*** The 2024 Volleyball Canada Youth Nationals may be over, but you still have a chance to grab this year’s merch! The Post Sale is live, running from May 26 to June 19 at 2:00 PM MDT. Click here to order your gear! ***
Have you checked out the new Volleyball Canada Youth Nationals merch yet? Or maybe you’ve already received your presale order, and now you’re wondering about how we do it? For all you volleyball enthusiasts out there, here’s a look behind the scenes of how we design the Volleyball Canada Youth Nationals merchandise every year.
We’ve been at this since 2018, when Volleyball Stuff became the official merchandise provider for Volleyball Canada and we set up our first booth at Youth Nationals, the largest youth sporting event in Canada, with over 1,500 teams and 20,000+ athletes competing across the nation. Each year, we start the design process for Nationals as early as 6 months in advance of the May tournaments, to make sure that each year’s design is trendy, relevant, attractive, and something the youth will actually want to wear. We make sure the most popular apparel colours from previous years are on offer again—last year’s best-selling Sandstone crewneck sweater becomes this year’s Sandstone hoodie, for example—and our goal is that each year’s designs flow into the next’s in one cohesive style.
That doesn’t mean we don’t like shaking things up! At vbs apparel and our sister company Lubdub Apparel, we’ve taken on a trio of talented graphic designers in the past couple years, and we wanted to use their talents to push in a new, more illustrative direction. So Sarah, Melody, and Maria set out on their initial sketches with the inspiration of a vintage concert t-shirt—large, minimalist graphics on the back, and calling back to the foundation of the Canadian Volleyball Association in 1953 on the front chest logo. We always want to be sure there’s a link between Canada’s elite national teams and the young athletes who look up to them as well, so we’ve made sure that the typeface and graphic style of the Youth Nationals merch flow into the style you see on the uniforms of Canada’s national team. We want to foster the talent of Canada’s future top athletes—and this is just a small detail that helps you dream big!
After our trio of designers started on their initial sketches, it was a team effort to refine them into the best ideas to present to Volleyball Canada for their feedback. This year, one of the early concepts that Maria and Sarah worked on was a design of a volleyball hitting the net, but Volleyball Canada pointed out that a more positive angle would be better. Rather than showing a ball hitting the net, which would surely mean one team or the other would be disappointed, let’s show the ball sailing over the net, where all players can imagine the excitement and potential of a rally in progress.
Taking these concepts and feedback, Melody, Sarah, and Maria all worked together to develop their designs further. Melody tells us that while each of the designers tended to focus on the concepts and designs they had come up with, it was by no means an isolated affair. Each of them worked together on all the ideas, offering each other feedback and taking inspiration from each other’s strengths to eventually arrive at a slate of finalized concepts for Volleyball Canada’s approval. Once they had selected the design they liked best, final tweaks and mock-up stages looped in our production team, testing placement and materials until we arrived at our final locked in designs.
And as you can see, they look great! We’re so proud of the work we put into these designs each year, and we’re so excited to share them with you. The presale period for the 2024 Volleyball Canada Youth Nationals merchandise may be over, but you still have the chance to pick up your piece of the excitement at each of the Nationals events in Ottawa (May 2-5), Fredricton (May 2-5), Richmond (May 9-12), and the festival event in Edmonton (May 15-26). We’ll be there slinging shirts at a booth at each event, taking in all the action with you. Good luck to all the competitors at this year’s nationals! We can’t wait to cheer you on!
[…] Post Sale is now live, running from May 26 to June 19** We put a lot of thought and love into our Nationals merchandise design each year, and we don’t want anyone who wants a piece of the action to miss […]