History of The Draft Kit The idea for Draft Kit started in 1993. Michael Brautman and a couple of his friends started playing fantasy football in the late 1980’s on one of the original internet services call Prodigy. They had such a great time that they decided to start their own local league in 1993. This was way before any fantasy football site or commissioner service was even thought of. In order to play and run a league you had to get your stats out of the newspaper on Monday and then wait until Tuesday morning and get the Monday night’s game stats for your final results. You had to set your lineup by phone or fax machine, and that is also how you got your weekly results.
Our first live draft was quite a mess. We had a large sheet of paper and we wrote in every player picked. The problems were that some players were already picked and then picked twice, and after a couple of adult beverages, we had a hard time reading the draft board. Mike had an idea he worked on throughout 1993 and for the 1994 draft Mike unveiled a draft board with player name stickers that were all white but used file folder dots for colors of each position. The idea worked so well, that in 1995, Mike started a company and had colored stickers produced, and draft boards printed and started selling this idea as The Draft Kit from Highlight Fantasy. At first there was only one size with pretty small labels which were equal to today’s Personal Size Draft Kit. Over the years we expanded to 3 different sizes with all sorts of options to work with any league.
At the beginning, all of our advertising was done through Fantasy magazines. Here is our ad from fantasy Football Index in 1995:
We were one of the very first companies to have their own website in 1997. It was just a advertising / information site as there was no e-commerce and no Yahoo or Google at that time. Through the years we have continued to improve or products, adding trophies, koozies, draft board stands, T-shirts and many more items.
