Alex Carstens stepped into his closet Tuesday and started counting.
He wasn’t quite sure what the number had gotten to over the years, and he wanted to confirm. He turned slowly, moving from wall to wall, taking care to log every item, one-by-one.
He paused after several minutes.
“One hundred and ninety-three.”
That’s the number of Homefield Apparel items Carstens has accumulated over the years.
Carstens is hardly the only fan obsessed with Homefield, a college apparel company known as “The Good Brand” to its legion of fans on social media. The company's weekly drops of comfortable T-shirts, sweatshirts, caps and joggers have become can't-miss events for many college sports fans, and the brand prides itself on storytelling about each school's history in its designs.
For Carstens, the first item Homefield item he ever purchased was meant to help one of his favorite podcasts.
A regular listener of the Banner Society’s “Shutdown Fullcast,” jokingly known as “the world’s only college football podcast,” Carstens wanted to support members who had been hit by furloughs at Vox Media in 2020.
Though “The Good Brand” was a reference to quality, Homefield has been known to do real-life good, too, and donated 100% of proceeds from two T-shirts to support impacted members.
Carstens bought in, and one comfortable shirt led to another. And another. And another.
He had kept up with regular drops from Homefield’s Big New Saturday campaign, but he wasn’t intentionally collecting items.
Until he was.
Carstens recalls a social media post asking how many Homefield items readers owned, and in that moment realized he was likely on the verge of something no one else was doing.
“I really started to look at my closet and then I looked at what schools were out there,” Carstens said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m close. I’m really close.’ And I wanted to go for it. I didn’t know if anyone else had done it, but I wanted to try for this and get every single school that Homefield has. At that point, there was no stopping me.”
According to Carstens, he kept up with drops and owned one item from every Homefield school until around July 2021, when a growing family recalibrated his priorities. Still, Carstens’ collection features 153 different schools as Homefield’s lineup has grown to more than 190 with more added regularly.
A big Michigan fan, Carstens even owns a single tee for rivals Ohio State and Michigan State — though they remain balled and stuffed into the back of his closet. For Carstens, getting his collection back to 100% is worth owning a pair of shirts he finds highly offensive.
“They’re there,” Carstens said. “But they ain’t gonna see the light of day.”
Homefield CEO and co-founder Connor Hitchock says that multiple customers have purchased items from more than 100 schools, but he can easily recall when he heard about Carstens.
“I remember one time I went back into the warehouse and our fulfillment manager, I just heard her say, ‘Oh my god, guys, he’s going alphabetical,’” Hitchcock said. “And there was an order with Eastern Michigan, Evansville, Fairfield, Ferris State, Florida State. He was ordering like five schools every two weeks.”
Though Carstens’ quest to collect the Homefield portfolio was shocking in the moment, he was far from alone.
College football fans were ready to collect Homefield items, whether Homefield believed it or not.
The start of Big New Saturday
The summer of 2020 was a critical moment for Homefield. As the world was locked inside during a pandemic, the four-person staff was looking to add eight new schools to a lineup of about 25.
Small schools such as Tulane, Hawaii and Colorado School of Mines were among the incoming drops.
Like many sports fans, Hitchcock and his wife, Christa, Homefield’s other co-founder, missed the engagement of sporting events, but found themselves glued to “The Last Dance.” As the sports world paused, the documentary, which followed the Chicago Bulls’ quest for a sixth championship with Michael Jordan in 1998, provided exactly what fans had longed for.
That excitement, episode after episode, was also the inspiration Homefield needed.
“That’s where we made a massive leap,” Connor said. “What if we took these eight schools we had and created something that every week, in the absence of sports, we created an event that people could comment on together and experience together. That was the genesis of Big New Saturday.”
Every Saturday, noon Eastern, Homefield would deliver a new school for 15 straight weeks. To start, Homefield had just eight schools locked in. While Homefield now often works six to nine months in advance for many projects, it was forced to complete deals and designs in as little as a week back then, with Christa, the lone designer at the time, putting in long hours.
Amid the chaos, Big New Saturday was a massive success. The campaign ended up lasting 17 weeks after Alabama and Michigan got involved following drops for Auburn and Michigan State.
The realization Homefield could be a collectible brand also set in. And all it took was a direct message.
Following the launch of Big New Saturday, a request came in for a Homefield subscription box. According to Connor, the majority of customers purchase from a single school. But this customer wanted them all — a T-shirt for all 15 schools, at the time, included in the campaign.
“I said, ‘Can you believe somebody just DM’d to ask this,’” Connor remembers asking Christa. “I guess, but it’s going to be for like three people. So, we put the subscription option on the website.”
More than 500 people ended up buying the subscription box to get a shirt from a different school for 15 weeks.
“It’s humbling, for sure,” Christa said. “It’s definitely a full-circle moment, in that my team is spending so much time looking at collectibles over the years. The amount of time that we spend on eBay and in yearbooks — to think of future generations recognizing Homefield as an icon of a time period is a really cool thought.”
RELATED STORIES:
- How much did your school get to appear in "EA College Football '25?"
- "EA Sports College Football 25:" 10 best teams to use in dynasty mode
- Steph Curry files trademark for 'Nuit. Nuit' apparel
'They understand people like us'
It’s not difficult to see why Homefield items have become so beloved over the years.
Nostalgia is powerful, so much so that even non-collectors are often happy to snag retro jackets or throwback concert tees when possible. Homefield has tapped into that with sports fans, and it has taken the brand extremely far, extremely fast.
