Direction B

We dress your team. We gather your town.

Every supplier stops when the boxes arrive. This one starts there, and what it builds is a town behind the club.

This direction drawn against the market as it is today

Swipe the picture sideways to see all of it.

Big brands via distributors (Joma, Nike, Macron)
Local sports shop (Deportes Polos type)
Custom specialists (Aimar, Wade, Panda)
EKANA todaycheaper than the specialists, no shop of its own
Direction B

The dashed line is what this direction would offer; EKANA today and the three supplier groups stay solid.

The situation

Every town in Madrid has its own club: a first team, an academy of a hundred children, a bar by the pitch. Everyone knows it is there and nobody wears it. On a Saturday the street is full of Real Madrid shirts and empty of the club two streets away. Nike filters the treatment down to Manchester United; nobody has pointed it here.

What we saw

Every supplier's job ends when the boxes arrive. Nothing any of them sells happens after delivery, so nothing any of them sells makes a town turn up.
The people around a club have never been sold anything. The trade sells a kit, and only to a registered club.
Spain already buys town clothing once a year: at the fiestas every supporters' club and group of friends orders its own shirt, and a printing trade exists to serve them.

More of what we saw

Madrid buys the same thing with no fiesta to hang it on: shops selling tee shirts that say Vallekas, Carabanchel, Usera and Lavapiés, worn in the street all year. None of them is a club.
Real Madrid runs this loop in-house and smaller professional clubs buy it from agencies. It exists at every size of club except this one.
One local shop already sells a shirt of its own town, so any shop can copy a design. What a shop cannot copy is the club's permission, the club's own channel, and a shirt that is not for sale.
These clubs sell very few season tickets, or none at all. There is nothing in one worth having, so nobody holds one.
Small clubs have no communications person. Anything that has to be invented every week dies, so a season of posts has to exist before the season starts.
Today only a few parents buy anything beyond the obligatory pack, one or two shirts each. That is the honest starting point.
In the city the same thing is a barrio rather than a town. The word changes and the club at the centre does not; where a barrio has two clubs, we sign one of them.

What we do differently

We give the club a campaign that gathers its town, built on one question asked twice: kids watching a big team get its new shirts ask ¿y si ascendemos?, and the same kids at their own club ask ¿y nosotros?
We make the season's films, posts and small games in one batch before the season starts. One named person at the club sends them out; we never run the account.
We design clothing the town would actually wear: a hoodie, a tee shirt and a cap in the club's colours carrying the town's name, one numbered collection a season, kids' sizes included.

More of what we do differently

We open the collection in the week of the town's fiestas and close it on the first home match, because those are two days the town already has without us.
We sell it one piece at a time from the club's page. Nobody at the club ever holds a box or handles money, and the club's cut lands on every sale.
Some shirts are not for sale at all: one comes with every season ticket, one goes to the fans who were at fifteen matches, one is made only if the club goes up. Each says on it what it marks.
Those shirts are made in the same run as the collection, so nothing needs a small rushed production and nothing needs a sponsor.
The match kit carries on exactly as today. The club approves the designs and takes its cut.

What we stop doing

We stop finishing at delivery. Every supplier in this trade, ourselves included, ends when the boxes arrive.
We stop putting a box in the club's cupboard. The club never orders, holds, counts or sells stock, and nobody at the club handles money.
We stop making a wide range. One collection a season, dated and numbered, and old designs are never made again.

More of what we stop doing

We stop pretending to be a fashion label. The reason somebody buys is the town, not the cut; the clothing only has to be good enough that nobody is embarrassed to wear it.
We stop hanging any part of this on a sponsor. Nobody has asked a local business for anything, and nothing here needs one.

The message to the club

We dress your team, the way you already buy it. Then we do the thing no supplier does: we put a town behind your club.

Who buys

Two buyers, and they are not the same person. The president signs, exactly as he signs a kit deal today, and what he is buying is a town that turns up.

The town buys the clothing: the parents of the academy's children, who already buy the worst version of it in a training shirt nobody would choose to wear; the people who go to the matches; and the neighbourhood's kids the campaign is aimed at.

Former players and season-ticket holders are out of the first story, because nobody has checked whether a former-players network exists and almost nobody holds a season ticket yet.

Who pays

The club pays roughly what it pays for its kit today, and nothing more. The town pays for its own clothing, one piece at a time, and the club takes a cut of every piece. The shirts that are not for sale ride in the same run as the collection and are paid for out of it, which is what makes it possible to give them away.

No part of this waits on a sponsor, and no business has been asked for anything.

The package

Drawn as the club would see it, it is on what we would present to the club. Item by item, it is this.

What is in it

The campaign that gathers the town: the films, the posts and the small games in the club's own look, made in one batch before the season, ready for one named person at the club to send out.
The town's own clothing: a hoodie, a tee shirt and a cap in the club's colours carrying the town's name, one numbered collection a season, kids' sizes included.
The season-ticket shirt: every season ticket comes with a shirt nobody can buy, made in the same run as the collection.
The earned shirt: not for sale at any price. It goes to the fans who were at fifteen matches, and it says the season on it.
The promotion shirt: made only after a promotion, only for the people who were there.
The club's match kit, as today.
The club's page, where the collection is sold and the club's cut lands on every sale without anybody counting a transfer.
Three designs and the club's page, built before the first meeting, so the president sees it finished before he pays for anything.

What is deliberately not in it

A wide range, or several collections a year: one collection, a few pieces, because most designs miss and a wide range that misses leaves stock nobody buys.
Running the club's channels for it: we make the season's campaign; the club's own named person sends it out. If we ran ten clubs' accounts we could not run the business.
A rebuilt club website and a redrawn badge: that is direction A. The two could be sold as one package, and they are kept apart so each can be judged on its own; whether they are one idea or two is still open.
A club sticker album: Karim and Nader raised it and parked the question of whether it belongs in the package. It is parked, not refused; it would need written consent from every parent for photographs of minors and a sticker drawn per child.
Paid advertising: nobody has ad money; the campaign travels through the players' families and the kids in the schoolyard.
The basketball club and the other clubs of the same neighbourhood: a later stage, once one town's collection has sold, on the same templates.
The bar selling the collection on match day for a cut: sensible, and later, once a collection exists and a bar owner has agreed to account for stock.

Which exercise each part of this came from

The three tiers of non-customers: The people around a club have never been offered anything by a kit supplier, and what all of them want is to show where they are from without a kit's minimums: that gave us both the buyer and the product.
The buyer utility map: Nobody wears the local club off the pitch, and the whole stretch after the kit is delivered is untouched ground: that gave us the campaign and the shirts that mark a season, a milestone or a promotion.
The six paths: The local shirt competes with big-club fashion and not with another kit, the fan is a buyer nobody pitches to, and the industry sells obligation where it could sell pride.
The strategy canvas: Every supplier group on that picture is competing for the same thing, an order from a registered club, and every one of them stops at delivery. That is the ground this direction takes.