Kits 23/24

[Drummond]

Meanwhile, Chelsea choose to go without a sponsor on theirs...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/66152580

[SaddVillan]

An article published by The Athletic in March this year about Castore.

THE RISE OF CASTORE , A SPEEDBOAT IN A MARKET OF OIL TANKERS

At this point, most football fans have seen the logo, even if some are not yet entirely clear what it represents: the layered wings of a bird of prey unfurled in a v-shape, as if in flight

It can be seen on the chest of every
Newcastle United, Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers player this season, as well as on the shirts of Rangers, Sevilla and Bayer Leverkusen — and those are just the highest profile examples.

It is the mark of Castore, a British sportswear brand that has soared rapidly to prominence as a successful disruptor of the kit supplier market traditionally dominated by three global giants: Nike, Adidas and Puma. In less than eight years since its launch in 2015, the idea conceived by Wirral-born brothers Tom and Phil Beahon — both, in their own words, “failed sportsmen” — to offer a premium alternative to mass-market sports clothing has ballooned into a company of more than 500 employees valued in 2022 at £750million ($921m), with customers worldwide.

That remains small change compared to the three industry titans that measure their worth in billions, but Castore’s philosophy has been to make that vast difference in scale work for it.

“I always think of us as a speedboat in a market of oil tankers,” Tom Beahon tells The Athletic. “The big guys are massive, and there are lots of positives that come with that, but they’re also quite slow by virtue of their size and scale.

“If we can be a speedboat in a market of oil tankers, we can have a competitive advantage against these guys.”

Both brothers are natural competitors who grew up in sport: Tom was on the books at Tranmere Rovers until the age of 21 before a stint with Spanish club Jerez, while Phil played semi-professional cricket for Lancashire after switching from football, having represented Liverpool and Manchester City as a schoolboy. The shared realisation that they were not good enough to reach the elite level prompted them to quit and move down to London to take jobs in finance, with a view to saving up the money to launch what became Castore.

When they finally did so — with the help of a Virgin StartUp loan and their parents, who re-mortgaged the family home — they believed the company could find a footing in an unforgiving market, but knew they would somehow need to convince prominent athletes and sports teams to partner with them to gain any real brand recognition.

“It’s a market that has been dominated by a small group of the same brands for a very long time,” Tom Beahon adds. “Any market that hasn’t had a significant number of new challengers is at risk of becoming a bit complacent and missing out on innovation. We intuitively felt that right from the beginning, but it was very much a fight for survival in the first couple of years.”

Tom and Phil had learned the business of clothing production from scratch, travelling around Europe to gain insight from textile experts, building relationships with factory owners and sourcing fabric from family-run mills in Italy to produce Castore’s earliest ranges. The world of elite sport was even less immediately accessible, so they focused on the people around high-profile athletes, gifting their product to physical trainers, coaches and other support staff.

One day in 2019, British tennis legend Andy Murray noticed his long-serving strength and conditioning coach Matt Little wearing Castore gear and asked where he could get some. The conversations that followed with the Beahon brothers led to Murray becoming Castore’s first elite brand ambassador, as well as a shareholder and an advisor to the board.

Murray’s endorsement, turning down bigger offers from far more established sports brands to assume a creative role in the design of Castore’s tennis range and wearing it on the court, represented a transformational boost. It also provided the foundation for the next quantum leap in the company’s rise: the brokering of a five-year kit deal with Scottish giants Rangers in 2020.

Supplying individual athletes and kitting out entire teams with huge fanbases who want to be able to buy replica shirts are vastly different challenges. The brothers had worked to expand Castore’s supply chain and distribution network to meet the expected demand for an August launch, but their learning curve with Rangers supporters was steep and far from seamless.

“We launched the partnership during COVID and the world was so crazy,” Tom Beahon says. “You could get a call from your factory on a Tuesday saying, ‘Those 250,000 units we told you would be there by Thursday will no longer be there’. Like anything, you adapt and find solutions to the problems, but we certainly took some bruises along the way. We were like a youth-team player who got promoted to the first team very quickly.

