The analysis
Raise above what the market offers
What the eliminations and reductions on the previous two pages pay for.
Small orders and replenishment hypothesis
Original factor. Small orders / replenishment
What the market does. The market's answer to a late registration or a lost shirt depends on whether someone happens to hold stock. The local shop and the custom specialists score 4 because a shelf or a catalogue covers the common case; the big brands score 3. For a fully custom kit, nobody's answer is good: the reorder takes as long as the original batch. EKANA is at 2, the weakest row on its line.
What EKANA does instead. A small, deliberately limited Madrid-held spare pool for common club items and sizes where the club's volume justifies it, with defined rules about what is held, how much, and when it is replenished. A late registration or a size change is answered from that pool rather than from Egypt.
The nuance. This is not instant production and it is not a warehouse. It covers late registrations, common-size replacements and predictable urgent needs, and nothing else; a genuinely one-off custom request still takes what custom production takes. The target is 4, level with the best of the market rather than above it, because raising it further would mean holding stock nobody has shown is needed. Which sizes, which garments, how many, who funds them and what happens to what does not move are open questions, and they are on the tests page rather than hidden.
Club shop and payment handling hypothesis
Original factor. Club shop + payment handling
What the market does. The local sports shop scores 5 here and the big brands 4, because a shop or a distributor's portal already takes money from families. The custom specialists score 3. What none of them does is tie that shop to the club's own once-a-season order run; the shop sells to whoever walks in, and the club's order is a separate job done by hand.
What EKANA does instead. Families order on their phones, choose item, size and name, and pay directly, against a fixed deadline. EKANA consolidates the paid orders for the whole club, produces once, packs per player and delivers once to the club. The same shop is where community products are sold and where a preorder window runs.
The nuance. Online club shops exist and EKANA did not invent them. The target is 4, below the local shop's 5, because this is not a better shop than a shop. What is different is what the shop is wired to: the club's order run, the deadline, the consolidation and the per-player packing. None of it has been built or proved, and this page says so.
Money back to club hypothesis
Original factor. Money back to club (kit, sponsor, cut)
What the market does. The industry's version is a discount or a percentage. The big brands score 2, the local shop and the specialists 3: the club gets a cut of the same sale, or free kit if it is big enough, and free kit is a top-club thing. The size of the pie is taken as fixed and the argument is about the slice.
What EKANA does instead. EKANA tries to make the pie bigger. More things around the club become economically useful: community merchandise, paid limited drops, products a local business funds, a membership or season ticket with something in the hand, products tied to an event or an anniversary.
The nuance. Not a higher commission. If the only change were the percentage, this would be a discount dressed up as a strategy. The target is 4 rather than 5 because every mechanism behind it is unproved: nobody has yet paid for a community product from an amateur club in this market, and until they have, the top of the scale would be a claim the evidence cannot carry.
Flexibility of deal terms hypothesis
Original factor. Flexibility of deal terms
What the market does. The brands are rigid, at 2: the terms come with the contract. The local shop is at 3 and the custom specialists at 4, where flexibility means arguing each deal out from scratch. Nobody offers a structure; they offer a negotiation, and the club's outcome depends on who is better at it.
What EKANA does instead. A small set of named funding modes, each with its own rules: family-funded, club-funded, business-funded for a defined community run, and mixed. The club picks a shape rather than negotiating every line.
The nuance. Structured flexibility, not unlimited negotiation. EKANA is at 4 today because it will agree to almost anything deal by deal, which is flexibility that costs EKANA more than it gives the club. The move to 5 is a move from improvisation to a defined set of modes, which is more useful to the club and cheaper for three people to run. Payment timing, who owns stock and who absorbs what does not sell are unresolved.
Ease and speed of custom design hypothesis
Original factor. Ease + speed of custom design
What the market does. The market tops out at 4, where the custom specialists and EKANA already sit. Custom design is done job by job by a person, so the number of options a club sees is limited by how many hours a designer has. The industry's way of making it easier is to make it less custom: templates a club picks from, with its badge dropped in.
What EKANA does instead. Reusable design structures, AI-assisted exploration of variations, and human selection and refinement, so a club sees a convincing finished visualisation of the whole package quickly, before it commits. The production file stays properly custom.
The nuance. The point is not less customisation. It is much more visual exploration per hour of EKANA's labour, which is what makes showing a club the finished picture affordable at all. AI does not solve the design economics on its own; whether it produces real efficiency is one of the tests, measured on design time, number of viable options, revision count and approval speed.
Fully custom design evidence
Original factor. Fully custom design (not catalogue)
What the market does. The big brands and the local shop score 1: a catalogue shirt with a badge on it. Only the custom specialists reach 5, and it is the one row where EKANA already matches the best in the market.
What EKANA does instead. Nothing changes, and that is the decision. Fully custom design stays at the top of the scale and everything else is built so that it can stay there.
The nuance. A methodological point rather than a movement. This is a strategic raise in the sense that matters, protecting and building on the one factor where EKANA is already at the market's ceiling, but the score cannot go above 5 and no 6 is invented to make the chart look better. Every other move in the grid, the narrow catalogue, the reusable structures, the AI-assisted exploration, exists partly to keep this affordable as the number of things being designed grows.