Spring in retail mean clearing your shelves. Retailers start placing orders for back-to-school season, which kicks off the annual retail cycle. Over the next couple of months, you'll see a lot of clearance sales (it's actually the best time to buy, in most cases).
A few misconceptions that seems to go around and around on this board:
1) GTAA has pretty much no say as far as what ends up in retail. Stansbury can tell the bookstore (or any retailer) til he's blue in the face (pun intended) to stock an entire store full of gold adidas gear. The bookstore (and its corporate owner) is going to buy based on HARD DATA. They will order X of gold, Y of blue, etc. based on past buying patterns. They would rather sell out than be holding extras this time of year.
2) adidas.com is no different than Fanatics or the bookstore. They will stock the items that they believe will sell the best. It looks like they sold out of everything they ordered. That's a huge win in their industry. The expectation from some was they would carry EVERY GT item that adidas produced. That's not the case of any of their schools.
3) What the teams order is completely separate from retail. Outside of the standard sideline polos, most everything is custom ordered and doesn't go through any retail chain. GTAA staffer told me at the game Friday night that 404 hats were ordered as blank white adidas hats and then embroidered by a local vendor, and that's what happens with most everything the teams wear. GTAA can't "sell" an item, so that's why the hats and backpacks were tied to a donation. The campaign helped meet the fans' demand and raised a good chuck of cash for the program.
When GTAA struck the apparel deal, they did not buy adidas or the bookstore. There are maybe a handful of schools that have the power to call the shots with their deals, and Georgia Tech ain't one of them.
