What started in Broad Ripple basement is now one of college sports fans' favorite brands

INDIANAPOLIS -- When Griffin Oakes’ game-tying field goal attempt in the 2015 Pinstripe Bowl was controversially ruled no good , giving Duke the overtime win over IU, it signified another agonizing moment for IU fans — who still haven’t seen their Hoosiers win a bowl game since 1991 . But one diehard fan turned that misery into fortune.

Connor Hitchcock was a senior studying marketing at IU when Oakes’ 38-yard attempt sailed directly over the right upright and was ruled a miss without review. A year before, Connor and his girlfriend, Christa, began an apparel company called Hoosier Proud. The brand catered to Indiana residents and sold graphic-designed shirts and stickers that featured details like Indiana’s outline, the state flag and the phrase ‘three one seven.'

After IU lost the Pinstripe Bowl, the brand dabbled into the sports world. While Christa — who graduated from Miami (Ohio) with an interactive media degree — typically designed the shirts, Connor designed one that read, ‘THE KICK WAS GOOD’ with the Indiana state outline in the middle.

Hoosier Proud started selling the shirt in August 2016, right before the start of a new football season. While the shirt wasn’t officially an IU shirt, it caught steam among IU fans. Once it spread around Twitter, Hoosier Proud sold more shirts for that one design than it had total in two years of selling apparel.

Connor turned that moment of frustration for him and many other IU fans into an opportunity. The missed kick would lead to a new company, one that is taking over the college apparel world with unique vintage logos and licensing deals with more than 200 schools.

“We became known as the Indiana football brand, which is a very funny thing to tie your hopes and futures on,” Connor said with a laugh.

From Hoosier Proud to Homefield Apparel

By 2018, Connor and Christa — who met as high schoolers at a Michigan summer camp in 2010 — were married and living in Broad Ripple. Connor was working in digital marketing for One Click, an e-commerce eyewear business. Christa was working as a photographer at events like weddings, engagements and senior pictures. The Hitchcocks continued making Hoosier Proud products on the side of their full-time jobs.

One day, Connor and One Click CEO Randy Stocklin talked over coffee as a part of One Click’s mentor program. Stocklin suggested the Hitchcocks look into selling college sports gear full-time and expand beyond Indiana. Connor wasn’t convinced it was something he wanted to or could do.

Connor felt the market was too crowded. Stocklin saw a space for the creativity of Hoosier Proud to become nationwide for college sports. Stocklin, a Purdue basketball and Notre Dame football fan, felt the official products from those schools were too bland. Stocklin is also a Franklin College graduate, and he believed the Division III Grizzlies sold low-quality merch.

“I was venting my frustrations with the lack of thoughtfully designed and quality collegiate apparel,” Stocklin told IndyStar. “So that's really where the conversation started, and that got Connor's wheels turning.”

Most college sports fans have bought gear licensed by their favorite school. But to this point, there wasn’t really a trusted brand for fans to flock to whenever they wanted something new. This meant there was always a third party involved, which limited where gear could be purchased and hindered the overall originality and quality of the products.

Connor began to realize this, and when he and Stocklin met again a month later, the 23-year-old’s mind had changed.

“I realized while there are a ton of licensees in the space (of) companies making apparel, nobody understood how to do it in a direct-to-consumer way,” Connor said.

So Connor spent the next six months setting up his new business. He found investors (including Stocklin) and created the infrastructure needed to go all in. In July of 2018, Connor and Christa quit their jobs. At the end of August, Homefield Apparel was born.

Homefield was created by college fans to serve college fans. Connor is of course a huge IU fan and Christa was a Michigan fan due to her father, Jim Breaugh, playing QB at Michigan from 1977-80. Eight summers after meeting at camp, Connor and Christa were married and starting a business together from their Broad Ripple basement.

When Homefield began, it had eight licenses, all from Indiana schools. IU, Purdue, Ball State, Butler, Indiana State, Evansville, Valparaiso and Southern Indiana were the schools partnered with Homefield.

But Homefield wanted to have national outreach that extended beyond Indiana. The goal was to make vintage collegiate apparel that would be direct-to-consumer. To secure the licenses and reach unfamiliar fan bases, Homefield needed exceptional marketing.

Breaking the fourth wall

Homefield had existed for nearly a year and it wasn’t gaining the traction it needed to succeed. There was $800 in the company’s account when Connor and Christa talked over drinks at Half Liter BBQ in Broad Ripple.

The Hitchcocks realized the brand’s target audience is millennials, which Connor and Christa are. Connor — like many millennials — frequently used Twitter to interact with other IU football fans. He wanted Homefield (which had four employees at the time) to grow through the social media app, and he had an idea to make Homefield’s account different from other companies.

“What if I just started using the Twitter account like a personal Twitter account as an IU sports fan?”

After that conversation, Homefield’s Twitter presence completely transformed. Connor “broke the fourth wall” a lot and posted less like a brand and more like a fan.

The alterations to Homefield’s Twitter account follow the core value of perspective. Homefield has multiple core values framed on a wall in its office, and the message under perspective reads, ‘Take a breath, we’re not saving the world.’ When explaining that sign, Connor said, “At the end of the day, it's just t-shirts.”

By changing its branding, Homefield tapped into the goofiness aspect of college fandom. Connor wanted to stray away from the “30 flavors of vanilla” he says exists in pro sports leagues. That’s why Homefield appeals to college spectators.

“College is just all over the place,” Connor said. “All these crazy traditions, for no good reason sometimes. And fans go crazy or will donate a bunch of money to get a really good basketball recruit or something. People care deeply about this, it’s so intimate and personal.”

