Homefield Apparel adding vintage Alabama merchandise with rarely seen logos on Saturday

Alabama fans will soon be able to purchase clothing branded with versions of Big Al that go back decades.

Homefield Apparel, an Indianapolis-based college sports apparel company that specializes in vintage logos, is adding Alabama to its catalog on Saturday. Alabama is the final chapter of its Big New Saturday fall campaign that has seen 22 schools added to its catalog.

“There’s just so many different versions of Big Al to use,” Connor Hitchock, the founder and CEO of Homefield, told The Tuscaloosa News. “You may have seen them randomly pop up from time to time, but anything involving him is going to be really good. There’s a Rammer Jammer shirt that we’re really excited about, too.”

Homefield’s catalog includes logos that, without extensive research, would have been largely unknown to the common fan of schools, such as a bison logo used by Indiana in the 1960s and several iterations of Maryland’s terrapin.

“We can’t go to every single school and physically dig through their archives, but we’ll consult a number of resources: we’ll do our own research, we’ll literally read yearbooks dating back to the early 1900s to understand where phrases come from,” Hitchcock said. “We’ll do old eBay searches because you want to see not only a cool old logo but how they used that logo so we can do it justice. Our entire thing is we’re thoughtful, so we want to do it justice.”

Hitchcock will even reach out to fans via Twitter direct message for institutional knowledge. He admits he had a head start on Alabama: his brother-in-law is an Alabama graduate and his sister-in-law played soccer for Alabama, in addition to working in its athletic department.

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The full collection will be revealed on Saturday with roughly 10 logos/marks, including some that could not have been found through traditional methods. A vintage vault maintained by a widely used licensing company is a good starting point, but Hitchcock’s research found other logos he wanted use, which he took to Paul Mills, UA’s assistant director of trademark licensing.

Hitchcock said Mills, “was all about it.”

Reach Brett Hudson at 205-722-0196 or bhudson@tuscaloosanews.com or via Twitter, @Brett_Hudson