Tom Beahon: Building the Tesla of Sportswear, Why We're Taking on Nike & Adidas

We are speedboats in a market of oil tankers, so we have to be more agile than anyone else, but we have to be more innovative. We have to be at the front end of changes in sport, the business of sport merchandise in particular, but I think more broadly is still incredibly nascent.

Delighted to be here, guys. Thank you very much for having me.

So very simply, when Phil, my brother, and I started Castore, no one teaches you any of this stuff. Like, we had no experience; we were young guys when we started the business, so we were literally making it up as we went along. And as far as I'm aware, there's no book that you can read that tells you a good name for a British sportswear brand to challenge the huge guys that have dominated the market for a generation. So we were kind of thinking about ideas. I don't know how, I presume there was a few beers involved that evening, but we started to delve into Greek mythology. In Greek mythology, there's a very specific story of two brothers, Castor and Pollux, who challenged the Greek gods. And clearly, kind of three or four beers down at this point, we thought that is an exceptional analogy for us as two brothers challenging the big guys of the sportswear world. And then we made what I think with hindsight was the right decision to go with Castor rather than Pollux. We've made a lot of mistakes in the last seven years, but I think we got that one right.

Yeah, so we, I guess, background very normal working-class family, born and raised in Merseyside. Our mom was a teacher, our dad worked in construction, so there was no entrepreneurial role model kind of whatsoever. And I guess in a way that's not uncommon for young boys growing up in Merseyside. Sport was religion; everyone wanted to be a professional athlete. My sport was football, Phil's was cricket. Unfortunately for me, I did not have the talent to play for either Liverpool or Everton, who are the two good local teams. I was certainly top-tier local teams, so I did play for Tranmere Rovers, got in a different way, clearly not quite the same level as Liverpool and Everton. But I was probably fair to describe myself as good but not good enough to make it anywhere near the highest level. So you kind of left with a decision to make, what in the real world is a young age. I was 22 and I stopped playing football, but in the world of elite sport is kind of middle-aged, you know, whether you're going to make it at the highest level or not. And for me, I feel like I was very much shaped by that failure, and a lot of people don't like using the word failure, oh no, it's a learning experience, but it didn't feel that way at the time. You kind of get pulled into the manager's office in, I think it's kind of like April May at the end of the season, and they'd say we're not going to renew your contract. And that is not a particularly nice thing to go through when you've just kind of dedicated your life up until that point to achieving that goal. So at that point, I was kind of obviously not in a great place, and you think, well, do I want this to define me? Do I want to be one of those people that, I guess we've all met, where they kind of propping up a bar somewhere saying they could have, would have, should have if it wasn't for this injury or that kind of piece of bad luck. Alternatively, you kind of take that pain, that hardship, that difficulty. That cricket career could have been it, but there's so many stories. He had a bad back, didn't he? You know, 50, that's another whole different story. Let's do that one separately, but I do have a big thing actually about, I genuinely think there's so much untapped potential where people, young people almost make it as professional athletes, not quite good enough, but then they don't go on to achieve what they could do because generally they've not been in education as long as other people and they kind of get lost in the system. It's a horrible expression but you do get thrown onto the scrap heap and you're left to fend for yourself, which I guess that will be not great for a lot of people. For me personally, it was like, right, no one's going to give me anything, I've got to make, I'm going to make something of myself, I've got to do it myself.

Um, so you have a bit of a cry first and foremost and you feel sorry for yourself and then you get over that. And where I was very lucky is that I had a brother who was going through a not dissimilar experience. Like, you, his sport was cricket. I guess similarly to me, good enough to make it at a decent level but not good enough to get to the highest level. So we're very, very close as a family, very close growing up, and we were kind of talking about it like we both going through this similar experience in a different way. But would say, why don't we? What are we going to do with the next stage of our lives? Like, this is a really not nice feeling. We don't want to be a statistic. Like, you read this many people get thrown on the football or cricketing scrap heap. What are we going to do? And it was really through, there was no light bulb moment, but it was through I guess that pain, that hardship, that difficulty, that we said basically whatever we do with the next stage of our lives, we want to be in control of our own destiny. I don't want that experience of being called in, it was Ronnie Moore, I still remember it to this day. He was manager of Tranmere and he said, yeah, we're not going to renew your contract. I never want to be in that situation again. And the only way that we could think that you're guaranteeing never to have someone else tell you that you failed is if you start your own business. Because win, lose, or draw, it's completely in your own destiny there. So there's no one to blame, there's no bad luck with injuries, there's no bad luck with tactics. It's all on you. And I guess that probably scares a lot of people and it really wouldn't appeal to them, but it was the opposite for us. Having had that experience early in our lives, we just ran into it with two feet and felt we've already, the worst has already happened. We wanted to be professional athletes, you don't get what you want in life always. The sun still rises the next day, got nothing to lose now, we're just going to go for it.

In 100%. And for two reasons. So firstly, just the emotional kind of sharing that pain and hardship and difficulty. And I guess firstly realizing that this dream that you've literally geared your whole life to up until that point, you've made huge sacrifices. When your friends are starting to go out drinking and meet girls and having fun, you're not doing any of that because you're going to bed early on a Friday night because you've got a game on a Saturday morning. All of those sacrifices come to nothing and you've failed. So almost to get over that, like mourning, you've got to get over that failure. To have someone just to share that with, I think was massively important. But then secondly, when it came to starting Castore, in a way, and I have thought about this and I can't think of anything other than just pure dumb luck, and Phil and I are very similar in certain ways. We're both very driven, we're both very intense, we both like to get up at 5 a.m. every day without an alarm. Like that, we got quite a strange way that we work every day. But we're very different in terms of our skill sets, and that was just completely fortuitous. Castore would not have done half a tenth of what we've done either if it was me alone or if we both had the same skill set. So we were just really lucky to have each other in that sense.