And once again, the online popularity of the brand was catapulted by IU football.

As Connor embraced the rebrand, he was also optimistic about the 2019 season. The Hoosiers had a quality roster and a favorable nonconference schedule, and Connor convinced himself IU could win nine games, something that’s only happened twice in program history. Along with Kyle Robbins and Chris Schutte — who both wrote for the IU blog Crimson Quarry — Connor birthed the tagline #9WINDIANA .

Homefield made a shirt with #9WINDIANA printed across the front. The phrase caught steam on social media amongst IU fans, helping to elevate Homefield’s visibility.

IU entered the annual Old Oaken Bucket game against Purdue with a 7-4 record prior to the season finale. A win against the Boilermakers and a bowl win would make the tagline true. IU beat Purdue 44-41 in a seesaw overtime affair thanks to a walk-off quarterback sneak from Peyton Ramsey.

With the game being the day after Black Friday, Connor was in his office printing shirts to ship while he watched IU win. As a few players walked off the field, ESPN’s broadcast caught them yelling, “9WINDIANA.”

With the phrase catching steam in IU’s locker room, the athletic department invited Homefield to the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla., to be the official vendor of the IU Alumni Association tailgate and be a vendor inside EverBank Stadium (then named TIAA Bank Field). IU lost the Gator Bowl 23-22 to Tennessee in another devastating defeat. But Homefield was established and here to stay.

Jerod Morris is the co-founder and host of The Assembly Call, an IU basketball podcast. The Assembly Call has been advertising partners since the Hoosier Proud days, and Morris is impressed with how the Hitchcocks have grown Homefield and connected with fans.

“You talk about marketing sometimes, and it can feel like a devious word,” Morris said. “There’s been nothing devious about it. It’s just been extremely genuine, speaking the language of the people that they’re targeting. And I think they’ve done a masterful job of it.”

Honoring tradition

What makes Homefield unique is the dedication to the brand’s vintage designs. Homefield has been able to connect with people because of the design team Connor called “part historians.”

When Homefield secures a licensing deal and begins working on a new design, it ensures whatever its design team creates is authentic to the campus, fans and traditions of a college. The design team performs deep dives into old yearbooks, media guides and even eBay when it’s time to make a new design for a school. The dedication to research is what separates Homefield from the rest of the pack.

“We take great pride in telling the important stories to your university,” Connor said. “It’s not just throwing a logo on something because we think it looks cool. We're going to have a rich product description with it, too, that tells you what this logo was if you’ve never seen it, (and) why it matters.”

Click on any college product on Homefield’s website , and you’ll see a description of what years a certain logo or phrase was used by a school and the backstory behind the logo. Homefield is hyper-focused on getting details right. It’s why if a school only used a logo for football, you won’t see Homefield putting that logo on a basketball shirt. Elements like that may seem minute, but as Connor said, “it matters.”

Homefield often uses logos so old (like Nevada football’s Sagebrushers logo used from 1896 to 1922) sometimes the only available graphics are uneditable, two-dimensional raster images. Before adding its own designs to these vintage logos, the designers have to vectorize the images to a higher quality.

“Everything is so important to each fan base,” Christa said. “So we want to make sure that we reflect that and that we do justice to that, and that things aren't just generic or templated, but they're really specific to the traditions and legacies that make those schools what they are.”

Homefield’s dedication to quality and details gives schools the trust to partner with the brand. It’s why Homefield now has licenses from over 200 schools, including every power conference institution. And it's why sales have increased year-over-year. In 2021, the company saw 300% growth, up 32% the next year, 26% in 2023 and this year will see an increase of over 50% from last year.

“... you think about all the different fan bases that are out there, all the different mascots and logos and traditions that they can help celebrate," Morris said. "And sure enough, that's exactly what they've done.”

Five fans have gone as far as to get tattoos of Homefield’s designs. When that happens, Homefield covers the costs of the inking.

Where Homefield Apparel is today

You may have seen Baseball Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. sporting an Indy 500 bomber jacket as he entered the pace car for the 108th running of the race on May 26. Or maybe you saw rapper Flavor Flav in the same jacket during the race’s red carpet event on May 25. That was a Homefield jacket.

The bomber jacket was part of Homefield’s new Indianapolis Motor Speedway collection, which included the jacket, hats and t-shirts. The brand — whose office and warehouse share a wall with Abel Motorsports in Speedway — was the biggest apparel partner for the race right up the street. Connor doesn’t get awestruck much anymore when he sees notable people rocking Homefield gear, but this was different.

“Seeing Ken Griffey Jr. wear our bomber jacket, as a kid who grew up loving baseball in the ‘90s and early 2000s, that was a really cool 'whoa' moment for me,” Connor said. “He's just on another stratosphere of star to me. I mean just even walking around town, I see our IU, Purdue, Notre Dame stuff all the time on people if I go on a walk on the Monon. But for whatever reason, walking through Target seeing someone in our IMS hat just felt different to me.”

As Homefield expands, the company plans to manufacture more bomber jackets, shooting shirts, jerseys and pullovers. The company — which now has about 50 employees — released baseball and softball pullovers ahead of the NCAA tournaments.

While the brand evolves, its goal is to maintain the purity and authenticity that it was built with.

“We get to make a really fun thing and we get to be something that hopefully brings people joy,” Connor said. “Anybody's job is stressful, even if you like the core thing of what you do. But we've been so fortunate to be able to do this business because we love college sports. We love the aesthetics behind it, and we get to do it with some really awesome people.”

After all, it’s just t-shirts.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: What started in Broad Ripple basement is now one of college sports fans' favorite brands