Trail Blazers unveil new association and icon Nike jerseys

When the Portland Trail Blazers decided four years ago that they would at least consider changes to both their logo and traditional home and road uniforms, the team put together a focus group of fans ranging from long-time season ticket holders to new transplants to the Portland-metro area to gauge interest in potential tweaks.

“We decided to go through a pretty extensive brand audit that included looking at our identity,” said Ryan Flaherty, Vice President of Brand Strategy for the Trail Blazers. “We went out and did multiple focus groups with a couple hundred fans, the fans ranged from 17 to 70. Old school, been here in the region forever to new school transplants, Blazermaniacs, season ticket holders, people at every game, people that have never been to a game but are still casual fans. Kind of spanned the entire group, and within those focus groups we really concentrated on the new logo — is it worth changing, is it worth updating — as well as our uniforms. With those groups we asked them tons and tons of questions and got their feedback.”

The overwhelming sentiment? Keep the look, at least for the standard uniforms, relatively unchanged.

“There’s some subtle differences,” said Dewayne Hankins, the team’s Chief Marketing Officer. “What we learned through this process is that, much like the pinwheel, there aren’t a lot of changes that our fans were asking for. We’re lucky to have pretty classic uniforms.”

Which is why the new uniforms, unveiled for the first time at the yearly Rip City 3-on-3 event at the Rose Quarter, don’t look all that different than the previous iteration. But between Nike taking over the uniform contract for the next eight years, feedback from players about changes they’d like to see incorporated and a bit of general modernization, the new editions do have a different look and feel, subtle as it may be.

“We looked at different color combinations, style, design elements, iconic symbols and what we learned from that is that they have a lot of pride and love for our current logo and the uniforms,” said Mario Milosevic, art director for the Trail Blazers. “They didn’t want us to change much… Through this process with uniforms, they wanted us to be authentic to our heritage but also be innovative and they want us to reflect our community and culture. They also want us to keep the signature elements.”

In terms of materials, all the new uniforms will be made from from Nike calls “Alpha Yarns” and recycled polyester fabric made from PET bottles. The result is a lighter uniform, something players had requested, that wicks sweat away 30 percent faster and dries 15 percent quicker than the previous jerseys. The logos on the uniforms, such as the pinwheel and the NBA’s logo, are now plastic rather than stitched patches, which cuts down on weight, as does using thinner materials for wordmarks, numbers and names, which were much thicker on the adidas uniforms.