Based out of Houston, Athletic Decals Incorporated makes every single decal you see on an NFL helmet — the big team logo decal on the side, league logo and American flag, any commemorative decals, and even the stripes. Because these decals are seen by millions and millions of people every week, you could make the case that his tiny company is a key cog in the NFL’s visual branding program. A staff of 10 people does all of the printing in-house, supplying hundreds of thousands of decals to college and pro teams.

But the interesting part of the story is how they started. Chris Willis, owner of Athletic Decals Incorporated, was working for a small screen-print shop in Alabama about 20 years ago…

Someone from a local high school team came in and asked if we could (make helmet decals). It was one of those deals where we said, “Sure!” And then, as soon as he walked out, we looked at each other and said, “How the heck are we gonna do that?”

The great thing about this new material was that you could peel it off of the helmet without leaving any glue or other residue behind. So it was easy to remove or replace. Also, vinyl tends to shrink a little bit, so the vinyl and adhesive would shrink at different rates, and you’d eventually have this little edge of exposed adhesive that would pick up dirt and grass and all. So at that time, this new material was a huge improvement. And then I met this collector guy who said, “Listen, you’ve got something here. You should try calling some NFL teams and see if you can do decals for them.” And my boss said, “Listen, don’t waste your time with that — you can’t just call an NFL team out of the blue and expect to do business with them.” But fortunately, I was young and stupid — I was still only about 25 or 26 years old at the time — so when the boss went on vacation, I dialed Dallas information, got the Cowboys’ phone number, asked to speak to the equipment manager, and they put me through, just like that. It was so easy.

Now that’s one helluva story, isn’t it? The Cowboys ended up turning him down, but he got the Vikings to bite and got his foot in the door with the NFL. Over the next few years, word spread among equipment managers and this little tiny screen print shop in Alabama all of a sudden had over half of the NFL teams for clients. Eventually, some businessmen put up capital to start a company exclusively to produce helmet decals, and they moved the operation to Houston.

They distribute the main team logo directly to the teams, and the rest of the stuff — the NFL shield logo, the flag, etc — are shipped and billed directly to the NFL, who then distributes them to the teams.

Some fun things I didn’t know: the Bengals helmet is actually painted (those tiger stripes are not decals), but the Rams stripe-like horns are actually decals — and they’re hell to apply. But strangely enough, the Colorado State Rams helmet is painted; they paint the whole thing gold, mask off the horns, and paint the rest green. And the Michigan helmet is painted as well; they take a Green Bay Packers helmet, mask it off and paint it navy. The Patriots decals are tough, because they like the tails of the Patriot-Guy to match up from one side to the other. The Texas Longhorns decal is brutal; the horns are narrow and there’s no border around them, so there isn’t much decal to hold on the helmet — one hit, and its all askew. Great stuff.

They don’t do any design work per-se, being a printer. Willis says their biggest job is reproducing color accurately. He says they had to create a custom ink for the Seahawks new helmets, because the design specs called for a light blue with a metallic flake in it. Ditto for the Jets, whose green has a metallic flake in it.

My favorite question and answer, at least the one that made me laugh, was this one:

PL: Have you ever been given a design to reproduce that you didn’t like?

CW: Well, yeah, but besides that, it’s so graphic, it really tells the story. You look at it and you know it’s Viking’s horn. I like the Chiefs. I’ll tell you who I really like: the Jaguars, because the logo uses what an art student would call negative space, in terms of how they use the black.

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Again, the original article from ESPN’s uniform-design-columnist guy — feel free to peruse his archives, which are fascinating, with its discussions of new uniforms, color palettes, and what not — can be found here.