The Islanders want fans to design the team’s next alternate jersey, announcing a contest Wednesday that the club believes is the first of its kind in the NHL.
Islanders President of Business Operations Kelly Cheeseman said the promotion is “something that I’ve wanted to do in this league for a long time” after having success on a similar idea with the L.A. Galaxy a decade ago.
“We see how passionate NHL fans are around their jerseys,” Cheeseman told SBJ, “and we were finally able to come up with a concept that worked, that the league was behind and Fanatics and the designers were really behind. Excited to see how Islanders fans in particular get into this – to design the concept they want, not the concept that necessarily we want or what Fanatics wants.”
The winning jersey will be worn starting in the 2027-28 season, and the designer will receive a team-signed jersey and a VIP experience to watch its on-ice debut. Submissions are due by July 24 through an online tool that lets users choose between 15 jersey patterns, nine logos, numerous fonts for nameplates and numbers, and more than 50 colors, all of which were all pre-approved by the league’s relevant parties.
“The trickiest piece is the IP,” Cheeseman said, crediting NHL SVP/Marketing Brian Jennings and the league’s retail, legal and IP teams for working with the Islanders to ensure a jersey a fan builds in their platform couldn’t become ownership of another party.
“They’re all striping concepts that we’ve used in the past, or the templates that they have, [and] all logos or fonts that we own,” Cheeseman added. “We can’t get tripped up by something that’s created that we wouldn’t own or have license right to.”
After the submission period closes, the front office will enlist input from players as it narrows the options down to the final five, which will head to a fan vote in August. Cheeseman said the team doesn’t have anything in mind that it’s looking to see from entries, though he thinks they’d like to stay somewhat within their existing brand identity. No logo changes are planned as part of this project.
“I want to see something that the fans actually really want,” Cheeseman said. “I mean, that’s probably a politically correct answer, but if we pull designs forward and the fans vote on the one they want and it’s picked by the players, I think there’s no way that that fails.”
Cheeseman would know: When he ran this promotion with the Galaxy, “the players liked that jersey so much, they wore it all the way to the MLS Cup and won,” he said.
