Why I Still Make Fantasy Football Trophies by Hand After 30 Years

You wouldn't believe how many times I've heard this:

"You should see about having your trophies made in China."

Yeah...

Let's take a handmade, carefully crafted work of art and turn it into every other generic trophy on the market.

What could possibly go wrong?

The funny thing is, people who suggest that don't really understand why I started doing this in the first place.

I didn't start FantasyTrophies.com with dreams of building some giant trophy empire.

Hell, I didn't even think it was going to become a real business.

I started because I made a trophy for my own fantasy football league.

The guys loved it.

Then other leagues started asking if I could make one for them.

And that's when I realized I might have tapped into something that was missing.

I understood what fantasy football was really about.

It wasn't just about the money.

It wasn't about making a bunch of trophies and figuring out how many I could sell in a year.

It was about the trash talk.

The friendships.

The rivalries.

The ridiculous inside jokes.

The draft-day traditions.

The memories.

And, most importantly, the history.

I knew that most of the guys buying my trophies were a lot like me. They didn't want their league represented by some generic trophy that could be mistaken for the championship trophy from their kid's pee-wee football league.  In other words, a plastic football on a cheap, multi-tiered base. 

They wanted something different.

They wanted something that had personality.

Something that actually looked like it belonged to a serious fantasy football league.

And they wanted a trophy that made a statement.

I've heard stories from customers about taking their new trophy to a bar after the draft and watching people stop to ask about it.

That's exactly what I wanted.

A trophy that gets noticed.

A trophy that starts conversations.

A trophy that makes someone say, "Where the hell did you get that?"

And I've heard plenty of stories like that over the years.

Those stories are one of the biggest reasons I've continued doing this for more than 30 years.

Because when a customer tells me that their new trophy changed the way their league felt, or that everyone was fighting to get their name on it, that's a hell of a lot more satisfying than simply seeing another order come through.

That's the part I don't think I'd get if I were mass-producing cheap plastic trophies overseas.

I don't want to spend my days assembling some generic plastic figure onto a particle-board base and then finding some clever way to say "Made in America" on the website.

That's just not what this is about.

For me, it's about making something with some character.

It's about knowing that the guy who wins your league is going to hold that trophy over his head on draft day.

It's about hearing from a commissioner who tells me his league has been fighting over that trophy for years and now their league will never be the same. 

And it's about getting that same reaction from my customers that I saw from my own buddies the first time they saw the trophy I made for our league.

That's why I still do this.

After more than 30 years, I'm still making these trophies the same basic way I did when I started:

By hand. One at a time.

Could I make them cheaper by doing things differently?

Sure.

Could I produce more of them?

Absolutely.

But then they'd be something different.

They'd just be another trophy.

And there are plenty of those already.

I'd rather keep making something that has a little personality, a little history, and a lot of pride behind it.

Because when you spend an entire season talking trash, sweating out Sunday afternoons, agonizing over lineup decisions, and waiting all year for your draft...

I think the champion deserves a trophy that's actually worth fighting for.

— Dave