Um, so that was difficult, but it's part of the part of the journey. So again, kind of, I mean this was probably 10 years ago that we started thinking about it, and then it kind of get going and it builds momentum. But now, and I don't know if this is completely true or I'm just imagining it in my own head, but it feels like everyone expects success to be instantaneous. We all look at Instagram every day and see the glass of champagne, the fast car, the holiday, whatever else. But going through the period of I don't know what I'm going to do, how are we going to work this out, those setbacks, those hardships, those challenges, that's an integral part of the process. So for us, like we were in Merseyside, I was playing football up there. We moved down to London because we both, one, we needed to save money. So I went and got a job in finance because I was like, how can I earn as much money as quickly as possible legally? I'm going to go into finance. So I went into banking and Phil went into corporate finance. So we moved on here, we moved into a tiny flat together. We must have led the most boring lives of anyone who's ever moved to London because we didn't go out, we didn't do anything because we were saving all our money to start Castore. But it was, I guess, the classic entrepreneurial story that we had to be in the office by 8:00 a.m., but we'd be up at 5:00 a.m. and we discussed Castore, what we going to do, how we going to do it. And then the same again in the evening. And it was no light bulb, it just built over time.

So there was two parts to it. There was a part when we were still both in jobs and that was getting product designs, getting samples. We would like spend our holidays, so you get whatever, 20 odd days of holiday a year. And when you start a business, all that stuff goes because holidays don't exist, certainly not in the same way. But when you got your 20 odd days a year from the bank, we'd fly over to Portugal to meet factories, we'd fly to Italy to meet fabric suppliers. And we were funding all of that through our salaries. I think the first...

I don't think we did, mate, being really honest. Like, there was no special insight. We just, it was all led by passion. It was almost like we don't know what success looks like. We couldn't articulate are we going to get it to this or that or the other. We had this, again, north star, to use that expression, where we were like, why has no one ever built a British sportswear brand that competes with the big guys? You've got either the big Americans, Nike, New Balance, those guys, or the big Germans, Adidas, Puma. Why is there not a British brand that competes with those guys? And around the same time, you had brands like On Running, Alo Yoga, Lululemon had come earlier, but all slightly different but with the same underlying thesis, which was the global sportswear market is so big, why is there not space for a premium alternative to the big guys that have dominated it? And we were kind of, we had the same mindset. And we like, well, there's got to be space in that market there. So at the beginning, it was, well, let's just go find the best fabric, let's go speak to people who know more about it and tell us what is the best performance fabric out there. And it was very much just learn on the job, bump your head a few times, get better every day, build it organically.

To a degree, yes. That I think in my head there was an, we had an implicit sense of how the market worked. So if you've spent your whole life, which I had up until that point, in football, whether it's from a product perspective and you're like, well, I've got this, it's a Nike shirt but it doesn't feel like a Nike shirt, this doesn't feel very good. Or just intuitively seeing that, oh, why have Real Madrid got so many more and so many more cooler products than anyone else? So it wasn't kind of a something that I would have written down on paper, but you just had this sense that, well, this is a market really that is far too big to be serviced by such a small number of people. There's got to be a gap. So it was more an intuition than anything specific.

Uh, so we did a T-shirt. And again, I remember it. We went to Italy, got an Italian fabric. We went to a Portuguese factory, and these guys were like best in the world. And I still remember to this day going for lunch with the owner of this factory in Portugal. He spoke very little English; I speak precisely zero Portuguese, so you could put a gun to my head, I could not tell you what we said to each other. But I can only assume that he was won over by this kind of super passionate, slightly crazy Liverpoolian who was like, yeah, yeah, we're going to create this brand, you need to work with us now because this is going to become massive, don't miss the boat. And generally, factories don't like working with new brands because you represent a risk, which is completely fair and logical. But we managed to convince this Portuguese factory who worked with the very best brands in the world. And once we did that, we were kind of off at the races. And again, there was no marketing budget. I said it before, like our mom and dad remortgaged their house. So to go back to your question earlier, we had like 10 grand in savings, something like that, maybe 15K. That kind of got us some samples, we built half a website with that. But then we were like, oh shit, we don't have enough to launch this thing properly to buy the first round of stock because every factory in the world has minimum order quantities. They don't want to deal with you unless you're going to order a minimum of X. And for the best factories, and we needed to use the best to create a premium product, the minimums are quite high. So you're looking at a minimum order of call it 30 odd grand or whatever. We spoke to a lot of banks when I tried to raise some seed investment. The pitch was that us two young guys were going to create a British challenger to Nike and Adidas, and people looked at us like we were crazy. And at that point, our mom and dad, who don't have a lot of money, don't have a big house, worked their whole lives to pay off their mortgage, said, well, we believe in you, we'll back what you're doing.