“The feedback on the designs themselves was positive, but we had a number of challenges getting the volume of kits into the market. I don’t think anything could have prepared us for the avalanche of demand from the Rangers fans.

“They’re known for having a massively passionate fanbase and we experienced the full force of that. We ordered what we thought was a really good number of shirts that would satisfy demand for the first six months of the partnership, and when we’d sold out in a matter of hours we realised we might have underestimated… that was a classic example of, ‘You don’t know what you don’t know’.”

On the pitch, Castore struck gold with Rangers, who ended Celtic’s streak of nine Scottish league titles in the first year of the deal and reached the Europa League final in the second, losing against Eintracht Frankfurt on penalties in Seville.

An increased profile opened the door to more opportunities, as other clubs began to approach the Beahons to discuss potential partnerships rather than the other way around.

"It’s rare for a new brand to enter this market and even rarer for a new brand to enter it the way we did, with a team the size and stature of Rangers,” Tom Beahon says. “After that, we were catapulted into a sphere where a lot of teams — not just from football — were asking, ‘Who are these new guys on the block? Are they going to be a flash in the pan, or are they a serious business and an interesting option?’.

“For us, it was about capitalising on that awareness we had and the fact that these guys wanted to speak to us, but also to try to do it in an intelligent and strategic way.”

Castore’s website lists 24 team partnerships across five sports. Its non-football deals include supplying kit for the England, South Africa and West Indies cricket teams, McLaren and Red Bull Racing in Formula One and English rugby union giants Saracens and Harlequins. Individual brand ambassadors beyond Murray include Olympic champion swimmer Adam Peaty, England cricketer Jos Buttler and, until recently, US Open champion golfer Matt Fitzpatrick.

But it is their rapidly growing status in the football kit supplier market that has garnered particular attention for Castore’s brand. Earlier this month, a multi-year deal was announced for the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) to become the first national side in its portfolio, and partnerships with Athletic Bilbao and Feyenoord are due to begin next season.

This rapid expansion has fuelled suggestions in some quarters that Castore has taken on more than it can handle, not helped by a handful of high-profile quality control blunders: in a Premier League game against Aston Villa in January, eagle-eyed viewers spotted the Wolves crest printed upside down on defender Nelson Semedo’s shirt and earlier in the season, the Leverkusen crest peeled off defender Piero Hincapie’s shirt during a match. Sevilla midfielder Ivan Rakitic took to the field wearing a shirt with no club crest at all.

A small number of fans have reported similar issues with purchased replica kits, but Tom Beahon is adamant these problems exist only on the margins of Castore’s operation.

“Castore has not had any more issues than Nike, Adidas or Puma in terms of supply chain or quality,” he insists.

“We just get judged by a slightly different and higher standard because we’re the new guy who’s burst onto the scene and partnered with some big, high-profile clubs. It almost feels like some people are looking to say, ‘We knew those guys were too good to be true and what they were doing wasn’t sustainable’, so every time there’s a minor issue people like to put down the disruptor rather than encourage you. I don’t think that’s unique to Castore or the sportswear market; it’s just one of the crosses you have to bear as the new guy.

“There have been issues, of course. We delivered north of five million units last year and are delivering north of 12 million units this year — at that scale, you’ll always have one or two per cent of issues due to human error. That’s true of every brand in this market. It just seems to get picked up with us more than with other brands.

“I don’t mind it, because it just means we’re going to challenge ourselves to be better in the long run.”

None of this has prevented Castore from growing its list of kit deals with high-profile football clubs. Part of its appeal has been to offer clubs a more engaged partner after feeling neglected by Nike, Adidas or Puma. Another part lies in its willingness to be creative with the structure of the commercial agreements signed.

Though every kit deal is slightly different, broadly speaking they traditionally work like this: a kit manufacturer pays a football club an annual fee for the right to use the club’s brand to sell branded clothing, and the kit manufacturer keeps the bulk of the revenue generated from shirt sales, with the club typically taking a cut of between 10 and 15 per cent.

