The exercises and what came out

The six paths

What the tool is

Six ways of looking sideways at a market, past the rivals everyone already watches. Each one is a different question, asked on its own. The book sets them out as a straight comparison: here is where an industry fighting its rivals looks, and here is where it could look instead.

What we did

• Each path was asked two questions in order: how does this actually work today, and only then, could we realistically change it.
• We did not ask buyers directly. Each path was reasoned from what Nader knows about the market and what the earlier exercises found.

What came out

Everything else a club could spend on:

• A president buying kit is really buying the feeling that his club is a serious club, and today the only thing that sells him that is a big brand's logo on the shirt.
• The people around the club are choosing between a shirt of their own town and a Real Madrid shirt, not between two kit suppliers.

Trading up and trading down:

• A club goes up to a big brand for the name on the shirt and the convenience of a shop.
• It comes down to a specialist for a design of its own and terms it can negotiate.
• Nobody offers both at once.

Who is actually in the chain:

• Every supplier pitches the president.
• The parents pay, and want a pack made up for their child with nothing to chase. Nobody builds for them.
• The people around the club are sold nothing at all.

What happens around the kit:

• The pains sit around the kit, not in it: collecting sizes, guessing how many, storing boxes, making up each child's pack, replacing a lost shirt, paying before seeing the result.
• Every supplier sells the batch. Nobody sells the year.

Price or pride:

• Kit is sold as a chore, once a year, on price and delivery.
• Nobody has ever offered the people around a club anything to feel proud of, because nobody has tried to make one.
• That ground is open precisely because every rival is fighting on price.

Where the trends end up:

• One person can now do the design and online work that used to need a small agency, and that is real and already in hand.
• Kit made and printed one piece at a time is the other trend, and we deliberately did not build on it: nobody has costed what holding blank stock and printing locally would take, so nothing here promises a shirt in a day.