Again, I don't know what success looks like. I didn't, I couldn't say that Castore was going to get to 100 million, 200 million valuation, but I'm not going to fail. So I'm going to work harder, work at weekends, go and speak to 150 people, and if 149 say no, I'm going to speak to another 150 until someone says yes to me. We're just going to make this work. And I think there's no singular route to success in life, but having not been to university, having not had a kind of formal business education, but just that sheer relentless drive to succeed, I think is a competitive advantage that I didn't really realize at the time.

Yeah, so I'm going to give some free advertising to Goldman Sachs, uh, because we used to say our customer at the start is the Goldman Sachs man. So we were men only to begin with; we didn't have women's wear. Women's wear is now our fastest growing part of our business. But at that time, and it was driven by no greater logic than we're two guys, we've got marginally less chance of fucking this up if we create men's wear than if we try and guess what women are going to like. So we said our customer was the Goldman Sachs man, which was, this was back in 2016 before COVID. So we said this is a guy that is in the office five days a week at 7:00 a.m., but will be in the gym four days a week at 6:00 a.m., doing a triathlon or a marathon at the weekend, and he's inherently competitive. And there was no brand that really spoke to that demographic. They were either wearing Nike or Adidas, which are great brands, but mass market, or they'd wear Lululemon, which was kind of genesis as a female brand, talks about yoga and well-being and lifestyle. This guy was competitive, they were focused on performance. So we said, well, if we can target that consumer, convince them that we care about their needs better than anyone else does, because the big brands are talking to every consumer, we'll just talk to you, and therefore we'll understand what product you want, how you want to be serviced. So in the early days, I would spend my weekends stood outside Equinox in Kensington.

Finish that sentence, it could be misinterpreted. Yeah, you obviously know the area better than me, or maybe that says something about you, mate, I don't know. But I would talk to the trainers as they were going in and leaving and saying, well, what do you wear, why do you wear that brand, would you be interested in a premium brand? And basically, the way that we got Castore off the ground was we'd gift this, like pre-influencer influencer marketing, we'd gift kit to these trainers and say, well, if you wear it with your clients and your clients buy, we'll give you a kickback on the sale. And it worked. It worked, I mean, nothing's easy in life, but it worked pretty quickly. And what happened, which was beyond our expectations, was that Goldman Sachs man, that Equinox Kensington man, would fly to New York or Singapore or San Francisco on business, he'd take his Castore kit with him because he would go for a run or go to the gym while he was there. And then we'd see a flurry of orders through our website from like literally a one-mile radius of Goldman Sachs Tokyo or wherever it was, because it just spread via word of mouth. And the biggest challenge of this market, which is your competitors are huge, was also the biggest opportunity because there's so few new entrants. So when this new brand came, people were like, oh, that's interesting, that's different, the fabric feels a bit different, there's details there that my Nike T-shirt doesn't have. So it grew quite organically from off the bat.

So we, and this comes back to the earlier question. We had two ideas right at the start. The first of which was there should be a premium British sportswear brand that competes on the global stage, that was our overarching thesis idea. But aligned with that, we knew that the market for global team sports was broken. And this is the point of having lived and breathed that world. You knew that Nike and Adidas focused almost all of their resources on a tiny number of teams: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Paris Saint-Germain, those kind of guys. So we felt if we can create a premium sportswear brand, if we can build a supply chain, an operational infrastructure, a logistical infrastructure, a technology platform, we'll be able to leverage those attributes to go and disrupt a market that firstly has some amazing growth drivers behind it. Sport is globalizing, sport is digitizing, there's a lot of really exciting things happening in sport, which is why this podcast exists. But secondly, to mark that has had almost no disruption for a generation. Like the same brands had partnered with the same teams, there hadn't been a lot of innovation. So we felt right at the start, we knew it'd take us some time to build the credibility to get into that market, to hard work to partner with from a kit perspective with a major football, rugby, cricket, motorsport team, but that was the ambition right from the start. So that was always in our mind, let's build a brand that will allow us to disrupt that market.

A lot of people did, and we had investors, we'd done a couple of small rounds by that point, and a lot of people did. And it was a completely fair thing. But I think again there's probably two aspects to it. There's the personal. Phil and I are the type of people that I'm willing to work harder than anyone, be grittier, be more resilient, do whatever it takes. I kind of, I will suffer more pain than anyone. If you put me on a treadmill next to you, I'm not getting off either. They're taking me out in a body bag or I'm going to win.

There you go. I like that, be a good challenge. We'll get, we'll get the camera on, maybe we can evolve the podcast launch video there you go. Let's get it on YouTube, we can both become influencers. We could actually do this.

Yeah, so it was actually Castore at the time. We launched AMC with Andy off the back of the partnership. But I remember it to this day. So we were in Australia, both my brother and I, for the Aussie Open with Andy, and he's our first big partnership. And he had this press conference, and I remember we had a big debate, Phil and I, about whether what product to put him in. And Phil was like, we've got to put him in something that says Castore, because no one's going to know what the wings are like now. Our wings get seen quite a lot and they're quite prominent, but at the time, no one knew what the Castore logo was. So plastered him in this T-shirt that had Castore on the front. And I think we did more revenue in like the hour after that press conference went live than we had in like three months prior, or something crazy like that, which I guess proves the concept of how valuable these top-tier athletes are. But to take a step back, I think we were on the lookout for a big athlete, and you're like, we can't go and do a football, we didn't do boots at that time, same with rugby. There's a couple of sports and you asked the question earlier about how do we decide not to be kind of a specific, we're going to make T-shirts or shorts and nothing else. But the decision we had or the discussion was slightly different, and it was around we want to be a multi-sport brand. If the overarching long-term ambition is for Castore to be a premium British version of Nike, Adidas, you can't pigeonhole yourself in one sport. So having that multi-sport approach was always the intention right from the beginning. And it was harder because everyone at the time just like investor said, what on Earth are you doing going into football? Everyone at the time said the only way you can build a direct-to-consumer brand is by being niche. So you should be a triathlon brand or a running, and I'm sure there's a lot of logic in that. We like that, now we're not going to do that. We want to create this big global brand, we have to be multi-sport. So it is just such an astonishing... I spend my life investing in businesses, it is astonishing though to have the success you did going as horizontal as you did with no funding, a little funding, like really.

