Derek Friedman would like to sell you an officially licensed Denver Nuggets NBA Finals T-shirt for $40. But if you decide to go with a $20 knock-off, he won’t be upset.
“The biggest risk isn’t for somebody who just wants something with the Nuggets logo on it,” said Friedman, owner of the Denver-based SportsFan chain, of the counterfeit gear currently flooding the Denver market. “It’s that you get what you pay for.”
With the Nuggets in the NBA Finals, Denver has become fertile ground for opportunistic producers and sellers of counterfeit merchandise. But even without the pop-up, Nuggets-themed tents now decorating street corners around the city, Denver designers, online sellers, and street vendors risk copyright crackdowns all the time. Their unlicensed shirts, hats, jerseys and other merchandise tout icons ranging from rock stars Taylor Swift and the Grateful Dead to sports teams like the Nuggets and Colorado Rockies, to Casa Bonita and the Big Blue Bear sculpture.
Sometimes the merchandise is attractive to fans because it can lost much less than officially licensed wares, or because the designs are edgier or more interesting. So fans — and to some extent, the brands themselves — have a chance to win either way, retail and counterfeiting experts said. But only if consumers know exactly what they’re paying for.
Aaron Heinrich, senior director of retail operations for the Colorado Rockies, said the team doesn’t regularly police what’s fake and what isn’t. “The only time we get directly involved would be during those types of hot-playoff markets, like what the Nuggets are going through — and the (Colorado Avalanche) went through last year,” he said.
The most common form of fake Rockies merch are jerseys, he said. But Heinrich isn’t going to take a picture of someone wearing a team jersey with a Taylor Swift patch — which he recently spotted at Coors Field — and rat them out. “We’re not typically deciding what’s counterfeit. It’s more like, ‘Do they have a peddler’s license to sell outside Coors Field?”
“We never view it as a lost sale because that person was probably only going to spend $40 on a jersey anyway,” added Heinrich, who declined to share revenues for annual Rockies merch sales. “I know people think licensed merch is only making owners richer. But if a shirt’s junk and falls apart after one wash, we get some of that negative association.”
Some street vendors are licensed by the city to sell official gear outside of Coors Field or Ball Arena; look for their dangling badges and impressive inventory. Officially licensed gear also tends to have a hologram sticker of authenticity, SporstFan’s Freidman said.
While individual makers of bootlegged merch sold on Etsy or Facebook Marketplace tend to fly under the legal radar, larger sportswear and fashion counterfeiters can fund shady operations and cost American jobs, experts say. Trade coalitions such as Buy Safe America estimate annual losses of more than 300,000 jobs in wholesale and retail, and $13.6 billion in wages and benefits to workers, due to counterfeit merchandise.
The bigger the name, the more prevalent the knock-offs. Mish-mash imagery of Denver sports teams and public-art icons such as Blucifer (the airport’s infamous “Mustang” sculpture) and the Big Blue Bear (downtown’s “I See What You Mean”) are among the most common examples.
However, only Denver International Airport (DEN) is legally allowed to use “Mustang” in its marketing or other materials under an agreement with late artist Luis Jiménez’s estate, according to spokeswoman Stephanie Figueroa. The airport does not sell anything Mustang related, and even if it did, “DEN is not required to pay the estate for such uses,” Figueroa said.
The legal gray area surrounding semi-public icons provides cover, but also flexibility. It’s the difference between going 5 miles over the speed limit and 50, some independent makers say. DIY artists don’t have the scale or resources to take huge bites out of a corporate earnings, and many companies don’t want to be seen as targeting small businesses with legal action.
A few weeks ago, Rose Pixley began selling $32 t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Casa Bonita Reopening: The ultimate test of your digestive system.” The pink, italicized message encircles an illustration of the Mexican-eatery’s famous sopapillas, tapping into cheeky nostalgia for the restaurant’s debatable food quality.
Pixley, who runs the Lavender Mountain Lily jewelry shop on Etsy, figured she’d test the market for ahead of the Colorado icon’s reopening. But the 36-year-old native said she’s “definitely not trying to pose” as the company. “I just thought it was a fun idea.”
Neither Denver Nuggets nor Denver Broncos officials responded to interview requests for this story, and a manager at downtown’s I Heart Denver store at Denver Pavilions, which sells Colorado-themed merchandise from hundreds of individual designers, declined an interview.
The store and many others — including Abstract Denver, which supplies goods to I Heart Denver — feature items depicting public-art sculptures that are owned by the city’s Arts & Venues office. Abstract’s in-house designs also use Homer Simpson and the Morton’s Salt logo.
But these types of depictions — modified and stylized — are protected from lawsuits due to their parodic nature, said Denver artist and event producer Andrew Novick. They just have to be “transformative,” according to the legal language, he said.
“The letter of the law is vague,” Novick added. Enforcement is a matter of whomever brings the lawsuit, which is then decided in state and federal courts on the basis of intent and financial damage, he said. “So it often comes down to who’s got more money (for litigation). Think about Disney, which is famous for going after any infringement.”
Members of Denver punk-pranksters The Warlock Pinchers, of which Novick is part, long ago stole the Oakland Raiders logo for their own, hoping to get the NFL’s attention and turn the litigation into free, national publicity. “But we didn’t,” he said with a laugh. “We weren’t important enough.”
Novick did, however, receive a cease-and-desist letter from the former owners of Casa Bonita threatening legal action during the restaurant’s bankruptcy in 2021. Novick had made “Save Casa Bonita” patches for a Casa Bonita-themed art show, but didn’t use the company’s logo or imply a connection to the restaurant. Novick has not heard from Casa Bonita’s new owners.
Colorado punk band Elway received a “strongly worded” letter from representatives of the Denver Broncos’ John Elway in 2011, urging them to change the name. But the letter stopped short of “cease and desist” language and the band is still making music.
Denver cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz has donated some of his original work to the bars and restaurants he depicts in daily strips and hardbound collections. That’s won him more commissions and a role as Denver’s unofficial illustrator. History Colorado sells his prints, and there’s a banner of his work at its flagship Denver museum designed as a selfie backdrop.
The subject? Casa Bonita.
“If the places I illustrate ask for prints, I’m happy to supply,” he said. “But it goes both ways. A lot of places I’ve illustrated use my artwork for their own advertising. All I ask is that they credit me.”
