He moved the chains!
The Brooklyn artist who makes ironic trophies for fantasy sports leagues got a fresh start when he moved his studio from Park Slope to Sunset Park this year.
After his former teammates ran some flag-worthy plays, the artist made an isolation run and advanced his business from 18th Street to a converted artist studio in a 44th Street warehouse, he said. That’s a gain of 2,288 yards. The new location is giving him more freedom, and he’s picked up some new plays from fellow artists.
“I was partners with these guys, but it was time for me to move on and take over the business, so I had to move out,” said Dave Mitri, who started Fantasy Trophies in his parents’ Cleveland Garage a year before moving to Brooklyn in 1991. “I love the new location. There are lot of creative people who are making different products, and it’s pretty exciting. There’s one business called Fleabags — it’s these two women making designer handbags. It’s been great having them here — especially because they’re also an online business — because you can bounce ideas off of each other.”
Mitri looked at studios in now-trendy Gowanus and Sunset Park’s Industry City, but both were out of his price range, he said.
The artist makes trophies for fantasy football, baseball, basketball, hockey, golf, and even Nascar. The award’s pudgy, leather-football-cap-clad model — who in one trophy is sitting in a recliner with a television remote and protruding beer gut, and in another protects a six-pack of beer Heisman-Trophy-style — pokes fun at the couch potato pastime and fantasy leagues, Mitri said.
“Fantasy football is about literally sitting on your couch or recliner all day watching every single game if you can. So I said ‘I want something that captures that aesthetic,’ ” said the trophy-maker. “I thought it would be funny if I took a heavy-set guy, put a neck roll on it like linebackers wear, and gave him a beer and a remote control.”
Mitri’s business has been steadily growing over the decades — now about 80 percent of his income comes from trophy-crafting, and he supplements that with carpentry in the off-season, he said.
He has shipped trophies as far as Australia and Alaska, but he found out this spring that his highest-profile client is a Brooklyn native, he said.
“Jay Z owns one,” Mitri said. “I was engraving a name plate and it said ‘Shawn Carter,’ and the team name was ‘Roc Nation.’ I’m like ‘Shawn Carter — isn’t Jay Z’s real name Shawn Carter?’ And then I saw a tweet from a guy on ESPN talking about this dude in Jay Z’s league — he’s holding the trophy, and he made a fake cover of an ESPN Magazine to trash-talk all the other guys in Jay Z’s league.”