No, I'm not a tweeter. I'm not a social media guy. But so again, we didn't have any money. It was every day, it was like how much comes in versus how much goes out. What's the business at this stage?

So you've got it going, but you're not a big company. And this is how far into the journey?

Less than two years, I think, something like that.

But we, yeah, we, like I say, that Goldman Sachs man that we knew or we had a sense existed, did exist. And the kind of average transaction value on the website was high. It grew by word of mouth, so we didn't have to invest in marketing a lot. So we were a good business at that point. Which to the earlier question, in many ways, people thought we were even more idiotic or crazy for saying, well, you've got a good business here that's growing organically and nicely and profitably, why the hell are you going to put it at risk by partnering with Rangers or the West Indies? So yeah, those debates were interesting at that time. But with Andy, we knew that we wanted to take the brand to the next level. We knew that in order to get credibility as a serious sports performance brand, we needed to partner with someone that would wear your product in the most intensive sports environments. So what we did was gift product to people around athletes, so their personal trainer, their coach, their manager, their agent, their mom, whoever it was. We just wanted them to keep seeing the brand. And I guess the good old-fashioned saying, which I am a massive believer in, of the harder you work, the luckier you get, was very much the case here. That we kind of do all this stuff and try really hard, and Andy kept seeing the brand. And as look would have it, he was coming to the end of his previous agreement. I managed to get myself in front of him. And Andy, may if you ever get him on the show, he may have a different perspective, I don't know. But I really lent into the, we're young, working-class brothers, we got this big global dream, and these, obviously with Jamie, two guys from a pretty working-class background that have gone on to achieve amazing things. And I think that resonated with him.

No, so that meeting, again, I still remember it because I was, I don't know if we're allowed to swear, but I was so fucking nervous. It was a big thing for us. I, it's a big thing at any time, but was a big thing at that time. And I had my little suitcase of product to show him and feel like a traveling salesman. But I don't know if it was a negotiation tactic on behalf of Andy's agent, if it was, it worked incredibly well. But they took me to the room at Wimbledon where any like champions are allowed to sit, and there's like this picture of Andy in the background with his Wimbledon trophy. And then his little me sat there like, oh my God, how the hell have we got here in two years? I still remember kind of packing orders on my mom's kitchen table, kind of thing.

You knew serious, you knew. And it's, yeah, he, I mean, what I think again, Andy may have a different perspective, but I think the story resonated with him of these two guys that have got this big ambition and a load of energy, but the product was the driver of why he wanted to partner with us. Which, if I think back to our success in the early years, and now kind of fast forward seven years, people talk about the big partnerships that we've done, and there's been a lot of exciting things. But what was the case right at the beginning and hasn't changed is if you make a superior product, you've got more than half a chance of winning in life.

I guess it all starts with the relationship. So everything in life is relationships. The most valuable thing you have is your reputation. And for us at that time, it was our first big one. So again, and we were learning as we went along. And I always say to the team now because I'm really trying to encourage a culture of move fast and break stuff. We're speedboats in a market of oil tankers, we have to be more agile than our competitors. So I always try to say to people, don't worry about making mistakes, I just please do not make the same mistake twice and try not to make an expensive mistake. So if you fulfill those two criteria, I'm not going to ever be disappointed at anyone for making a mistake. I'll be the opposite and be disappointed if you're not trying to do things differently. But in this case, it would have been obviously a big mistake if we got it wrong, but really it all comes from the relationship. And as we got to know Andy and his team better, it became apparent that there was essentially a meeting of minds where we were very happy to think differently and do things in a way that wasn't a traditional kind of model back then. And Andy is, he's well known, kind of a guy that's invested in businesses and thinks about his career outside of tennis. So there was just a meeting of minds. And before you start saying, well, it needs to be this or it needs to be that, you work out that, yeah, we've kind of got similar values here, we want similar things. And after that, it's actually pretty straightforward.

Exactly that, completely organic. So you gave equity in Castore, not setting up an independent company with him. So he became an investor in Castore as part of the process, which fair play to him because there's a lot of athletes that wouldn't have done that. And I think now it's a bit more in vogue, isn't it? But back then, Andy, I think, was kind of a pioneer in saying, well, actually, this has got the chance to give me more upside, but more importantly, I can help this business. I care about it, I'm passionate about it. It was one of those things that just happened really naturally.

Less than that, and hopefully it'll one day be worth as much, if not more, than Roger's. I know Andy's competitive, so we'll like it to be worth more.

