The Sportswear Manufacturer

    It was a fixture from childhood until I was a young adult. I remember seeing the blue building atop the hill as we travelled west on Columbia Parkway to the Red Bank Road exit enroute to Swallen’s. In case there was any doubt what you were looking at, there was the sign - VELVA SHEEN.

From the April 13, 1969 Cincinnati Enquirer

    Velva Sheen was founded in 1936 by Oscar Schroeder and was originally a flag and banner manufacturer. In its early years, the plant was located at various sites in Over the Rhine and the West End. In 1957, Robert Rielly, a St. Xavier High School and Xavier University graduate and veteran of World War II, purchased Velva Sheen. His brother, William, an attorney, served as a consultant and later joined the company full time. William was also a St. Xavier and Xavier University graduate and World War II veteran and had graduated from the University of Cincinnati College of Law. Neither brother had any background in the industry. The company’s annual sales at the time of the acquisition were $500,000 and the company had 20 employees.

     It isn’t clear exactly when Velva Sheen’s focus shifted from printing flags and banners to sportswear, but the 1960s were a period of rapid growth. In June 1960, Velva Sheen moved from Over the Rhine to Gilbert Avenue in Walnut Hills. In June 1963, construction wrapped up on a new 4,000 square foot warehouse facility at the Walnut Hills plant. In 1965, the company produced nearly two million articles, had $3,000,000 in sales, and employed 125 people. The company was already outgrowing its Gilbert Avenue facility and, in June 1966, announced that it was building a new $650,000, 60,000 square foot plant on Virginia Avenue in Fairfax. The location would allow for future expansion.

     The new Fairfax facility was designed specifically for Velva Sheen’s operations. Different departments in the company were identified by different color doors. There was an Art Department where artists created designs or adapted customer designs for screen printing production. The Art Department produced 1200 – 1500 new designs every 22 working days. There was a wood working shop for the manufacture of screen frames. They bought many of the shirts they printed from other companies, but manufactured what they couldn’t buy. Their seamstresses produced up to 2,400 garments each day.

     Velva Sheen created the continuous-motion screen printing equipment they used. The July 29, 1968 Cincinnati Post & Times-Star described the printing process as follows:

The 30-foot-long printing-flocking presses at Velva Sheen move continuously and are operated by a technician with complete control over the process from the first step, the imprint with colored adhesive, to heat treatment of the flocked image in an oven. The garment is first placed on the press under an illuminated image, the adhesive is then impressed through the silk screen and while the operator watches in a mirror, the garment is flocked, the waste flock is recovered by suction, and the garment moves through a 265-degree oven for drying.

From the February 1, 1970 Cincinnati Enquirer

    Although Velva Sheen’s business was mostly with colleges and universities, in 1968 they began offering their products to PTAs, booster clubs, and Little League teams for fundraising purposes. They sold the product to the organizations wholesale, and the organizations then sold the goods for a profit.

From May 20, 1968 Cincinnati Post & Times-Star

    They also had a number of customers from fraternal organizations, camps, the U.S. government, and corporations.

From June 3, 1968 Cincinnati Post & Times-Star

    By 1970, student unrest on U.S. college campuses impacted Velva Sheen’s business. After all, students who were challenging their schools’ authorities, weren’t going to dish out money to advertise those schools on their clothing.

     However, there were certainly designs other than college logos that could be printed on sportswear. One of the biggest sellers locally was the Cool Ghoul shirt. For non-Cincinnatians or younger folks, the Cool Ghoul, portrayed by Dick Von Hoene, was a popular local television character who was a ghoul with a touch of hippie. The Cool Ghoul partnered with Shillito’s department store for a personal appearance at its Downtown location where he autographed short sleeve Velva Sheen sweatshirts with his likeness with “blood red ink.” The event generated an unexpectedly large crowd and the store began running out of shirts. Shillito’s management called Velva Sheen requesting more shirts immediately and the company produced them. The Shillito’s buyer hopped a cab to Velva Sheen, picked up the shirts, and replenished the store’s stock to save the day.

From the March 28,1970  Cincinnati Enquirer

    In 1972, Velva Sheen was acquired by Beatrice Foods. It operated as a division of Beatrice and Velva Sheen management was kept in place with the Rielly brothers remaining in charge.

     Velva Sheen experienced occasional misprints and overruns. Initially, the company operated an outlet store out of the plant. However, around 1973 the Velva Sheen misprint store opened on Wooster Pike in Fairfax. I made my television debut in a Velva Sheen misprint (a local news crew was trailing Santa Claus, who was going house to house visiting children). The shirt was a graying, well-worn graphic tee with a sad-faced cartoon character and the caption “Be nice to me. I had a hard day.” My mom had a Velva Sheen misprint with the caption “Never underestimate the power of a woman.” My favorite misprint store purchase, though, was an orange BGSU tee shirt. I was a freshman in high school and had no idea what BGSU stood for, so my friend and I decided on “Big Girls of Southern Utah.” (My apologies to those of you with an allegiance to Bowling Green State University.)

From the February 7, 1973 Eastern Hills Journal

    The Velva Sheen misprint store on Wooster Pike was only open for around five years, but its closure wasn’t the end to their outlet stores. In August 1978, the Hyde Park outlet store opened and the company ultimately had seven retail locations. They supplemented the misprints and overruns with other sportswear, jackets, shoes, and athletic accessories and began offering screen printing on orders as small as 10 items.