Castore’s agreements, however, are more incentivised in structure, with the club receiving a higher royalty percentage as agreed revenue targets are hit. Put simply, the clubs who sign with it have an opportunity to significantly increase their earnings as more shirts and other branded apparel are sold.

This flexibility is part of what Tom Beahon means when he talks about wanting to be “a speedboat in a market of oil tankers” — but he is confident that Castore is not moving too fast in the football kit market for its own good. “There absolutely is a balance between building brand awareness and not saturating the market or partnering with the wrong people, or taking on more partnerships than you can manage,” he says.

"People sometimes think, unfairly in my opinion, that because we’ve grown so quickly we must say yes to every partnership that comes across ou r desks. We very much are selective, but we’re also ambitious. ‘Grow or die’ is a valid maxim in business. This isn’t an industry that values small, boutique brands. You need to be of a certain size and scale to earn people’s respect, and that has been at the front of our minds as we’ve grown our partnerships portfolio.

“However, we always ask ourselves, ‘Can we do a good job for this team? Are they a good fit for us? What are we going to be able to offer them that is different from the big guys? How is it helping us build our brand?’. We try to be very disciplined and targeted in how we go about these things.”

Castore has big plans for its future in the football market. Tom Beahon reveals it intends to make football boots, though he declines to provide any further details — “I can’t tell you any more or I’ll get shot by my product team!” he jokes — and the company is looking at options to further invest in women’s sport.

It may never reach the size of Nike, Adidas or Puma, but all the signs are that Castore is in the football business to stay.

[chrisw1]

It says they will have one, just that it's not sorted yet.  Nice shirt though.

[AV84]

It says they will have one, just that it's not sorted yet.  Nice shirt though.

Trivago is on their away one though ?

[Brazilian Villain]

It says they will have one, just that it's not sorted yet.  Nice shirt though.

Chelsea have usually had fairly decent shirts (aside from being blue) during their Nike era.

Wouldn't mind us getting '3' as our sponsor as the logo isn't overly intrusive on a shirt. Over to you, Chris.

[chrisw1]

It says they will have one, just that it's not sorted yet.  Nice shirt though.

Chelsea have usually had fairly decent shirts (aside from being blue) during their Nike era.

Wouldn't mind us getting '3' as our sponsor as the logo isn't overly intrusive on a shirt. Over to you, Chris.

I'll see what I can do.

[Brazilian Villain]

It says they will have one, just that it's not sorted yet.  Nice shirt though.

Chelsea have usually had fairly decent shirts (aside from being blue) during their Nike era.

Wouldn't mind us getting '3' as our sponsor as the logo isn't overly intrusive on a shirt. Over to you, Chris.

I'll see what I can do.

Good man, just leave the badge alone.

[Smirker]

In less than eight years since its launch in 2015, the idea conceived by Wirral-born brothers Tom and Phil Beahon — both, in their own words, “failed sportsmen” — to offer a premium alternative to mass-market sports clothing has ballooned into a company of more than 500 employees valued in 2022 at £750million ($921m), with customers worldwide.

Any idea when they're gonna start? 

[JUAN PABLO]

It says they will have one, just that it's not sorted yet.  Nice shirt though.

Trivago is on their away one though ?

suprised the home and away kits are both blue and havent they got rid of Dimateo yet , how the fook do the get away with FFP

[darren woolley]

Good article.

[four fornicholl]

It just wrong, the Lion pointing the wrong way! It’s shit

[Chico Hamilton III]

It just wrong, the Lion pointing the wrong way! It’s shit

Amen! Can’t believe we’ve been suckered in by the marketing bullshit we’ve been fed.

[London Villan]

Doesn't sound like Chris Heck has either!

[Des Little]

The lion will be facing back the other way next season, I'm pretty sure of it.  We just need to find another bunch of creatives to come up with some fluff as to why.

[tomd2103]

The lion will be facing back the other way next season, I'm pretty sure of it.  We just need to find another bunch of creatives to come up with some fluff as to why.

"When we kick toward the Holte End, we want the lion to be  facing towards the McGregor statue and Aston Hall in a nod to the heritage of the club and the local area".  Now where's my six figure salary for sorting that?