Steven Farag put the players on the shirt - and in the business

Steven Farag spent part of a family holiday in Mexico doing something with remarkably little holiday spirit: staying up all night on Photoshop. He was a University of Illinois sophomore, and he thought the coming campus St. Patrick’s Day celebrations could use better shirts. Leisure had lost to a merchandising opportunity. His family had brought him to Mexico; his attention remained in Champaign.

Back on campus in January 2012, he showed the designs to his Delta Chi fraternity brothers. They helped spread them through conversations and social media. The orders went to Campus Sportswear, a local shop whose owners came to know their student customer rather well. A recurring joke developed: perhaps he should buy into the place. By graduation in 2014, the joke had acquired a transaction. His shirt business had also paid for his college education.

The distinction matters when telling Farag’s story. Campus Ink’s roots reach back to 1947. Farag did not establish a printing business before he was born. He joined an existing operation and helped build the modern company around it. One of its owners, Jedd Swisher, became both his partner and his teacher.

The student customer becomes the operator

The shop had already lived several lives. It began as a cobbler’s business, founded by Anthony Butitta, and moved toward Illinois apparel under a later generation. Farag arrived with knowledge of a different kind: what students wanted to buy, where to find those students, and how to take their orders online. The old business brought production experience and local relationships. The new partner brought a customer base that wore its enthusiasm across campus.

Farag had entered university intending to study engineering, then found himself drawn toward sales and marketing. Summer work cold calling and managing a painting business had given him practice approaching strangers and asking for a decision. Apparel supplied a product he could also help create. By senior year, his campus-event merchandise sales had reached six figures.

He turned that experience into a student design and sales program. Students could learn to make designs, sell to campus organizations, and handle real customers. In a 2023 account of the business, Farag said the program had trained more than a thousand students across 100 campuses. Nearly a third of the full-time employees had started during their undergraduate years. A college job could become a route back into the company.

Before the famous email, the arithmetic

Farag’s public interests extend to the less photogenic parts of running a print shop. In 2018 he wrote about calculating fixed costs, converting them into a daily overhead figure, and checking whether jobs generated enough gross profit to cover it. A busy press could still be an expensive way to spend an afternoon. Low prices were hardly a triumph if the day’s work left the bills unpaid.

His method was deliberately practical: sample recent jobs, look at setup and production time, and investigate when the numbers fell short. It is a useful detail in a career now associated with athletes and a celebrity investor. Long before the larger licensing agreements, he was asking whether a particular order justified the time it occupied.

He was also discussing automation and customer relationships with other printers. A 2017 conference talk described the growth of a shop already doing more than $1 million in business. His later work as a co-host of Printavo’s PrintHustlers Podcast, alongside Bruce Ackerman, made those conversations a regular part of his professional life. Printing gives him both a business to run and a community to talk shop with.

Ten minutes with Kofi Cockburn

The opening into college sports arrived in 2021, when athletes could begin earning from their name, image, and likeness. Campus Ink already understood campus commerce. Athlete merchandise offered another application for the design, selling, and production skills it had been developing.

One early meeting stayed with Farag. Illinois basketball star Kofi Cockburn and his representatives were close to choosing another company when Campus Ink received an introduction. Farag’s team had a few days to prepare a proposal. Cockburn then came into the store and gave them ten minutes to make their case. They won the business. The wider Illinois basketball team followed.

Farag later described a photograph of that meeting as a picture the company returned to when thinking about its beginnings in NIL. When Cockburn visited again ahead of his Illinois jersey retirement, he met the production team and watched some of his old designs being made. The relationship had outlasted the initial sales pitch. In this business, a retired jersey could still lead back to a working press.

A Friday-night pitch reaches Mark Cuban

By the 2021-22 basketball season, the Illinois experiment was producing roughly $100,000 for the team’s players. Farag wanted to repeat it elsewhere. He sent Mark Cuban an email on a Friday night. The subject line was plain: “We’re doing this in Champaign, IL and it’s working”. An offer followed the next morning.

The investment was announced in March 2022. Cuban took a minority stake, and the plans included expanding both the student training operation and the athlete merchandise platform. Farag had approached someone known for considering unsolicited pitches. He had also supplied evidence that his idea had customers.

He connected that decision to his earlier sales experience. In his own account, cold calling and door-to-door work had built resilience while other people questioned his career choice. Approaching Cuban was an extension of a habit he taught student sellers. As he put it: “I figured I should practice what I preach”.

More investors followed. A $2 million financing announcement in March 2024 included Illini Angels. High Street Equity Partners later joined a group that included Cuban, Renee Montgomery, Lightbank, and Capital Innovators. The growing investor list brought new relationships around a company whose original partnership had begun over student shirt orders.

“I figured I should practice what I preach”

Steven Farag, on approaching Mark Cuban

A cold email comes back around

Farag has been on the receiving end of an important cold email, too. Graphic artist Sean Childers had been running his own NIL merchandise company and wanted more time to design. He spent two weeks composing a message to Farag. Campus Ink hired him after conversations with the team.

One of Childers’ projects was a “Big Maple” design for Purdue basketball player Zach Edey. To make lettering that resembled syrup, the designer experimented with actual syrup, then honey, photographed the result, and worked on it in Photoshop. The artwork was particular to the athlete. Its production involved considerably more kitchen experimentation than the finished shirt might suggest.

Other athletes supplied marketing ideas themselves. During Illinois’ 2024 tournament run, teammates wore one another’s merchandise at media appearances. Fans asked where to buy it, and the Illinois store’s sales rose. Farag described players seeing feedback from purchases and receiving payments every two weeks. They could help a teammate’s merchandise sell simply by choosing what to wear to a press conference.

The factory gets a parking space

In 2026, Farag took production closer to the audience. The NIL Store’s mobile trailer carried a Roland direct-to-film printer to basketball events. The setup let the team respond to a tournament as it happened, then supply merchandise to retailers while fans still wanted a souvenir of the previous night.

At the Big Ten tournament, a broadcaster’s “Triple Yaxel” line about Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg became a shirt available the following morning. Another overnight job combined players from the two finalists and required approvals before printing. Farag described a three-person crew producing about 800 pieces between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m. on a demanding Sunday. A sports moment had become a production deadline.

The trailer also exposed the ordinary difficulties behind the idea. Temperature, power, stock, and the number of designs all needed attention. At UConn, the team had offered about 20 designs; later, a narrower selection proved easier to handle and sold more. Farag admitted running out of supplies and making emergency replenishment runs. His lesson had the appeal of an operator who had carried the boxes himself: fewer variables could make for a better business.

The old design gets a new ending

Illinois’ 2026 Final Four run gave Farag and Swisher a particularly personal product to make. Swisher had created a “Jersey Madness” shirt for the school’s 2005 run. The design returned 21 years later, now in an environment where the players could earn from it. More than 5,000 orders came through in the first 24 hours online and for pickup. Farag and his partner could hold the two versions together and see what had changed.

A further expansion arrived in July 2026, when Farag announced an ESPN apparel licensing partnership. His letter to supporters set out plans for collections connected to ESPN programming and college football storylines, including College GameDay and SportsCenter. The intention was to give athletes another opportunity to earn through merchandise while letting fans buy something tied to a particular sporting moment.

For all the new partners, Farag’s work remains recognizable from the student version. Find an audience. Make something it wants to wear. Arrange the printing. Pay attention when the audience tells you what worked. The scale has changed, and so has the list of people who share in a sale. Somewhere between a college bedroom and a tournament parking lot, the shirt acquired quite a supporting cast.