On Saturdays in Athens, Georgia, wide receivers race downfield to haul in passes, linebackers make bruising tackles, and running backs fight for every yard. The University of Georgia Bulldogs might walk off the field with a win—and a few holes and tears in their jerseys. The following Saturday, they don’t charge through the tunnel in brand-new uniforms. They return in those same jerseys—repaired, repatched, and ready for another battle. The team behind those repairs is Community, an Athens boutique where owner Sanni Baumgärtner and her seamstresses specialize in sustainable fashion, alterations, and keeping the Bulldogs’ jerseys game-ready.
Though UGA isn’t the only college football team to hire local tailors and sewers to mend its jerseys, the partnership captures the core mission of Community, where a visible workroom connects customers with the faces who make and fix their clothes. After coming to Athens from Germany as an exchange student in 1997, Baumgärtner fell in love with the city’s artsy character and, while playing in a band and selling vintage clothing on the side, developed a passion for turning old clothes into something new. In 2010 she opened Community, and the connection to Georgia football came almost by chance nine years later.
“It was a happy customer that recommended us to the Georgia athletics equipment team,” Baumgärtner recalls. She’d known little about football—at least the American kind—before coming to Georgia, and the idea of the job initially intimidated her. “At first I was terrified because the football field is such a big stage, but my seamstresses were not worried at all,” she says.
Seven seasons later, the work has become part of Community’s weekly routine. Tiffany Poucher, the shop’s alterations specialist, is the primary tailor, while Baumgärtner handles quality control and jumps in when there’s a crunch. Before the season, they sew on nameplates and graduate patches, and after each game, the jerseys are delivered to Community with whatever damage the latest game brought. “It gets pretty rough,” Baumgärtner says. “Sometimes if a player gets injured, they need to be cut out of their jersey. So we put the whole thing back together for them.”
The postseason brings the biggest rush. Bowl patches can require a turnaround of just a couple of days, with 120 to 130 jerseys arriving at once. With each hole mended throughout the season, the repairs begin to carry a history of their own. “The jerseys become these memory maps for players,” Baumgärtner says. “At the end they can look at their jerseys and remember certain moments from the games.”
The boutique also makes adjustments to help players move comfortably on the field. A quarterback might need more room in the arms for throwing, for instance, and the seamstresses can open the stitching slightly underneath the armpit. “It’s really exciting to know we can help them perform to the best of their abilities just by making slight modifications,” she says.
On the field on Saturdays and in its boutique downtown, Community shows the importance of the hands behind the stitches and that even the most hard-worn pieces are worth preserving.
Anna Williams, a 2026 intern at Garden & Gun, grew up in Pittsville, Maryland, and graduated from the University of Georgia, where she studied journalism and sports media.