It's an interesting question. I think the cohort of athletes or talent, entertainment, film, music, that genuinely move the dial is really small. There's very few people that do that. Those guys and girls should think creatively about how they maximize their brand and leverage their platform, community, whatever else. But I do think they are the exception rather than the rule. Personally, I always think, let's be creative. So whatever the market has been previously where we pay you this and maybe there's that, let's just think creatively. Let's start with a blank sheet of paper. You want to align interests. So whether it's doing a partnership with Andy Murray or Rangers or England cricket or Red Bull Racing, the most important thing is aligning interests and say, well, do we both win? Because if you're Beyonce and partner with a brand and just say, well, pay me loads of money, the brand is on the hook, and if it doesn't go well, they're not going to win. That partnership, that relationship is not going to be sustainably successful. So one of the big, and it sounds really simple but it's harder than you might imagine, is structuring these partnerships where both of your interests are aligned, you both know what the goals are going in, we want to grow the brand, we want to go into new markets, and you both are rewarded as those things are achieved or not. You've both got skin in the game, there's not a disconnect between one and the other.

So I won't, I won't talk about Andy or anyone else individually because that wouldn't be right, but the principle of as the business grows, as the business achieves objectives, I'm very positive on that as a concept. Because exactly as we've said, it encourages people to work together, it encourage, it make sure that everyone is aligned on the objectives, everyone's rowing the boat in the same direction, they're willing to go above and beyond to make things happen. And again, if you take a step back and think about Castore, particularly how he entered the team sports market, you need people to go above and beyond. That's not an easy thing to do. Very few brands have ever penetrated global team sports. So not only do we need to be innovative and come up with a creative model, you need, we call it the marginal gains, you need to find the 1%. So having an athlete or a partner that is rewarded if that extra thing happens makes a really big difference. And to go back to Andy, he made a massive or had a massive impact in the short term from kind of a revenue, financial perspective, but I would say as big an impact if not bigger from a credibility perspective. When we went into team sports, again, I can't speak for Rangers, they were our first big football partner, I'm certain that having Andy Murray as a partner, the stamp of approval that he gives you, helped us win that partnership.

Correct, exactly right. And again, it comes back to how do you be creative, how do you think differently. So let's go to Rangers. So then you're sitting in the Rangers, this is your, because I think the first is so important, you, Andy was the first say big brand or big person to really kind of put his name behind your brand. When you then go to Rangers, what are their core considerations? Because I'm sure they have concerns around supply, your ability to fulfill. What did that look like?

So the best way to answer that is to start by saying why was there a gap in the market. And our view was the incumbents, Nike, Adidas in particular, would only focus on a very small number of teams. So therefore, there was a significant number of teams that have huge fan bases, deeply passionate fan bases, often very international, if not global, fan bases that were completely under-optimized. No one in Oregon or in Herzogenaurach where Adidas was sat there thinking, right, how do I grow the revenue of Rangers or Newcastle or these guys? Because they were focused on Real Madrid or Paris Saint-Germain. Combined with that, the Premier League, we're doing these big international broadcast deals, so there's more kids in the Middle East, the Far East, Southeast Asia, South America watching the Premier League, getting visibility of the Europa League, the Champions League, which again is a big, big opportunity. But someone needed to unlock that value. So going in, we were saying our fundamental pitch or way that we could be different was we will focus on growth. Are those brands, can they look you in the eye and say that they're going to be focused on growing your merchandise revenue, extracting or unlocking value from your global fan base? That in itself is a very powerful message.

It's a combination. So product is a big part of it, the bespoke nature of the product, the breadth of product, as you say, outside of match day, training, travel, accessories, lifestyle, collaborations, limited editions. To do that is hard work, it takes planning, it takes focus, it takes consistency. Nike have a market cap of 175 billion, Adidas is 35 billion. To sell an extra 10, 20, 50,000 units for a Rangers, a Fiorentina, a Red Bull, does not move the dial. It's not changing the share price. No one is going to be strategically focused on that.

It is good business, very much so. You have to remember that in addition to the product that is expanding, and I would say elevating as well, so enhancing the bespoke nature, the quality of that product, the channels through which you're engaging with fans are evolving. So traditionally, football shirts have generally been bought in, when I was growing up, Sports Direct or JD, that was kind of the two places that you'd go to buy a shirt or the stadium itself. Now through digital channels and social media, as ways of engaging with fans, as well as the fact that the fan bases are far broader, far more global, far more diversified from a demographic perspective. You've got the traditional football fan, but you've now got young kids in South Korea that are engaging with the Premier League. The way that you can engage with them is very different than it has ever been before. So it's not only the product, it's the channel through which you're engaging with that fan, and the nature of the fan. They want different products, they don't necessarily just want to buy the replica jersey.

So it's, it's very much a deal-by-deal basis. There's no standard, and that again comes back to this core principle that no one had thought about this market creatively. I think everyone had looked at it and said, oh, Nike and Adidas, they're so big and powerful, don't even try. There's no chance, they're so big, you'll never beat them. And we, whether it was youth or naivety or, I don't know, we said, well, why not? There has to be an opportunity there. Are Nike and Adidas doing as good a job for the, and I always call them the Super League, obviously the Super League failed, but their focus is on the Super League teams. Every team outside of that global elite does not get the same level of product, the same level of distribution, the same level of support. So for us to say, well, we can maximize value for these teams, help them grow. With financial fair play becoming more prominent, having a partner that will genuinely focus on helping you grow, driving more revenue, sharing data around who your fans are, where they are, what their buying habits are, how do you unlock value from that, that is something that no one was doing before. It was genuinely innovative. And I always use the example of I want Castore to be the Tesla of the sportswear market. So Volkswagen didn't bother to make an electric car until Tesla came along. So we not only are a speedboat in a market of oil tankers, so we have to be more agile than anyone else, but we have to be more innovative, we have to be at the front end of changes. Sport, the business of sport merchandise in particular, but I think more broadly is still incredibly nascent. You've got amazing business fundamentals where fans don't change the team that they support ever, but you haven't had people think about how they tap into that and how they maximize value both for the fan but also the teams.

