Features June 24, 2010, 5:00PM EST

It's Not Whether You Win or Lose. It's How You Sell the Game

Plan B. Branding helps turn minor league baseball into a lucrative, lovable freak show

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Jason Klein (left) and Casey White of Plan B are the leading sluggers of minor league branding Gregg Segal for Bloomberg Businessweek

By Paul Wachter

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From behind home plate, Jason Klein and Casey White look proudly at the Reading Phillies' flamethrower Phillippe Aumont. It's not his high-priced arm they're admiring, it's what he's wearing. "They're the only team with pink on their uniforms," White says.

Klein and White, who are each 30 years old, are the owners of Plan B. Branding, an upstart consulting company that has helped more than 30 minor league teams, including the Double-A Reading Phillies, rebrand themselves, creating new uniforms, logos, and in some cases even names. It's a thriving business, largely because minor league teams, unlike some in the majors, haven't suffered much in the recession. Attending a Reading Phillies game costs about as much as seeing a movie. "I won't say we're recession-proof, but we're recession-resistant," says Minor League Baseball President Pat O'Conner.

Merchandise sales account for about $50 million of MiLB's $750 million in annual revenue, but the true value is higher. "The merchandise drives awareness, which translates into ticket sales," says Ken Schnacke, president of the Columbus Clippers and chair of MiLB's licensing committee. On average, 13 of MiLB's 160 teams rebrand themselves each year. Often it happens because a team moves, gets a new stadium or a new owner, or becomes affiliated with a different major league team. It also happens because a new look drives sales. "It's like if LeBron James changes his number," O'Conner says. "Everyone wants to buy the new jersey."

Perhaps the main reason you see more cosmetic changes in the minors is because the owners and their staff are, in essence, theatrical producers—and costumes are a big part of the show. "We don't control a single thing that happens on the field, not the players that are sent to us or the coaches," says Reading Phillies General Manager Scott Hunsicker. "What we control is what happens off the field and making it a great experience for the fans."

That's where Plan B comes in. The two owners, best friends since kindergarten, got off to an inauspicious start in baseball. They were fired from summer jobs with their hometown San Diego Padres after pulling a stunt in the stands involving a piñata of an opposing player stuffed with fake money. In 2002, while White attended New York's Pratt School of Art & Design and Klein the University of Alabama, aided by a mascot scholarship, they sent letters to every minor league team offering their design services. Only the West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx wrote back. For the Jaxx, now a Seattle Mariners Double-A affiliate, Klein and White designed the team's new logo, "Jim Dandy," a Disneyfied version of a miner wielding a baseball bat modified into a pickax. Merchandise sales spiked, word spread, and other clubs came calling.

Two years later they completely reinvented the Clearwater Phillies. Like many minor-league teams, particularly those in the lower rungs, the Phillies were named after their parent club, which had nothing in the way of local identification. To come up with something that had greater resonance, White and Klein spent time on the Florida docks, where fishermen recounted their harrowing brushes with vicious sharks that use their tails to attack. They were called threshers, and soon enough, so was the team. With a logo cooked up by Plan B, the Clearwater Threshers sold eight times more gear in 2004 than in 2003.

By comparison, the rebranding of the Reading Phillies was a more modest affair. Team owners considered their association with Philadelphia to be an important asset, so the range of possibilities was more circumscribed. "We created a candy version of the Philadelphia Phillies uniform," Klein says. In place of the Liberty Bell, which the Philadelphia team uses on its patches, Plan B substituted a pagoda, alluding to a quirky Reading landmark.

Klein and White take pride in the time they spend with an organization and the research they do into local history before embarking on design work. "It's typically about a four-month process," Klein says. The fees start at $10,000 for a team and run as high as $80,000.