When and how to get the official Panthers Stanley Cup Champions T-shirt
FORT LAUDERDALE - A shop in Fort Lauderdale has been working at top speed since Monday night to print the official Florida Panthers Stanley Cup Champions T-shirts.
Atlas Embroidery and Screen Printing, an official printing shop of the NHL, started work on the initial batch of 10,000 shirts while the game was still ongoing.
Alex Dones, an operations manager, said that during the second period of Game 7 he had a feeling the Cats were going to win.
"In the second period, it was 1-1 and I started getting ready because I had that feeling. Then the Panthers scored again and I just knew. I knew it was on, I knew we had to get here, and I knew we had to get set up and ready to roll," he said.
Dones said he conducted a group chat with the company's 50 employees, telling them they needed to get to work. Right when the Panthers officially won, the process got underway and the presses started rolling. He said they were thrilled to be printing the first Panthers championship shirt.
After the blank T-shirts were unboxed, they were individually printed with the championship logo and then put through a dryer. The shirts were then hand-folded and given a silver sticker to denote that they were authentic merchandise.
Dones acknowledged that 10,000 shirts is not an easy task, but they were ready for it.
Where to get the Florida Panthers Stanley Cup Champions T-shirt
"It was a week long process, actually more than a week long. Right after they won the conference championship, we started getting orders in. We start prepping them by customer, pulling all the shirts to the machines, and getting them ready so that the night that we are going to print, as soon as they clinch, it's ready to go. This series could have been over a week ago, basically, so we had to be ready then too," he said.
Early on Tuesday, the Panthers picked up a large number of shirts and took them to the official store in the Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise. The rest will go to big box stores like Target, Walmart, Dick's Sporting Goods, along with JCPenney and other retailers in South Florida.
A second batch of 10,000 shirts will be printed with the official score and the players' names. Dones expects they will be printing through Wednesday.