Manuel Rojas said he was never really a football fan, until last weekend.
"Now, for sure, I'm a big Bears fan," he said.
Rojas said he owes a big thanks to Chicago Bears fans, after he received thousands of orders for his company's "Graterhead Hat" in just 24 hours after the Bears' wild defeat of the Packers in overtime Saturday night.
"I started seeing orders at 12 and 1 a.m. and that's when I thought, 'What the hell is happening?' And that's when I saw the game, saw the highlights, and I couldn't be happier," Rojas said.
Rojas is the founder of Foam Party Hats, a manufacturer of high-quality foam hats of all kinds of styles and designs. The idea for the company started 20 years ago in Venezuela, where Rojas is from. He said his mom Grace Rojas was designing the hats before eventually coming to the United States and starting the business.
In 2020, the company appeared on Shark Tank. Rojas said he hasn't seen sales like this since then.
"We were doing around 3,000 orders, and now I think we're up to around 4,000 or 4,500," he said. "I went directly to the office to start printing orders and kind of preparing the staff to start shipping things as soon as possible."
The company went viral after Bears receiver DJ Moore and quarterback Caleb Williams were seen rocking the massive foam cheese grater hats after the game Saturday.
Since then, Rojas said it's been all hands on deck for his factory of roughly 20 people.
"It's going to be a short week for us here at the the office because of Christmas, but we are confident that we can produce this in mass because luckily, this is our slow time of the year, so we didn't have many orders, so we can just focus on making this and shipping them as soon as possible," Rojas said.
While most of the orders were placed from Illinois and Chicago, Rojas said he's received orders from places like Wisconsin, California, New York and Houston, too.
"The moment we did this hat, I was 100% sure it was going to sell," he said. "I think last year at a Detroit Lions game against the Packers something similar happened, but not at this level."
Rojas said this is almost like a full circle moment for him, as the initial idea for the cheese grater hat was born out of Rojas' own frustration with the Packers, which sent him a cease-and-desist letter for making his own version of the iconic Packers' "Cheesehead" hat.
Rojas said the hat he was selling had nothing to do with the Packers.
"We had to take the hat down, and that's why I was kind of pi-–ed off," Rojas said. "There used to exist a cheese grater hat similar to what the the Green Bay Packers had, but it was no longer being manufactured, so we decided to create our own version and sell that out of some bitterness for the cease and desist letter we got from the Packers."
Rojas said now he's thinking of more ways to tap into the NFL and continue to reach fans in new and creative ways.
"Now that things are starting off with the Chicago Bears fans, we want to take advantage of this and actually build a brand more towards NFL fans because I know people love this stuff and at Foam Party Hats, we shine with creativity," he said.
He said the company is even planning to reach out to the Bears directly.
"The next move for us is definitely to sell them to the Bears and see where we can collaborate," he said. "We're getting a lot of inquires from stores near the Chicago area to see where we can sell these."
In the meantime, Rojas is working on getting a Bears shirt to hang in his office, as they're now his favorite team.
"We have gotten so much love out of the Bears fans because they they really like the product and it allows them to feed the rivalry," he said. "So honestly, we're just glad that we're part of this and we're happy with all the love that we're getting from them ... We're just happy to be to be part of this entire thing."