Mike Dunn

Mike Dunn puts the technology from the hundred dollar bill onto hats, so you can tell whether the athlete on the label got paid.

Dunn and Brad Banyas have known each other a while and trade texts; Dunn sent one after Banyas's face appeared in an advertisement while he was sitting in a cigar bar. He came in with a handful of sample tags and a bottle from Cherry Street Brewing, where Octane5 has had a barrel aged imperial stout made two years running as the gift its clients take home from the annual users conference. The label reads stay calm, drink a beer, run BrandComply.

Two businesses sit under one roof. The software started in the late 1990s when the NHL mentioned how much time a job was taking and Dunn offered to write something; it now processes royalty reports for brands like Harley-Davidson, Ford and Caterpillar, and for the University of Georgia, which has eight hundred licensees filing quarterly. The other half is the label itself. Every hologram on collegiate product in the country traces back to a patent Dunn and his brother wrote. They have since moved on to micro optics, licensed from Crane Currency, the same blue strip that runs through the hundred and about a hundred and fifty other banknotes. Lebanon put one in its currency and counterfeiting dropped by ninety two percent. The newest use is college athletes: roughly ten thousand of them sit in Octane5's database across seventy five or eighty universities, and the label is what proves the player on the shirt is getting his cut.

His son is at Georgia State and interning for the company, having asked for it rather than been handed it. His brother has been there the whole way. Forty brands now use the micro optic label, among them Georgia, Notre Dame, Miami, Kentucky, Oregon and Wisconsin. Dunn's pitch to consumers is small. When you are outside the stadium at a bowl game looking at a cheap hat, check for the tag, because the student whose name is on it is the one not getting paid.