Crew Dog

Crew Dog Co. is building the next great American collegiate brand. Founded at Yale in 2023 by two undergraduates, we make hand-drawn, embroidered mascot apparel: the antidote to the generic merchandise flooding every campus bookstore in America. We create products that bring students, alumni, and communities closer to what they care about most — their school, their team, their people. The generic merchandise problem isn't unique to college. It exists everywhere people identify with a group: pro sports, high schools, food and beverage, and corporate. Affiliation is universal, and Crew Dog is built to serve it.

Walk into any campus bookstore in America and you'll see the same thing: racks of generic, screen-printed merchandise that could belong to any school if you swapped the logo. A $5 billion licensed collegiate market, and almost none of it has uniqueness. That's the problem Crew Dog was built to solve. Every product we make features original, hand-drawn mascot artwork brought to life through large-scale embroidery — over 50,000 stitches and two hours of production per piece. We don't drop a logo on a blank. We design from scratch for each school, creating products that look and feel different from everything else on the shelf. The result is a brand in the college space that customers connect with emotionally, not just transactionally. I'm a second-time founder, and my co-founder and I built Crew Dog from our dorm at Yale while carrying full course loads. In two years, we've scaled to over $1.3M in revenue in 2025 across three channels — D2C, group orders, and retail. In D2C we've sold over 7,500 items organically with less than $5K in total ad spend. In the group order stream, we've designed for over 1,000 college groups through a 51-student ambassador program that's fully performance-based. In retail we’ve placed products in 45 campus bookstores and 80+ retail stores through partners like Rally House, Follett, and Lids, and signed 90+ university licenses. This quarter alone we added 34 new retail accounts and 17 new licenses. Our supply chain was built from scratch across three manufacturing partners around a made-to-order model. We carry zero inventory, take no upfront procurement risk, and only pay for what we’ve already sold. This lets us offer a wide range of colors, styles, and sizes across 90+ schools without the capital burden that kills most apparel startups. Our blended margins are 53% and growing as our volume increases. What we've built is exceptionally hard to replicate. We co-own all artwork with our university partners, giving us permanent IP protection on hundreds of school-specific designs. Additionally, most universities have granted us exclusivity on our style of mascot artwork, meaning they won’t approve artwork from other brands that produce anything similar. Beyond IP, our moat is operational: 90+ active licenses, national retail relationships, and established placement in 80+ stores. A competitor starting today, even if they were allowed to match our product would need to independently negotiate every license, earn every retail placement, build every design from zero, and convince universities to approve artwork that can't resemble what we've already made. The major licensees in the space, like Nike, Champion, Under Armour have little incentive to pursue this space too, as their model is built on scale and standardization, not school-by-school custom artwork. The opportunity ahead is massive — the generic merchandise problem exists everywhere people identify with a group: high schools, pro sports, food and beverage, and even corporate. College is where we are starting. Affiliation is universal and Crew Dog is changing how people represent their affiliation across America.