Travis Scott and Fanatics Partner With Universities for Apparel Brand

Rapper Travis Scott just dropped a new collab. Not a feature on a song, but a new collegiate-inspired apparel collection with colleges and universities across the U.S.

Scott’s “Jack Goes Back to College” collection launched April 4, and it features the branding and logos of 28 schools, including two historically Black universities. Each institution in the collaboration receives its unique apparel with the school’s logo and branding, including hats, T-shirts, sweaters, and backpacks, ranging from $68-$160.

The collection is a collaboration between Cactus Jack, Scott’s official brand; sports apparel platform Fanatics; and sports retailers Lids and Mitchell & Ness.

The collection will be sold on Scott’s website, select locations of Lids, and campus bookstores of participating universities.

The universities included in the collaboration are:

Scott celebrated the launch of his new apparel line with a tour of three universities featured in the collection.

Joined by Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin, Scott first surprised students at Louisiana State University (LSU) by personally attending the school’s midnight launch of the collection.

According to LSU, more than 1,500 students attended the launch, along with LSU President William F. Tate IV and former LSU football player and ESPN analyst Ryan Clark. Members of the LSU women’s basketball team were also in attendance helping students check out and bagging their apparel.

The duo was then greeted at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where Scott surprised the university’s football team at their spring practice and took photos with the women’s and men’s basketball teams.

Afterward, Scott and Rubin guest-taught a business and entrepreneurship 101 class with Texas Athletics Director Chris Del Conte before meeting students at the university bookstore.

The three-campus tour ended at the University of Southern California (USC) where Scott took photos with the football team and met fans buying his new apparel at the university bookstore. USC basketball players Isaiah Collier and JuJu Watkins were also in attendance.

“We are celebrating college, college students, college athletes, just the idea of college. It’s one of the most amazing places,” Scott said in an exclusive interview with Annenberg Media, a student-run news publication funded by USC. “It’s one of the places you find yourself as you’re going into college. It’s where you become yourself.”

Cactus Jack is not the first apparel brand to collaborate with universities. In 2021, athletic apparel juggernaut Lululemon Athletica launched its first collegiate collaboration at the University of Michigan.

After what could only be described as a smashing success, including selling out a whole season’s worth of product in a matter of hours on launch day, the company expanded the apparel offered at the university and announced new partnerships with additional institutions, including the University of Texas, the University of Alabama, and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

However, securing the rights to a university’s brand can take over a year.

Andrew Cottone, director of UCLA Trademarks and Licensing, told BestColleges that the Associated Students UCLA (ASUCLA), the nonprofit organization that houses services including university trademarks and licensing, was first approached concerning the Cactus Jack collaboration in June 2023.

“The application process can be pretty cumbersome, especially to ensure that any licensee, especially one as visible as Cactus Jack, can meet our supply chain standards. Then there’s the time it takes to produce the goods, import them, market them. Usually, a year is pretty standard,” he said.

Brands most often go through the Collegiate Licensing Co. (CLC) to get in contact with a university, which Cottone says makes a recommendation to pursue the request or not, based on the standards they set. The CLC represents over 700 colleges and universities, including Harvard University, Berkeley, and the University of Michigan.

One of the components UCLA Trademarks and Licensing looks for in the licensees they work with is sustainability, dedicating a director position to oversee responsible licensing and procurement.

“Her job is to go through everyone’s application [and ask]: Where are you producing it? Is any of this going to sub-factory? We’ll even go all the way back to the raw goods to some extent,” Cottone said. “… There are two components to whether you’re going to be licensed or not: the business opportunity, and [whether] you can produce the goods in a manner that’s aligned with the UC code of conduct.”

Once a license is approved, the Trademarks and Licensing office approves all designs and products before they are produced and sold to customers. A royalty is paid to ASUCLA for every piece of listed product sold.

UCLA has given trademark and licensing rights to many celebrity and apparel brands besides Cactus Jack (which sold out within its first day), including Drake’s lifestyle brand October’s Very Own, Lululemon, and Japanese fashion designer Junya Watanabe, who created a UCLA logo sweater that was featured in Paris Fashion Week in 2019.