Letter From Nocona
Glove Story
Eight months after its headquarters burned to the ground, and years after all its competitors moved overseas, the nation’s last large-scale baseball mitt manufacturer is still in the game.
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JUST TO THE WEST of Nocona on U.S. 82 is a sign that says “Welcome to Nocona: Leather Goods Center of the Southwest.” This is not, as you might suspect, an exaggeration. Or at least it wasn’t twenty years ago, when the sign was put up. H. J. Justin founded his boot company there in 1889, and by 1910 he was selling his products in 26 states. Following his death, his sons moved the operation to Fort Worth, but his daughter Enid stayed behind and started the Nocona Boot Company. In 1926 Rob Storey’s great-grandfather Cad McCalls launched the Nocona Leather Goods Company, which manufactured purses and belts at first and later the sports equipment that would make the company famous. Over time, more leather goods companies set up shop in Nocona. At its peak, in the early eighties, the local leather industry employed more than eight hundred people.
Those days are long gone, in part because of the brutal ups and downs that plagued the leather goods business in the twentieth century. But the Storeys persevered. They survived the Depression, then managed to stay afloat during the war by grace of the huge government glove contract. In the sixties the biggest names in the business, including Wilson and Rawlings, started moving their glove production to Asia. By the seventies everyone except Nocona was manufacturing ultracheap gloves in China and Japan. “The seventies were tough,” says Storey. “We nearly went under. I remember we had a two-million-dollar loan and could barely pay interest on it.” They cut costs. They survived. In the nineties business boomed again—glove sales rose from 20,000 to 50,000, driven by economic prosperity and also by the new popularity of adult softball leagues. (Gloves accounted then, as now, for 70 percent of the company’s business; the rest is football helmets, pads, and catcher’s gear.) Then, after 9/11, adult softball leagues virtually disappeared. (No one knows exactly why, though Storey believes it may have been a combination of the recession and the onset of tougher DWI laws around the country. As anyone who’s ever played in such a league well knows, beer drinking is an important part of the fun.) Business crashed as glove sales slumped and a host of new competitors, including Adidas, Nike, and Reebok—all making products cheaply in Asia—flooded into the market.
For the first time in the company’s history, according to Storey, there was no light at the end of the tunnel. “The credo of my granddad was ‘Never import,’” he says. “I stayed with that as long as I could. But we were stagnating and not growing. We sold helmets, catcher’s gear, chest protectors, masks, all made here, but no one wanted new shoulder pads at the prices we had to charge. In 2001 we had our first layoffs ever.” The time had come to do the unthinkable. That year Storey took a trip to Asia that convinced him that he needed to break with tradition. He began first to import his football equipment, and then added a low-end line of baseball gloves ($20 to $100), sold under the brand name Team Nokona. In 2002 the company began to sell bats too, both traditional wooden ones from Pennsylvania and composites from Asia. The idea was to boost profits so that Storey could sustain the company’s core business: high-quality, high-dollar, American-made gloves.
That was just the beginning. The next revolution at Nocona Athletic Goods came in 2005, when the Storey family owners—ten in all—sold 50 percent of the company to a syndicate of 35 investors from Boston and the surrounding area led by a baseball buff and marketing maven named Buddy Lewis. The company now had millions of dollars to do what it hadn’t done in more than fifty years: aggressively market and advertise its product.
“When I first saw this company, I felt it was a marketing guy’s dream, a hidden gem,” says Lewis, who now holds the title of managing director (Storey is president). “They just did not have the human and financial resources to unlock the best-kept secret in sports.”
Lewis, working closely with Storey, did not waste time. “We had a well-defined strategy and marketing plan, and now we had the funds to do it,” he says. Nocona Athletic Goods launched major promotions with four big-league teams, accompanied by radio and TV advertising, something it had never done before. In Philadelphia, for example, the Phillies run a “catch of the day” promotion at the stadium, in which a fan who has caught a foul ball is presented with a Nokona glove by the Phanatic, the team mascot. (This year the Nokona brand will be affiliated with the Rangers, the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Atlanta Braves, the Toronto Blue Jays, the Boston Red Sox, and the Phillies.) A Mexican joint venture called Nokona Mexicana was started up, which will export American-made gloves to the Mexican minor leagues. (They will also sell the lower-priced Asian starter gloves.) Major leaguers Todd Walker, of the Padres, Ryan Franklin, of the St. Louis Cardinals, and Jorge Cantú, of the Devil Rays, are now paid endorsers, and at least seventy minor league prospects have signed endorsement contracts. The company has plans to export its American-made gloves to Japan and Israel and to produce gloves in the Dominican Republic for sale there. Four “glovemobiles” have been dispatched across America to baseball and softball tournaments and other venues to push the gloves. “We’re doing things we never imagined doing,” says Storey, referring to his recent, large expenditures on advertising and promotion. “I sometimes say to myself, ‘What the hell are we doing?’”
What they are doing is globalizing their business on their own terms. And it’s working. At the time of the fire, sales at Nocona Athletic Goods were on track to double from the previous year. And as the company’s production continues to increase, the lost factory seems more and more like just a bump in the road. In the temporary plant you can see evidence of yet more new ideas: workers turning out “baby’s first glove”—pink and blue mitts that arrive partly assembled from China and are finished off in Nocona. They cost $75 apiece, and Storey says that Christmas business was strong. You can also see the company’s radical new wood-composite bat from Canada, one that Lewis and Storey say is unique to the market. “We tried it at Texas Christian and Boston College,” says Lewis. “And you can’t seem to break it.”
Storey figures that a new plant built on the site of the old factory will cost him around $2 million. It could be in production by 2008. If he gets his way, the place will have a museum too, a place where folks can go to see University of Texas hero Jack “Jackrabbit” Crain’s leather helmet from 1941; the Billy Hunter signature model Nokona glove from the 1951—1952 Fort Worth Cats; an antediluvian-looking model from the Depression era with no laces and primitive straps between the thumb and first finger; a two-fingered glove from the late thirties; Tony York’s (brother of baseball great Rudy York) Nokona glove from the Texas League of the thirties and forties. Part of the charm of such pieces is that they are obscure relics of the American heartland. That description once fit the Nocona Athletic Goods Company. Storey and his stalwarts are determined to outgrow it.
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