Better Believe It: Beverly's Sully's Brand Teams Up With Dunkin' On Boston Swag Deal

BEVERLY, MA — Twenty years after Chris Wrenn first began selling "Believe In Boston" shirts to fervent Red Sox fans outside Fenway Park there is now a version of the swag that celebrates the iconic Dunkin' brand.

Wrenn, who owns the Beverly-based Sully's Brand T-shirts and merchandise as well as Bridge Nine Records on Rantoul Street, said the Massachusetts-based coffee giant reached out to him in December looking for a way to bring together the coffee shop brand together with its hometown routes.

The result is a line of T-shirts, sweatshirts, pins and stickers that have the "Believe In Boston" slogan in the colors of the unmistakable brand.

"Over the years Sully's has gotten very good at incorporating our slogan into the feel of a team or the city," Wrenn told Patch on Monday. "We can take our spin on something and make it a Sully's shirt. I know the Dunkin' brand is beloved. But if you have a choice of wearing a regular corporate logo or something that maybe conveys a message or a feel with the brand, I think you will do that.

"That's what we do with all of our 'Believe in Boston' line."

Wrenn has been able to tailor the Believe In Boston theme to ventures with the Red Sox Foundation and other organizations through the years, with one of the original green shirts a Celtic fan staple since the second Big 3 era, the slogan is perhaps now best known through its ties to Dunkin' because of a certain star Cambridge actor's affinity for both the shirts and getting caught fumbling around with an order of large iced coffees while wearing the shirt during film shoots.

"Our shirts were out there with that connection to the brand so they wanted to see if they could create something," said Wrenn, who said "The Town" and "Batman" actor is not involved with this specific promotion even though he has recently done a series of commercials for Dunkin'. "That led to our licensing deal."

Wrenn, who operated a store out of Peabody for 14 years before the building was sold during the COVID-19 shutdowns, previously had retail locations in Boston and Salem before opening up the record store and t-shirt shop in the former Beverly Glass space at 282 Rantoul Street last September.

He combined with Dunkin' for a launch party of the new line, which can be found on the Sully's website, at the store and at the Target location next to Fenway Park, on Saturday with Red Sox/Yankees ticket giveaways and specialty donuts that read "Believe In Boston" available to those who stopped by during the Beverly Arts Festival.

"It's been awesome," he said of the Beverly shops. "The feedback's been great. There was a big reunion of a Boston band we were affiliated with this weekend so people were coming in from all over the place and coming up to the store while they were in the city.

"It was nice to have people in there who were there from both sides. We had people there for the sports stuff and Dunkin' and people who were there for the music."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)