Utah company picked to supply products for 6 of the bowl games

The University of Utah and Brigham Young University footballers weren't the only local teams that were busy preparing for college football bowl games this year.

Ogio, a bag manufacturer based on Bluffdale, was a winner this bowl season, with its products purchased by organizers of six of the 34 games. In some cases, the bags were provided to players, coaches and staffs as part of their package of gifts provided by the bowl committees. Some bags also make their way into the hands of bowl organizers, media covering the games or bowl sponsors.

"Ogio is a great partner with bowls, because we're not affiliated with any teams or conferences in terms of sponsorship, our products are recognized globally as a very high-quality, innovative brand, and our products are very functional and well-designed and high quality," said Nick Wright, vice president of Ogio's global promotional-products division.

"So the players see high perceived value in our products, and it's something they'll continue to use in their travels and everyday life and school and so forth. And then the other part of that is the board and sponsors, as well."

In all, Ogio produced 2,000 bowl bags, including 550 duffel bags for Thursday's FedEx BCS National Championship Game. Other Ogio bowls were the Rose Bowl presented by Citi, Orange Bowl, St. Petersburg Bowl, PapaJohns.com Bowl and the New Mexico Bowl.

"We've been doing bowl business the last three or four years," Wright said. "We've been in this industry over 12 years, and through relationships and in conjunction with relationships with one of our distributors who calls on the bowls, we started presenting this concept, and it was unique enough and personalized enough that six of the bowls liked the concept."

While Wright declined to say how much revenue the bowl sales provided for the company, all of the bowls purchased the Ogio bags. The retail value of a BCS title game duffel bag is $35, the Orange Bowl backpack would normally sell for $69, the Rose Bowl bag goes for $69 and layover travel bags sell for $150.

"The six bowls we worked with, some of them were player gifts, some were board gifts and some were sponsor gifts," he said. "What's unique about Ogio is we took a bag and offered it at retail and we then customized them out — custom colors on the outside, changing out color panels and so forth — to represent the color of the bowls on some of them."

Bags for the PapaJohns.com Bowl featured red and green elements in addition to the bowl logo. Some bags contained an inside lining with the bowl logo or customized zipper pulls. The ESPN logo was added to bags for three ESPN-operated bowls.