Our interview segments are back! After a long hiatus my fellow Bulletin writer Paul Lukas joins me to discuss his blog Uni Watch, which is now over 20 years old. Sports nerds unite! Paul has been covering the aesthetics of sports, including uniforms, logos and all aspects of design in the sports world for a very long time. The online community he's built is strong, hilarious and very particular. But it's also proof that finding a space and owning is still an essential way to grow an online content business. Stay for Paul's mind-boggling but very true example of how sports fans root for jerseys more than players. And don't miss the end of the podcast to hear from one of those loyal Uni Watch readers, and what his hysterical wife thinks about his obsession with Uni Watch.
The full podcast version can be found here.
Here's a portion of my chat with Paul Lukas:
Stefano: Another episode of Straight from the Source! It's been a while since we've had an interview segment. This one won't be in video form, but we got our podcast and of course, our written bulletin on Straight from the Source. Today, a fellow bulletin writer joins me...he runs the Uni Watch bulletin as well as uni-watch.com for many, many years now. He is Paul Lukas. Paul, thank you so much for joining me.
Paul: Thanks so much for having me.
Stefano: First off, I mean, I think it's kind an easy question. How would you fall in love with the aesthetic side of sports, as far as following the uniforms and what the players are wearing on the field or the court or wherever they may be?
Paul: You know, I've always been into that kind of stuff. back to when I was a kid. I remember getting my first little league uniform. And, you know, that felt so official, and I loved putting it on and getting my stirrups just right. I was that kid who was always doodling team logos in the margins of his notebook instead of paying attention to the teacher. And so I was, I was always noticing, like, why is this guy's sleeve a little longer than that guy's sleeve or whatever. It was just always something I was interested in. Then in the 90's, I was a freelance writer, and I was writing a lot about consumer culture, especially as it pertained to design like product design, brand design, industrial design. And I realized I could take that same filter of sort of breaking down visual details and apply it to sports.
I realized I had internalized from those childhood years, you know, I had internalized a lot of knowledge and a lot of opinions about the visual side of sports. And so I decided, in 1999, I made the first and still the only new year's resolution I've ever made, which was to create a sports column about design. I called it Uni Watch, and I pitched it around. I shopped it to the big guys like ESPN and Sports Illustrated. They didn't get it, they weren't interested in it. So I then set my sights a little lower.
I went to the sports section of the Village Voice, which was a weekly paper here in New York, where I live. They got it. And I remember the editor saying, 'how about we do this like, every four weeks? Do you think there's enough you can actually write about on this every four weeks?' And I said, I think...I think so. I'm pretty sure. Let's let's see and find out. And that's how Uni Watch got started. The column eventually left the Village Voice and went to slate.com for a little while then to espn.com once they eventually saw the light and sort of said, 'You know what, maybe we should have jumped on this beforehand, but how about now. I had a nice run at ESPN for 15 years, which was great. Along the way, I launched the Uni Watch blog to supplement the ESPN column because the ESPN content was every week to 10 days. But there were readers I knew who could, you know, they were hungry for this stuff every day if I could provide it and and then the blog has sort of become like my life raft. The other gigs come and go, but I've always got the daily blog, and there's a real community around it. A culture of people who get it, as we like to say, which is kind of shorthand for serious sports "geek-atude." I have to say I always believed in Uni Watch and believed, you know, it could be a thing. But I never once believed it would still be going after 20 years, I thought it would be a project that would kind of run its course. Instead what I learned along the way, is that the more information I put out there, the more I get back from my readership. And so while I'm sitting here talking to you, there are people right this very moment, emailing me tweeting stuff at me and saying, Look what I just noticed while watching a game, or look at this old piece of memorabilia I found in my grandfather's attic. Whatever it might be. So I've seen it's become crowdsourced, essentially. And I didn't expect that or plan on that. But it's, I feel very fortunate to be sort of the hub for all this information that people want to share with me and share with each other.
Stefano: I mean, it's interesting, right? Because, I mean, you mentioned it right kind of the sports "geek-atude"...People that really are passionate about sports have been watching it for years. We were talking before we went on here, that when it comes to big moments in sports in people's lives, a lot of what they remember, the visions in their head when they remember these moments, are what the team was wearing and the exact details of the uniform. Like I was mentioning, when the Miami Heat's won its first championship, Dwayne Wade throws the ball in the air. All dressed in the red Miami jerseys that I still remember. And I feel like there's a lot of people, like you mentioned, there's a community behind you now. And I mean, let's, let's be fair, let's be honest, Paul, I've been following your work for years. I mean, before we were together here at Bulletin before I was at ESPN for four years, I've been following your work. I really do feel that because there are so many people that attached their memories, or sports memories and some of the happiest moments of their lives to what the teams were wearing.
Paul: Yeah you know, Jerry Seinfeld famously said, 'We're rooting for laundry.' And it's true. If you break it down to a little more granular level, we're all familiar with the term brand loyalty in the consumer marketplace. But brand loyalty is usually a synonym for product loyalty. Like let's say, I like Cheerios, which, in fact, I do. And now that means over the years, I've sort of internalized some kind of positive feelings, some like emotional positivity to the yellow box, the typeface on the package. You know it that it all says Cheerios, to me some little thing inside my brain smiles when I see it on the grocery shelf. But what I really like about Cheerios is that they taste good to me. And if they change the formula, you know, if they tasted different or if they suddenly got soggy or whatever, then all that good feeling about the yellow box, wouldn't go very far. My brand loyalty is really product loyalty.
Like the famous example, that if you change the formula, people will not necessarily stay with your product. But in sports, the product by which I mean the players, the product is changing all the time. And so is the quality of that product. Your team can be really good one year and really bad the next year. The players get traded, they come and go via free agency, they retire. But you still keep rooting for that uniform, no matter who's wearing it. That is a really intense form of brand loyalty, and there's really nothing else like it on the consumer landscape. That is the power of a uniform. And like let's further out the example I like to give. Let's say I love the Mets and that I hate the Yankees, which in fact I do. But if the entire Mets team was traded today, 28 Guys for 28 guys straight up for the entire Yankees team, just if they swapped rosters, who would I root for tomorrow? To me, it's a no brainer, I would root for the 28 guys who are now wearing Mets uniforms, even if I hated them the day before that. That makes no sense. It's not rational. And that the fact that it's not rational, and yet most sports fans would tell you that's exactly how they feel. That is the power of you.