     Over the years, Velva Sheen had tens of thousands of customers. Most of the shirts were hits, but there were a few misses too. Voluptuous actress Raquel Welch starred in the roller derby film Kansas City Rollers and Velva Sheen printed shirts showing her in a roller derby uniform. It failed. Company officials blamed it on women not wanting to wear an image of a well-endowed woman and men not wanting to anger the women in their lives. The company also printed thousands of tee shirts with “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” for Muhammad Ali’s team in preparation for his Rumble in the Jungle match against George Foreman. The problem? It was printed in English, which wasn’t an official language in Zaire, where the fight was held.

     Some of the more popular designs were a picture of a garden hose with the caption “Up your nose with a rubber hose” (for fans of John Travolta on Welcome Back, Kotter) and the ubiquitous “Virginia Is for Lovers” tee shirts. Velva Sheen printed over 300,000 tee shirts for a Del Monte Foods promotion with captions like “Peas help me” and “Be a human bean.” Before the Charmin bears, the spokesman for the toilet tissue brand was fictional grocer Mr. Whipple, who was constantly miffed at customers who squeezed the Charmin. Procter & Gamble ordered tee shirts with the caption “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin. Squeeze me instead.”

From Etsy.com

    Velva Sheen wouldn’t print just anything on a shirt, though. They wouldn’t print anything they considered obscene or designs with a cigarette. Bill Rielly was a former four pack per day smoker who didn’t want to encourage anyone else to take up the habit.

     Bob Rielly retired from Velva Sheen in 1982. Bill Rielly retired in 1983, but returned as chairman a year later. The company continued to grow and thrive, averaging 10 percent annual growth. They shipped 60,000 garments each day and were the biggest UPS customer in Cincinnati. The company had 90,000 customers around the world, but still did most of their business with college bookstores. They were also licensed to print Muppets, Disney, Looney Toons, Garfield, and Smurfs merchandise. They printed shirts for Major League Baseball and National Football League teams and the NCAA.

     By all reports, Bill Rielly was a hands-on CEO. He enjoyed walking through the plant and talking to his employees about both personal and professional matters. In that respect, he was like Pat Swallen (see The Retailer). Unlike Swallen, though, he didn’t present himself as just a regular guy. He enjoyed international travel and art and displayed some of his art acquisitions at Velva Sheen’s offices. He had a couple of the artists on staff recreate an ancient Egyptian mural in the employee lounge. He also had two Japanese Torii gates installed in front of two of the company’s buildings. Bill Rielly said, "We are in the art business, but people spend most of their waking hours at work that is really not that interesting. I think it's important to make places like the lounge as pleasant as possible."

William Rielly at Velva Sheen headquarters, June 1987 Cincinnati Magazine

    Bill Rielly once confronted an ice cream vendor who sold ice cream cones to his employees that, he said, were half air and half ice cream. When the ice cream man told him no one else had complained, Rielly bought an ice cream machine. Employees had ice cream once every week and on days when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees. He often bought lunch for employees who had to work on Saturdays. He held a contest for employees to guess when the company would print its 200 millionth item with the winner receiving a trip to Walt Disney World. Bill Rielly retired sometime after 1987.

     Some of the more stressful times at Velva Sheen must have been during sports championships, particularly those involving a Cincinnati team. In 1990, Velva Sheen was the only company in the greater Cincinnati area with a Reds’ apparel license. Their artists had created designs for potential division, league, and World Series championships and were marketing them to retailers. MLB prohibited sale of licensed merchandise before a championship was won. Velva Sheen took a chance and began printing division championship shirts before the Reds had actually clinched. They had promised local retailers they would be available the day after the Reds won their division. Many employees worked through the night during the Reds’ World Series run, producing hundreds of thousands of shirts.

    In November 1994, Houston-based Brazos Sportswear, Inc. purchased Velva Sheen with plans to merge it with their licensed sportswear division. The company's headquarters moved to Fairfax. In 1996, the company closed its retail locations to focus on the wholesale business. Within the next year, Brazos acquired more apparel companies, including Cincinnati-based CS Crable Sportswear. In December 1997, Brazos announced that it would close the Fairfax plant and move its headquarters to the CS Crable location in Clermont County. The closure was related to company restructuring to reduce excess capacity due to the recent acquisitions. 129 people worked at the Fairfax plant, 80 of whom lost their jobs.

     Consolidation of company operations wasn’t successful, though, and within a year, Brazos was facing bankruptcy. They had $16.1 million in losses in the first half of 1998 and were delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Market. Brazos filed bankruptcy in January 1999 and announced that their Clermont County plant would close that spring. In May, Brazos announced they planned to sell most of their businesses to pay their creditors. In June, the few remaining employees at the company headquarters relocated to the former Velva Sheen facility in Fairfax. By early 2000, the company was out of business.

     Brothers William and Robert Rielly died within 24 hours of each other in July 2002. In addition to building a small banner and flag printing company into a multimillion-dollar sportswear manufacturer with international clientele, both men were volunteers and philanthropists.

     Topwin, a Japanese-owned California-based company, purchased the rights to the Velva Sheen brand in 2009. They have recreated the original tags, packaging and production method. So, the Velva Sheen name lives on.

From Topwin.com