Obvious Shirts and the business of fandom
How a Chicago Cubs superfan built a multi-million-dollar merch business without spending on ads — and why staying niche might be better than trying to scale.
If you look closely at the crowd shots during a Chicago Cubs home game at Wrigley Field, you’ll notice a pattern: Amidst the sea of fans in jerseys and logo merch, people wearing blue shirts with only a sentence of white text.
Perhaps, this week for the playoffs, “MY FAVORITE SPORT IS OCTOBER BASEBALL.” Or a personal favorite — the one I wear to games — “NO WAVE AT WRIGLEY.” Or the all-time best seller, “THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED WAS ON A WEDNESDAY IN CLEVELAND.” — an ode to the Cubs’ World Series victory in 2016, its first championship in 108 years.
These shirts are Obvious Shirts, a t-shirt and merch startup that’s become a special part of Cubs fandom since launching in 2015. What started as a gag for founder Joe Johnson — and then a hobby — quickly turned into a business that’s now doing millions of dollars a year in sales.
It’s a great case study in how to build a modern content-commerce-community business without spending on ads — and why trying to scale it might ruin what makes it work.
Like many beloved consumer brands, Obvious Shirts started by accident and grew through obsession.
Ten years ago, the Cubs were starting to get good again, led by young hitters Anthony Rizzo and Kris Bryant and star pitcher Jake Arrieta.
Johnson, a lifelong Cubs fan and entrepreneur-type, was working in the sales department of an enterprise software company, trying to make his annual quota by late summer so he could go to as many games as possible — forever the Chicago yuppie dream. (Certainly mine, too, growing up on the North Side and going to high school a couple of Red Line stops away from Wrigley.)
As the story goes, “I went to one of [Arrieta’s] night game starts, got pretty drunk, and came into work late,” Johnson tells me.
“When I walked in, I was the last one on the floor. There’s probably 60 people on my floor — it’s all open-concept. I walk in, and my manager’s like, ‘Um, what do you have to say for yourself?’ And I just said, ‘Jake Arrieta is good at baseball’. I sat down and the floor laughed, and my buddy next to me is like, ‘You should put that on a shirt’.”
So he did — Helvetica font, all caps, left justified in Microsoft Word: “JAKE ARRIETA IS GOOD AT BASEBALL.” Two weeks later, he wore it to a game. “I got up in the third inning to get a beer, and I got bombarded by people being like, ‘That’s so funny’.”
Johnson took down fans’ phone numbers and ordered more. He then sold 100 on Facebook, to family and friends, in a matter of minutes. Then another 400 in less than a week. “And I’m like, ‘Well, shit — I should just keep doing this’.”
His second design, KYLE SCHWARBER CRUSHES BASEBALLS, made it onto TV after a home run — and “that was what really took off, because that went viral on Reddit and social media,” he says.
At that point, he was selling those two shirts on Etsy, and the next morning, “I woke up to, like, 460 shirts sold.”
It also drew a letter from the Major League Baseball Players Association, “being, like, ‘You can’t do that’.” Johnson quickly made peace with the players’ union — they thought what he was doing was unique and creative, he says — and became an official licensee.
Obvious Shirts was in business. First, as a side hustle, and after about a year and a half, as a full-time gig.
And it’s grown since then, now doing $2.5 million to $3 million in sales, Johnson says, with around “four and a half” full-time employees and three part-time. Sales are around 70% direct-to-consumer e-commerce, with some wholesale via partners like Dick’s Sporting Goods, and its own small retail shop near Wrigley Field.
What’s most remarkable is that Obvious Shirts has grown organically without buying online ads (beyond limited experimentation). That’s a major rarity in today’s e-commerce landscape, where most direct-to-consumer brands rely on paying Meta and Google a huge percentage of their sales to drive awareness and growth.