Brian runs EZ Sports Apparel, a custom-uniform and team-store business based in Cypress, Texas, serving clubs, schools and leagues across baseball, softball, football, basketball, soccer and volleyball. He found me through Freelancer.com; the working relationship then moved into ongoing, direct work outside the platform, running continuously since April 2024.
The problem sits before manufacturing ever starts. A school or league signs up for a new season, and someone has to show every team (often several inside the same league) exactly what their jersey, pants and gear will look like in their own colours and branding, before anything is approved and sent to a vendor. Get that step wrong and the league is ordering blind on colour, logo placement and name-and-number layout.
The step before manufacturing: the sign-off.
CASE02
How I built it
Every team’s apparel got the same repeatable structure, so a league with ten team names could move through it fast: a brand identity and vision intro, a colour palette and font/logo asset sheet with exact CMYK, RGB and HEX for the printer, a jersey design spread and a pant design spread, closing with the full team lockup.
One deck structure, every team.
Exact CMYK, RGB and HEX: no printer guesswork.
Once a client signed off on the look, the same design got rebuilt as a production-ready file (sized, labelled, and in some cases explicitly marked “FOR VENDOR”), separate from the client-facing presentation, so there was never ambiguity between what the client approved and what gets sent to print.
Two files: the approved and the printed.
CASE03
What shipped
The accounts differ in sport, cut and colourway; the route from mockup to vendor file does not.
Recurring league work
Bear Creek Little League (BCLL) is a standing client. A full season meant producing individual mockup decks for each team in the league: Hooks, Blue Rocks, TinCaps, Storm, Bulls, Rattlers, Rail Riders, Marauders and Red Wings, each with its own colour story and jersey/pant design built off the same repeatable deck structure.
One deck, nine teams, five of them here, only the colour changing.
Prodigy
A recurring baseball and softball client with the widest range of any single account: button-downs, crewnecks and softball-specific cuts across multiple colourways (Armed Forces green, Awareness pink, Black Ops, American white, and more), plus fabric-specific variants like a 160 GSM interlock option.
One account, the widest range of any, five of its cuts and colourways.
Outlaws
Full team identity work including a red colourway with a combined mockup-and-die-cut sublimation layout, and a separate black colourway. Die-cut sheets are their own deliverable, since sublimated jerseys print differently than a standard screen-printed design.
Sublimation differs: its own die-cut sheet.
Additional recurring accounts
Texas Bombers, Power Soccer and LTYA Softball League are among the longer-standing relationships: teams that return season after season rather than one-off requests, plus other one-off school and club jobs as they come in.
Across every account the work isn’t limited to baseball: soccer, softball and other school sports get the same mockup-to-vendor treatment. Alongside the core apparel work, smaller packaging pieces (bags and branded soft goods for EZ Sports Apparel itself) have come up as one-off add-ons within the same working relationship.
CASE04
Where it landed
Several of these accounts (BCLL, LTYA and Outlaws among them) are recurring, multi-season relationships rather than single projects, with new team decks produced each time a league’s roster changes or a new season starts.
The repeatable deck structure is what makes that turnaround possible: a new team’s colours and logo drop into an existing system rather than requiring a new design process each time. That is the difference between a supplier who is called when there is work and a partner a season is planned around.
Ten seconds of the same account, end to end: the deck structure, the approval portal, and what a league opens on delivery.
If you are looking for graphic design work Hamza is reliable resource that can help you variety of graphics and designs... highly recommended!
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