So a big part of inventory management is that Castore is a digital-first, data business. So we have data on the teams that say, well, you can see you have all the data historically when team is winning, losing, drawing, fans are revolting against an ownership, anything else. Winning truth is the good, the bad, the ugly. What is average attendance? How many jerseys have been sold? What is your core fan base? Because you can be pretty confident you're going to sell that amount of inventory per year. On top of that, and where we start to put strategic plans in place. For example, when McLaren have a really popular Australian driver, you say, right, what are we doing to penetrate the Australian market? Red Bull a really popular Mexican driver, what can we do to penetrate that market? Chelsea, correct, obviously opportunity in the Middle East off the back of an ownership change, you're thinking about upside potential. But back to that word agile, unlike Nike or Adidas for whom it takes 18 months to design and develop and deliver a product, we'll design and develop and deliver the same product in between three and six months. So you can be far more reactive to what's going on in the world, which is a big advantage.

The single word would probably be trust. So I think people liked the idea when I would go in, it was often, people think, oh, it must have been really hard to break into that market, and maybe I should try and build this analogy about me being a genius and kind of having this unique power to sell, but I mean, I could say that but I'd be lying. Unfortunately, the reality is the market was broken. Castore would not exist if the market for team sports was working efficiently. Teams were waiting for us to come and speak to them and say, look, we think we can do this differently, we think we can help you grow your revenues, we'll share that upside with you in a way that it hasn't been historically. We're going to prioritize you in a way that the big brands haven't previously, we're going to focus on digital and later. People were ready and waiting to hear that. But the big question, and you alluded to it earlier, was well can you deliver? Do you have a supply chain? Sports is unlike any other sector. I've got quite a few friends who are kind of C-level people at fashion or generic retail businesses, and I always joke with them that if they're kind of two weeks late delivering a spring summer collection, they just keep selling autumn and winter and hope that the weather is bad and generally their customers won't notice. If I'm two hours late launching a shirt, bad things will happen. So the intensity within your supply chain and the operating model is incredibly high. It's difficult, but I look at that as a massive positive because it's a big barrier to entry for anyone else to come in. So from a business perspective, it's very attractive to me.

It's a good question. And clearly there is a delta. So a Red Bull and McLaren and Newcastle clearly going to sell something very different than the Salford or some of those other teams. But the underlying principle that sports teams...

Have been underserviced historically, they've been under-optimized historically. That is equally applicable throughout the pyramid. What I do think is really interesting is again there's been very little disruption in innovation. So as you go down the pyramid of football you've got some huge teams in League One with some big fan bases, some very passionate fan bases, and often fan bases that aren't contained domestically. You speak to teams and they'll say we wait for fans to come over once a year and buy a shirt, which is in my opinion utterly illogical. That's not just in football, that's in other sports, it's kind of international teams. We partner with the Republic of Ireland, you've got huge cohorts of Irish expats in Chicago, Boston, New York, but someone needs to focus on connecting them with that product. So up and down the value chain the size of the prize exists, it changes but actually the principle is very similar. Do you want to go into the top tier or actually is it enough owning the second tier? Which is amazing and broad. But you wanted to go into the top tier, I think the beauty of sports is that there's always opportunity. So clearly this podcast is called the Business of Sport and sport is big business, we all know that, but it's also emotive. And in my experience the big brands, because there's so few of them, on a cyclical basis their strategies change. So they'll focus on this sport not that sport, they'll focus on individual athletes not teams, they'll focus on X rather than Y, and that opens up pockets of opportunity which mean there is always an opportunity. There's something there in the market available. Our job is to build the Castore business, the infrastructure, the model, so that as and when those opportunities present themselves, which in my view they always will periodically, you're ready to take advantage of them.

It's a really interesting question, and so I don't think I'd phrase it as there's a bad team, but I think there's teams that better fit our brand. And again we've been on an amazing growth journey, and as with any business that grows rapidly you learn along the way. And one of the learnings has been our model works, the ability to unlock value for teams, the ability to grow their revenues and grow those revenues at higher margins is very attractive. But you don't need to partner with everyone that wants to partner with you. That's been a big learning for us: be disciplined, be strategic, focus on where you can add the most value. As I said earlier, I do think that the market as you go lower down will evolve, and some brands that have been around a long time and haven't moved with the times, haven't innovated, haven't digitized, haven't evolved their supply chains, I think there's going to be some interesting things happen in the next kind of 12 months and beyond.

It's an interesting one, I guess without ever taking anything for granted and you have to have humility in this industry because as soon as you think you've worked it out it has a funny habit of punching you square in the face. So you can never be complacent. But I don't think it's an overstatement to say that we've had far, far more successes than ones where it has been challenging. Equally, again clearly the nature of sport is it's so intense, there's always a challenge around the corner. So when those inevitable challenges happen, there's nothing you can do to stop them happening. The nature of dealing with elite athletes is that there's a problem here or there, the key thing is how you react to it. And I think that's where again being a founder-led challenger brand, we are the underdog, we are the disruptor, being really honest with people, having those—I said earlier that your reputation is the most valuable thing you have, relationships are the most valuable thing that you have in business. So that when that happens, if there is an issue, someone can phone you up and say look this has happened, and they know that you're going to care, they know that you're going to do something to try and fix it, is massively important.

