Impact Media strives to bring you as much information as possible on your club. The players on the field are crucial, but the club is also about passionate women and men that take care of every aspect of the organization. In this space, we’ll introduce you to some of these people who play in the shadows.
Montreal being Bleu-blanc-noir has a little bit to do with these three women.
Stéfanie Bureau, Nancy Cholette and Catherine De Sève-Fortier make up the Branding and Merchandising department. They come up with the shirts, jackets, scarves and other #IMFCSWAG accessories with which Impact supporters can proudly show their allegiance.
They attend to product development, artwork, quality control, receipt of goods, organization of the stockroom, market release, sales – “dusting, vacuuming…” adds an amused Stéfanie, the head of a booming department.
It wasn’t so long ago that these three young women would walk back and forth from their Stade Saputo offices to the boutique at the main entrance of the stadium, depending on the comings and goings of customers. Not anymore, they don’t. “We had to change things around in late June 2015,” says Stéfanie. “Traffic at the boutique spiked during the Women’s World Cup in 2015, and it hasn’t dropped since. That’s a good problem to have, and we see it in our sales numbers.”
Six months into 2015, online sales had reached their end-of-2014 levels. Seven months in, overall sales had matched those of 2014 as a whole.
The Merchandising department has built up a team of 70 on-call employees that come in for games or even during the week. Since 2013, Montreal Impact Academy players can get jobs here. “Some players are from outside the city and don’t have much money or many job opportunities,” says Stéfanie. “Plus, I’m a big fan of the Academy and its director, Philippe Eullaffroy. It’s a perfect fit.
“When people walk into a clothing store, you have to persuade them to buy products,” she continues. “When our supporters walk into our boutique, they’re already thrilled to be here. They want to chat about the club. Academy guys being there gives them a genuine chance to do so. And these kids are disciplined. They’re devoted to the club. They pay attention.”
Every product at the boutique has a different back story. Generally speaking, MLS licensees create adaptable designs that the Merchandising department can then alter according to the club colours. But the department can also create its own designs, and the Impact enjoys more and more freedom now that MLS has licensed three Canadian vendors, which allows the club to bypass the lousy exchange rate.
“We create more original designs than anyone in the league,” says Stéfanie. “For us, less is more.”
Case in point:
the fake jersey
.
This prank, a Nancy Cholette idea, worried many a Montreal supporter dreading that their team would wear an unremarkable kit. But plans took an unexpected turn when Cameron Porter gave a glimpse of the jersey on social media.
“But we were upset for about 10 seconds,” Nancy says.
The department swiftly sent a picture to a social media-savvy club member, asking her to leak the “new jersey”. At first, teasers were to be split 50/50 between hints of the actual jersey and the fake one, making it tough to get an idea of the design. Looking at reactions online, Nancy and her colleagues opted to make the teasers much more obvious. And to go one step further, the Sales and Marketing team published a picture of Maxim Tissot, standing in the shadows, wearing an Impact jersey – but which one? The thing is, Photoshop could be used to let the cat out of the bag: the blue and black vertical stripes.
In short, the team ended up with two different jerseys. A hoax that was bound to last merely a week carried on until the actual jersey was revealed, on February 11 – “Fans are so active on social media, it’s really easy to get feedback,” Nancy says.
In theory, everyone at the department has well-defined tasks. In practice, however, symbiosis is the order of the day among the small crew. As such, while Catherine takes care of several management tasks, the creative process for #IMFCSWAG is truly collegial.
“Nancy has a ton of ideas, and I put them into practice,” says Catherine, who worked in the children’s clothing industry for a decade. “We understand each other. The products excite us as much as they do our supporters. And our supporters have great ideas, too.”
The ultimate dream remains the opening of a downtown Impact boutique, but the all-female team has other ambitions as well. Director Stéfanie reckons that it is still tough to sell vendors on tapping into the women’s market, but she’s not giving up on that.
“I want to redefine the women’s market,” Stéfanie says. “This is the right fanbase, the right sport and the right vibe.”
