MLB puts team logos on skis, boards

If you're a big Kansas City Royals or San Francisco Giants fan, you can hit the slopes this winter in something that you never could before: skis or snowboards bearing the team logo.

Ditto for every Major League Baseball team.

On the eve of the World Series -- and with the holiday season and ski season both within reach -- MLB has licensed the rights to all 30 team images to a RAMP Sports, a small but upper-end ski and snowboard maker, which hopes to turn the ski slopes into a place where baseball enthusiasts can strut their team spirit in the off season.

"Baseball is a lot more than what you see on the field," says Steve Armus, vice president of licensing of MLB, whose overall licensed products sales exceeded $3 billion last year. "We're always looking for new ways to accommodate fans in what they're doing off the field," he says in a phone interview.

Sports licensing is big business. Sports licensing has become a $698 million business in royalty revenue, on retail sales of $12.8 billion last year, report the International Licensing Industry Merchandisers' Association. That's not including the collegiate category, with royalty revenue at $209 million on retails sales of $3.88 billion.

Sure, those figures are mostly built upon the sales of caps, shirts and hoodies that fans love to wear to games, but increasingly it's also about some less-familiar but pricier licensed goods, too, which now include skis and snowboards. Unlike a $20 cap or $25 licensed T-shirt, the team skis start at $649 (add another $200 for bindings and poles) and the snowboards start at $549 (add another $100 for bindings.)

"We're always looking for the things that are different -- but obvious -- and this is one of them," says Armus.

Even skeptical Millennials -- a target MLB craves -- will likely buy in, says David Carter, executive director of the USC Sports Business Institute. It's pretty cool, he says, "to be able to combine an active, outdoor winter lifestyle with a favorite summer sport." Getting fans to strap on Yankees skis or Red Sox snowboards "keeps baseball relevant 24/7."

Until now, skis and snowboards with customized designs have been almost impossible to come by because the manufacturing process was done on a big presses which required lots of orders to be profitable. But with new technologies that don't use the presses, the order sizes can be much smaller.

That's why Mike Kilchenstein, president and founder of RAMP Sports says he approached MLB -- and immediately got a thumbs-up. His four-year-old company is relatively small -- say, a fraction of the size of snowboard industry giant Burton -- but, he says, it's very nimble on projects like this.

"It's the bringing together of snow and team sports," says Kilchenstein, which designs and makes all the skis and boards at its headquarters in Park City, Utah. He says that RAMP has skis and boards for every team in stock. Products can be purchased from the RAMP Sports website and soon will be available on Major League Baseball's website. They're also sold at some team retail stores -- including the Royals, Baltimore Orioles, Detroit Tigers and Toronto Blue Jays.

This year, Kilchenstein says, he only expects to sell about a dozen pair of skis and boards per team. Within five years, however, he anticipates selling upwards of 500 per team.

The company is even looking into making "special edition" World Series skis and board designs, he says.

But the biggest customer might not be the guy or gal who uses them on the slopes, Instead, says Kilchenstein, it just might be high-end collectors or even sports bars that simply wants to hang them up for show.

"Some people will view it as art."