Generally in life people are reasonable, and if they can see that you're genuinely working, caring, trying to fix something, they want to work with you to try and fix it. Again it's back to that point of aligned interests. If everyone's interests are aligned, there's a mutual interest in trying to get something solved as quickly as possible. It's something that again I think of everything through a competitive lens: how are we better than the big guys, how do we do things differently? And one of the key things is the reactiveness. People know that we care. Again you can't solve every problem overnight, it's not possible in this industry, you'd send yourself crazy trying to. But knowing that, for people to know that you care, people to know that you'll do your best to try and fix it, to build that trust, which takes years by the way, and again we're kind of seven years into what is hopefully going to be a multi-decade journey. But to build that takes a long time, but it all starts with people knowing that you care.

So Castore has a vertically integrated model where we'll partner with the team, we'll have our logo on the chest as Nike, Adidas would, but unlike Nike, Adidas we will then say why can't we operate the website, is there an opportunity for us to optimize that, to optimize the retail stores? We'll invest in capex if new stores need to be opened, we'll look to optimize the wholesale market. So generally speaking, if you have that vertically integrated model, which to my knowledge no one else in the market does, your margins are attractive. The focus then is on saying to the team, rather than let's really focus on squeezing every inch out of this, it's having a strategic plan to say what is the size of the prize here, where do we think we can grow revenue to, and how do we structure a deal where I'm incentivized to do that and you're rewarded for helping me do that.

England Cricket has been massive for us. To partner with your home nation is what dreams are made of, right? Like watching the team walk out at Lord's in the Ashes genuinely is one of those pinch-me moments. I remember hiding in the toilets on the train down to London because I couldn't afford a ticket and I had to come down for a meeting, and I'm watching this happen. You're like it's just life bloody hell. In years, again, big lesson in life: you work hard and life can do nice things to you sometimes. Take some punches along the way but that's all part of the fun as well. That one again is almost the perfect example in my opinion of the original idea that we had, which was Nike and Adidas do not view cricket as a global sport. Nike and Adidas are so big and so global they have an incentive to only focus their resources on teams that will move the dial, that are either going to move the dial of their share price or move the dial in terms of global brand awareness. They had historically viewed cricket as not global, not big enough for them to move the dial. Again Nike 30-odd-plus billion revenue, they didn't want to invest in it. Which for us was a massive opportunity because there's a huge number of cricket fans not just in this country but further afield. I was in India for the World Cup and I saw shitloads of Castore, and that's in front of 1.4 billion people. Because there was Africa, there wasn't West Indies, but South Africa and England, you have there in a country that as you say is on top. So again it just proves the concept that this is such a big market, it's too big to be dominated by the small number of brands that did dominate it before we came along. But you've got to earn your right to be in this market, you've got to prove that you can add value. So with England Cricket, again not dissimilarly to Andy, it starts with values. Everything in business starts with people. So you're meeting the people, do they think that you're genuine? Again these are very intensive relationships, to the question earlier, at some point in 10 years something will go wrong with the kit. It's human, it's an impossibility for it not to happen. So they need to get comfortable that even when that happens the phone rings, someone's going to answer, someone's going to care, someone's going to move mountains to fix it for them. They need to know what drives you, what do you want Castore to be, is that aligned with their own values and their own ambitions? So it all starts with people and getting comfortable from that perspective. And from that it became really clear that the ECB had a genuine strategy to expand the sport and get more people from a broader range of backgrounds playing the sport. And kit, how you engage with fans, is a part of that. It's not the only part but it's part of that ecosystem. So having a partner—previously they'd had New Balance, prior to that they'd had Adidas. I'm not going to speak about those guys because that's not my business, but again probably we wouldn't have had the opportunity we had if either of those guys had done a stellar job. To have a partner that says, well those young people that you want playing cricket will be on Instagram, we'll be on TikTok, we'll be looking at websites, we are a digital brand, we're a data brand, we can create cool products that help get those people excited about the sport—I think that was quite appealing to them.

You're acquiring huge quantums of data every hour of every day, so either through our own websites or the team websites. And historically in sports it's one of the big untapped opportunities. Teams were not thinking about well how do we optimize this data, how do we understand our fans better? Again if you think even as recently as a decade ago, football teams would sell their season tickets to the fans, they'd turn up and watch the game, they'd either cheer or boo depending on what happened, and kind of the relationship ended there. Whereas through data you can see well what pages on the website are they looking at, how much money are they spending, how frequently are they buying. You can build a far clearer picture of who your fan is. You transpose that to a Formula 1 team: where in the world are your fans? Are you seeing a big spike in revenue in Saudi or Qatar or Toronto when the Formula 1 is on that weekend? How do you build lookalike audiences that allow you to optimize that? So sharing that data, for us to be able to share that with the team is very valuable for them.

I think it's a journey and it's probably hard for them to build that infrastructure themselves. It's the reason that we've raised, or one of the big reasons we've raised the amount of money that we have, is to invest in that technology platform, that data capability. Because for a team to do that themselves, it's not just expensive—and for a football team, if a pound can go into that platform that could go into a player, someone's going to need to argue really hard for it to go into a tech platform rather than a player. Because players win games, tech platforms generally don't. So if we can build that platform and be market-leading in providing that service to a team so that they don't have to do it themselves, that's a very attractive proposition.

