Mountain Ridge HS · 2019 · presale campaign
800+ blankets in under a month. We had no idea what was happening.
Mountain Ridge's new athletic director called us, ordered, sold out, called back, ordered again, sold out, called back. By the end of the month their booster club president, Erica Fitton, had moved 800+ blankets, and she'd built the model herself.
The call that started it
In 2019, Sam Rogers had just moved from being the athletic director at Ridgeline Silverwolves to the same role at Mountain Ridge High School. Shortly after the move, he called Spectator Sport and ordered 300 custom mascot blankets, 100 each across three different designs. We produced them and sent them out. About a week later, Sam called back: 'I'm sold out. I need another 300.'
The detail that confused us
Instead of reordering the three designs he'd just sold out of, Sam asked for a brand new comp sheet with three completely different designs. He placed 100 of each new design, for another 300 blankets. Then a week after that, he called again: another 150 blankets. He'd moved 750+ blankets in under three weeks, all on different designs. That's when we stopped and asked: Sam, what is going on? How are you selling this many blankets this fast?
Meet Erica Fitton, the booster club president
Sam introduced us to Erica Fitton, the Mountain Ridge booster club president. She walked us through what she'd built. She'd taken the design mockups our team had sent over with the original quote, and used them to create a simple Google landing page with a sign up form. Parents could see the design, place their order, and pay through the form. That was it. No CRM, no presale platform, just a Google page and a Google Form. Sales were happening multiple times per minute. By the end of the first month they'd moved more than 800 blankets.
Design A
Design B
Design CWhat we built around what Erica figured out
We'd just been handed a working presale fundraising model, invented in the field by Erica, not in a strategy meeting. We rebuilt the operational stack around it. The Google landing page became a real campaign page builder. The Google Form became a real-time campaign dashboard. 'Call us every time we sell out' became automated production triggering. But the core model (design the blanket, presale through the community, deliver, profit) is unchanged from what she pioneered at Mountain Ridge.
Why this story matters
Every Spectator Sport presale campaign descends from Mountain Ridge and from what Erica Fitton invented. The pattern we now call presale blanket fundraising wasn't invented by us. It was figured out by a booster club president who had a problem to solve and improvised a solution that turned out to scale across 7,000+ schools. We try to honor that by keeping the model as simple as she built it: design, promote, presale, deliver, profit. No upfront cost to the school. No inventory. No risk.
What this proves
Takeaways for other schools
- →Customers often invent the most durable business models. Companies just operationalize them
- →The presale model was field-tested before it was named. That's why it scales
- →Booster club presidents who already organize parent communication are the highest-leverage school champions
- →Free tools (Google landing page + Google Form) proved the model worked. The polished platform came after
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