but the collection finally has a target release in September. With 32 aprons and 32 knives designed in collaboration with every NFL team, each item comes with team-specific colors, artwork, mottos, and unique IPs.

And yes, each team was involved in approving the individual products, meaning soon enough, you’ll find out if you have similar tastes to the Chicago Bears or the Philadelphia Eagles.

“Theoretically, we could have said, ‘Hey, we’re going to start with just this set of teams,’ and then we’ll do the [other] set of teams,” Bernhardt said. “But we decided, and the NFL agreed, that it’s just really important to launch something for every market at the same time, and that was our guiding light.”

That’ll move the supply chains: He added that sustainability was also a major factor along with making sure each design was customized. “Coming up with a totally unique and differentiated approach to design for one team and then doing a completely different approach for the second team and then repeating that 32 times would have been really unsustainable,” he explained. “It would never have let us bring this to market on any reasonable timeline. So we had to figure out a way of, how [to] come up with a sort of a design framework that works across all the aprons. But then we want to also make sure that the aprons don’t all just look identical. They need to really feel like they’re authentic to the team.”

While things seem to be in order for the upcoming launch, the only question that remains is why would an apron and kitchen essentials brand partner up with NFL in the first place?

Heads or tailgates: “We’re always thinking about what interest [or] passion we have not yet met through our products that we could then design into to get those people really excited,” Bernhardt said. “One that just really jumped out at us was sports. It’s a very obvious spot in some ways, because people go tailgate, and when they tailgate, they’re cooking, and when they’re cooking, they very well may be wanting to wear an apron to protect whatever they’re wearing underneath. The NFL jumped out as the coolest one we could do to lead with.”

Bernhardt added that this will be the biggest collection “by orders of magnitude of in terms of the number of SKUs” as the brand has tried to create something to cater to every fan base across the country.

Still, the typical Hedley & Bennett customer, by Bernhardt’s own account, is someone who is “geeked out and passionate about cooking,” including home cooks and professional cooks. But for this collection, the target customer is pretty much everybody.

“I’m sure that there are people across all demographics, all genders, that love a sports team,” he said. “Our feeling was that creating a product for, let’s say…New York City…we figured that creating the New York Jets apron and creating the New York Giants apron may pull someone in our community that’s never heard of us and they just love the Giants or Jets and maybe they show up at a tailgate, maybe they read an article, and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s what I want for a Christmas or that’s what I want because that’s freaking awesome.’”