What "Officially Licensed by the NHL Alumni Association" Actually Means
It's the line on every ZippyBack™ product page and every box: officially licensed by the NHL Alumni Association. It's easy to read past it. But that license is the reason ZippyBack™ exists at all, and understanding what it actually covers, and who it actually supports, changes how a purchase feels in hand.
What the NHL Alumni Association Is
The NHL Alumni Association is the organization that represents the league's more than 5,000 living former players, from one-shift call-ups to Hall of Famers, across North America and the roughly 1,300 alumni members living in Europe. Its job is to look after the people, not the trademarks: connecting former players to healthcare, mental health support, and each other, long after the games stop counting. Glenn Healy, a 15-year NHL goaltender turned the association's executive director, put the group's current approach plainly: "If you played one shift in the NHL you will get a family doctor. If you played one shift in the NHL you get a mental health wellness professional for you, your wife and your kids." That's what the license is actually attached to.
Why the License Is Per-Player, Not Per-Team
Here's the part that surprises a lot of fans: ZippyBack's™ license with the NHL Alumni Association covers individual retired players who are enrolled in it, not the teams they played for. There's no such thing as an "officially licensed Canadiens" or "officially licensed Maple Leafs" ZippyBack™, because the NHL Alumni Association doesn't license teams. It licenses people. Every ZippyBack™ is tied to a specific alumni player who has opted into the program, which is also exactly why every purchase can be traced back to that player's own royalty and the fund it feeds.
That's not a technicality. A team-level license would mean royalties flowing to a franchise or a league office. A per-player license means the money follows the actual person: a full-career defenceman, a fourth-line grinder, a backup goaltender who played one memorable game. The Wendel Clark ZippyBack™ and the Glenn Healy ZippyBack™ are both officially licensed NHL Alumni Association products; a Toronto Maple Leafs collection built around them is simply a city-based way of browsing players who happen to share that history, not a separate team license layered on top.
The short version: "officially licensed by the NHL Alumni Association" means a specific retired player has enrolled in the program and earns royalties on ZippyBack™ sales bearing his likeness. It never means a team has endorsed the product.
What Happens When You Buy One
Every ZippyBack™ sale generates a royalty for the player enrolled on that piece, and those royalties flow back into the NHL Alumni Association's health, wellness, and transition programs, the same family doctor access, mental health support, and emergency financial assistance described above. It's a structure built to fund itself: the more a player's ZippyBack™ sells, the more that player's own program funding grows. Buying a specific player's ZippyBack™ isn't just picking a favorite era of hockey history. It's directly funding that player's access to the kind of support the NHL Alumni Association was built to provide.
Why It's Called "Minted," Not "Made"
One more detail the license touches: production. Every ZippyBack™ is minted in Canada, serialized, and produced under the same license structure that governs which player it can carry. It's a small word choice, but it reflects the same idea running through the whole program: these aren't mass-produced novelties borrowing a famous name. They're licensed, numbered pieces built around a real relationship between ZippyBack™ and the player behind each one.
About ZippyBack
ZippyBack™ is a patented, serialized wearable collectible that snaps onto the strap or side of a cap, officially licensed by the NHL Alumni Association and minted in Canada. Wear it, collect it, showcase it, trade it, or gift it: a different era of hockey history for every ZippyBack™ you add to your collection. Browse the full collection of officially licensed NHL Alumni Association players.
Every ZippyBack™ collectible you buy directly funds NHLAA health, wellness, and transition programs, real support for the men who gave everything to the game. The legends didn't stop mattering when the final whistle blew. Neither does your purchase. Be part of what keeps them supported.
