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Ryan Vesler has been obsessed with vintage sports apparel since childhood.
His collection started with classic Air Jordan sneakers and Bo Jackson's Nike merchandise. In college, he earned extra cash by scouring local thrift shops for vintage items to sell on eBay. And in 2007, his obsession inspired him to launch Homage, a Columbus, Ohio-based sports and pop culture apparel brand that brought in more than $50 million in 2024 revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Homage's apparel bears retro graphics with a vintage aesthetic, including throwbacks featuring classic sports team logos and legendary athletes from various eras. LeBron James helped popularize the brand by rocking one of its shirts, featuring 80's wrestler The Ultimate Warrior, after the Cleveland Cavaliers won the 2016 NBA Championship.
"LeBron wore our stuff. That was a 'pinch me' moment and a major brand moment at the same time ... because he's very deliberate about what brand he wears," says Vesler, the company's 42-year-old CEO, who launched Homage from his parents' Ohio basement with a combination of eBay earnings and a few maxed-out credit cards.
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Over the past almost-two decades, Homage has slowly worked to ink licensing deals with large organizations like the NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL, Walt Disney Company, WWE and trading card company Topps. The company's investors include celebrities and athletes like Ryan Reynolds, Jason Kelce and Kevin Durant.
This year, Homage expects revenue to increase by a double-digit percentage, according to the company. Here's how Vesler turned his personal thrift shop habit into a growing business with eight-figure annual revenue.
From thrift shop finds to business growing pains
At age 13, Vesler combed through racks of clothing at thrift shops in Columbus, looking for the thrill of unearthing a cool, vintage sports jersey or T-shirt. Finding the perfect throwback item, like an old-school Houston Astros rainbow-colored jersey, meant "knowing it was unique, that nobody else had it [and] you couldn't go to the mall and there were, like, 1,000 of them," he says.
While studying Spanish language and literature at Ohio University, Vesler ran a side hustle selling piles of vintage sportswear and pop-culture collectibles on eBay. His roommates were "always annoyed ... because [of the] boxes of stuff piling up," he says.
Vesler made enough money from the venture — eventually bringing in up to nearly $20,000 annually, he says — to support himself after graduating in 2005, leading him to try his hand at making his own products.
He launched Homage from his parents' basement in 2007, using more than $10,000 from his eBay earnings to buy blank American Apparel T-shirts and adorn them with self-designed sports graphics, he says. He wanted his designs be fun, creative and able to evoke the same joy he felt unearthing a unique thrift store find, he says.
He took the shirts to local college bookstores. The biggest one in his area — The Ohio State University, with a massive fan base that Vesler likens to that of an NFL team — quickly rejected him. So over the next year, he says, he built a client list of smaller local schools, like his alma mater, to establish Homage's reputation as a high-quality brand.
The products sold well enough at smaller schools that Vesler felt emboldened approaching local football icons to partner with Homage. He landed an in-person meeting with Archie Griffin, a two-time Heisman Trophy-winner at Ohio State, and inked a partnership with Griffin to license a series of shirts bearing the former running back's likeness.
The shirts helped Homage land its licensing deal with Ohio State in 2008, says Vesler. A lifelong Ohio State fan, he was "catatonic on the floor" in happiness, he says.
"I'd say that's the best IP in the world," says Vesler. "I knew that if you could prove yourself at Ohio State, you could go anywhere [in the U.S.]."
The value of saying yes to 'cool ideas'
The Ohio State deal brought an immediate surge of demand, which Homage's handful of employees could barely handle at first, Vesler says: "We never had enough inventory, we didn't have enough staff [and] stores would never send us their purchase orders in a timely fashion."
With the revenue from those orders, Vesler increased the number of blank shirts in Homage's inventory at any given time, and hired more staff to handle the larger workload. The company's annual sales topped $1 million for the first time in 2009, says Vesler.
Homage continued to sell mostly through college bookstores and its website until 2015, when it landed a national licensing deal with the NBA — due, Vesler says, to a years-long track record of managing Ohio State's massive fan base. Vesler sent a box of T-shirts to his local team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and insists it was a surprise when James, the NBA star, walked off a team plane wearing his brand in 2016.
As more athletes wore the brand in public, more partners signed on, including the NFL and Disney's "Star Wars" and Marvel franchises. Yet Homage is still a relatively small player in a highly competitive sports apparel market, led by giants like Fanatics and Nike, that's forecasted to top $173 billion in North American retail sales in 2025, according to a McKinsey & Company report.
Vesler says he's focused on gaining market share through pure creativity, in terms of Homage's apparel designs. He's also eyeing international expansion, starting with licensed merchandise for Wrexham A.F.C. — a professional soccer team based in the U.K. that's co-owned by Reynolds, the actor who's invested in Homage.
Some of Vesler's other strategic ideas are purely wishful thinking for now: His company isn't large enough, and doesn't have large enough "strategic partners" yet, to create sports-themed experiences like Homage-branded bars or hotels, he says. But no idea is too far-fetched to eventually consider, he notes.
"What enables this thing is people saying 'yes' to cool ideas," says Vesler. "Without that, there's no Homage."
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