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Assuming, of course, Steelers get there and win

Friday, January 18, 2002

By Lillian Thomas, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

In the commemorative T-shirt business, you can't wait till the final whistle. So on Jan. 27, if it looks as if the Steelers will win an AFC championship and advance to the Super Bowl, about 40 employees of Trau & Loevner will huddle in the company's East Liberty headquarters during the fourth quarter.

	Steve Loevner with some printed T-shirts at Trau & Loevner T-Shirt Co., Centre Avenue, East Liberty. The firm will print special T-shirts Jan. 27, if the Steelers win the AFC championship that day. (Darrell Sapp/Post-Gazette)

The instant the game ends, they will crank up 16-arm, carousel-like machines and start stamping the good news onto thousands of T-shirts. They'll work full blast all night to keep the T-shirts whipping around the carousels, getting a different colored portion of the design squeegeed on at each stop to print the closely held design sent the day before from Reebok. By early morning, thousands of Steelers AFC Championship shirts will be heading down the conveyer belt to the loading dock, where trucks will be waiting by 6 a.m. to get them to stores.

And then, the following week, they'll do it all over again, mobilizing in the waning minutes of the Super Bowl, said Steve Loevner, who, with his cousin, Howard Loevner, runs the company founded by his great-grandfather.

Trau & Loevner has the "if win" contract with Reebok to produce shirts during the first 48 hours after the AFC championship game and Super Bowl should the Steelers win. Reebok will take over production after that initial period -- it needs local companies because it can't ship from its own plants fast enough to get commemorative shirts into fans' hands right after the games, Steve Loevner said. If Reebok gets backed up, he can continue to print the shirts until the company is able to take over again.

If the Steelers don't win, Reebok eats the cost of the design and shipping the blank shirts to Pittsburgh, and Trau & Loevner absorbs the cost of creating the screens, setting the shop up to print them and tearing it back down.

Sometimes companies actually print the shirts before the game is over to get them to fans leaving the stadium, but that means a much bigger loss with a local team's loss, Loevner said.

He doesn't know how many shirts he'll be printing or what they'll look like.

"We'll get the initial order a day or so ahead, along with the design, so we'll know how many we'll make during the first night," he said.

"With all five machines going two shifts, we can produce about 1,500 dozen shirts a day," Loevner said. So producing the several thousand shirts that will probably be ordered by local stores over that first night won't be a problem.

The process is simple, once everything is set up. The screens with the designs -- one for each color on the shirt -- fit into frames on the machines. One person puts the "blank" shirts onto the machine arms, one takes the printed ones off and a couple of set-up guys keep the machines loaded with ink. Others fold and stack and load the shirts onto a conveyer belt to go down to the loading dock.

Trau & Loevner has similar contingency contracts with many college teams, Loevner said. He was hoping for a Nebraska win in the Rose Bowl, and says the arrangement means he always has a team to cheer for, even in contests in which there are no local teams.

The company, founded in 1897 by Philip Loevner and his brother-in-law, Gus Trau, got into the imprinting business about two decades ago.

"It started with Great-Grandpa pushing a pushcart in Uptown," Loevner said. The wholesale clothing company stayed in the family, but by the time Steve and Howard got involved in the business about 20 years ago, "It was a failing wholesaler, selling Hanes underwear to mom-and-pop stores."

The company switched to silk-screening and now sells mostly to large chains such as Wal-Mart, Kmart, Target and Ames. It has 80 employees in Pittsburgh, including three artists and a designer, as well as a showroom in Manhattan and facilities in Mexico, where the shirts are made. The printing is all done in Pittsburgh.

Trau & Loevner has licenses with a number of college teams and with the National Hockey League, but not with the Steelers. The T-shirt contract with Reebok is an extra that comes at a time of year that's often slow, Loevner said.

"So we have 48 hours of excitement" before things get back to routine, he said. Or maybe 96 hours.