At its core, Homefied is, of course, a clothing brand. But what has made the Indianapolis-based apparel company a rising juggernaut in a crowded space has been its storytelling. The lineup of comfortable shirts and hoodies is helpful. But each design provides insight into a school’s history, and that’s what has won fans over.
“It’s easy to [support Homefield] because they are college football fans, so they understand people like us,” Carstens said. “When I say people like us, I mean people who are idiots on game days, and they want to tell that story.”
The origin of Homefield can be traced back to a single game day: the 2015 Pinstripe Bowl between Indiana and Duke. Connor, an Indiana alum and diehard Hoosiers fan, suffered as a potential game-tying field goal sailed directly over the uprights. The kick was ruled no good.
The following offseason, “The Kick Was Good” became a common phrase among frustrated Indiana fans, and the shirt that jumpstarted what would become Homefield arrived soon after.
Connor first began printing shirts in 2014 under the Hoosier Proud brand, which focused on state-themed apparel at the time. Christa helped design the tees, while Connor sold them door-to-door.
Hoosier Proud did fine and could eventually be found in 30 or so stores across the state.
“The Kick Was Good” shirts were a different story. Connor began printing the simple catchphrase on red tees in his basement that offseason, and they immediately became a hit on social media heading into the 2016 campaign.
In 2017, Hoosier Proud had secured licenses for Indiana, Purdue, Ball State and Indiana State, Connor. Christa then got married, and the couple’s side project began gaining steam. The Hitchcock’s were able to raise angel investment money and Homefield launched with eight schools, all in Indiana, in August 2018.
On its surface, the vintage sports apparel space seems crowded, and the Hitchcock’s knew that going in. Vintage college apparel, however, was far from what fans of pro teams would expect.
Authentic college sports fans themselves, the Hitchcock’s have used Homefield to tap into the intimate relationship college sports fans have with their favorite schools. While much of the vintage apparel market is filled with the same basic designs repeated over and over, Homefield delivers a completely different look.
“That’s where a lot of brands stop,” Christa said. “They just drag and drop and put things onto a shirt, and this is where we’ve really kind of differentiated. That’s just the beginning for us.”
Christa, now Homefield’s creative director, and the design team draw inspiration from a number of collectibles. Once a school hands over its art sheet, the team starts hunting — it digs through eBay listings, ticket stubs, game programs and vintage apparel to find the right ideas.
This hunt sometimes results in former themes and color schemes making their way into the 21st century, and fans often find themselves discovering something they never knew about their favorite school.
So far, a number of old-school mascots are among the brand’s best-sellers.
A design featuring the Indiana bison, which led the school for a short time in the late 1960s, has been a favorite among Hoosier fans. While Notre Dame’s leprechaun currently stands as one of the most iconic mascots in history, it’s Clashmore Mike, Notre Dame’s Irish Terrier mascot that led the football team between 1924 and 1966, that is featured on one of the most popular tees.
Dipping into that history isn’t always a win, however. Schools are extremely protective of their brands and how they are displayed. A Homefield design might not always match the vision for what a school has, and things can often get rejected.
Homefield relied heavily on a number of small schools when it first launched, with the largest schools often viewing partnering with a new brand simply too risky. For a non-power conference school, any additional revenue can be a difference maker, and items featuring designs for Tulane’s Green Wave, UC Irvine’s Surfing Anteater, the Marshall Bison and the Hawaii Rainbows have been major hits since release — even beyond the alumni of those schools.
Those initial hits added up, and schools were sometimes left doing damage control if a rival had a Big New Saturday drop, and its fans didn’t.
“I'll always be grateful for the schools that took a chance on us at the beginning,” Connor says.
A collectible for the hard-core fan
Six years after launching, Homefield is extremely aware its items are highly collectible among college sports fans. Past designs have kept this in mind, and for the first time this summer, Homefield leaned into the collectibles concept hard.
First launched on Aug. 9, just weeks before the 2024 college football season starts, Homefield’s Can’t Miss Kickoff Box was designed with collectors in mind. Built around a stylized collectible box topped with “Homefield 2024” text, each features three school items, a mug and socks.
The Platinum Box, which adds a fourth school item, takes the concept a little further, while including a Platinum Pass that allows early access to the school’s drops and a 20% discount through the 2024 regular season.
“These aren’t for casuals — we built these for the truest of the true,” the Platinum Box description on Homefield’s website reads.
With just 144 made for each school, the Platinum Boxes are, more than anything Homefield has produced before, a short-printed collectible.
“Most brands now will just send stuff in a white mailer, but we wanted to communicate thoughtfulness, so we’re thinking about the experience,” Connor said. “We want you to feel amped when this arrives on your doorstep and it looks beautiful. You open it up and it’s presented well. It shows you that we get this is a special time of year. It’s kind of like opening a present on Christmas morning.”
Made up of three components that take several minutes to assemble, the boxes include specific details for the 2024 college football season, including a diagram of the 12-team playoff bracket, which Homefield hopes fans will recall as an important moment in time years from now.
The project is more complicated than anything else Homefield has ever done, but Connor says that doing it is simply Homefield staying true to how it started. Since the Hitchcock’s first launched Homefield, they’ve aimed to produce quality over quantity.
It would be easy to ditch well-researched designs and churn out templated shirts with volume. Homefield could also easily move into deals with pro teams using that model and scale its business rapidly.
But that’s not what the company has ever been about.
“You could do a lot more and we could lose the core of what we do,” Connor said. “And so when people collect, it’s because we’re putting out something unique, because it’s thoughtful, because it does speak to something that they haven’t been able to find before."
Ben Burrows is a reporter and editor for cllct.