No, I'm not worried about that. Because the more information I can share with these teams, the more I can help them, the more valuable a partner I'm going to be. And again take a step back, we're three years into a long, long-term journey. How sports will evolve in my mind, there's no doubt whatsoever there'll be more kids in more corners of the earth watching the Premier League, watching Premiership rugby, watching the Ashes in 10 years than there are now. So someone will need to build the platforms that connect with that ever-expanding global community, share knowledge with the team so they know who their fans are, what their fans are thinking, and ultimately helps them monetize that community. So I think it's—

So a big part is geographic expansion. So we've proven our model now, we've proven that we can partner with teams, there is demand in the market for our offering. The incumbent brands were not servicing the market in the optimal way, and we've proven that we have a model that adds value. So then you think about well where do I expand, where do I take this to? And it's always a really interesting but exciting challenge for a founder or an entrepreneur. Where I guess inherently we're ambitious and we're driven by ambition, so you think there's so many opportunities in South America, how do we go over there? Look at what's happening in the Middle East with the Saudi Premier League, what do we need to do over there? Look at how rugby is growing incredibly quickly in Japan, what are we doing in the Far East, Australasia? Again so there's opportunities all over the world for us. It's a case of being disciplined. But very much the focus is on international expansion. And then the second piece, and we've not talked about it much today, every time I partner with a new team, my logo, the Castore wings, on TV or on social media are being authenticated through those athletes, through that team. How I build a global brand off the back of that is really exciting. Opening new stores, launching international websites, looking at more athlete partnerships. We want Castore to be a global brand.

It's a really interesting one because clearly, I mean the US is the biggest sports market on the planet. If you have ambitions to be a global sportswear brand you can't have those ambitions without a plan for the US, really. Because if you look at the English Premier League penetration in the US now, growing faster than ever, better adoption than ever, you can have the Premier League but get the US because of it. You don't need to be sponsoring, I don't know, you name your team, the LA Galaxy or whatever. They have a different model in the US where leagues do centralized deals. So the NFL will do a single deal with Nike, same with the NBA, MLS will do a deal with Adidas. So there isn't the fragmentation that exists here in Europe. And I don't think there's the same level of tribalism and rivalry where if you partner with Rangers you're not doing a deal with Celtic, full stop. I don't think that same rivalry or tribalism exists in the US where teams all accept that they have the Nike swoosh. It's a generally standardized product served in a very standardized way. Are there pockets of opportunity within that? I think that could be really interesting. But if I think about my priority list and where Castore has a right to win, I know that we can do some really interesting things further across Europe. I know that we can do some really interesting things in the Middle East. So it's all about prioritizing and allocating resources efficiently.

So I think you'd be a fool to predict success or failure in Saudi one way or the other. So I'm not going to do that. What I'll give you is my perspective. The ambition that Saudi in particular and the Middle East more broadly has in sport is clear and is very clear. The Saudi 2030 Vision, hosting the Football World Cup, these are not short-term ambitions. To my knowledge China never had the same stated strategy and again to my knowledge didn't have the same government-level support, particularly not from the top of the government, as is the case in the Middle East. What I do think is very different, as you allude to, is that there isn't the deeply ingrained history and culture of either watching sport or participating in sport. That in my opinion will change. I think there'll be a significant increase in runners, people playing football, people playing cricket in the Middle East in the next decade and beyond. The speed at which that happens, I think will be where the debate is. I think the key is this, unlike maybe what we saw with China, is so fundamentally backed by institutions well beyond sport, as in a centralized sovereign. If you want to look at this for a business that ultimately is on and is long-term, buying into projects like future hostings of World Cups, you have to have that consistency up to certain times and that will only continue. They're going to get into more rights across lots of different sports, they're going to buy access into leagues. You look at, I think a really good example, Premier Padel where the Qataris have invested in Premier Padel, they're looking at doing M&A across that space. Padel is one of if not the fastest growing sport globally, it's very popular. I was in Qatar last year for the World Cup, a lot of people playing padel out there, kind of both locals and people over there for the event. So I think those guys are being really smart in positioning themselves in growing sports to be driving. Again take a step back, what I said earlier, sport hasn't had a lot of competition, sport hasn't had a lot of disruption and innovation. There will be bumps in the road, there always is. But I think what the guys in the Middle East have recognized is for them to be at the forefront of what is clearly a globally recognized cultural asset, they have a chance to influence in a way that if you buy a train company or an airline, it's not quite the same. You don't have that same level of influence.

In football I don't see any major risk of that at all. I think that's a very American view of the world where players support Tom Brady no matter who he plays for. You see the big spikes and then the dips in revenue accordingly. Again all of the data we have shows that is not the case. Of course you get a spike if your team signs a star player, that's logical and inevitable. But you don't then get the same drop-off because the fans still support the team. They're supporting that team through thick and thin. So I don't see a big risk of that. Again that will change sport by sport. Formula 1 fans will often follow a driver, particularly some of the younger audience that have come into the sport through Drive to Survive. But that's an opportunity more than it is a threat because the chance to create limited edition collections, limited edition marketing campaigns around that individual, if you're smart with the rights that you utilize and how you do a deal to make sure that the athlete is compensated accordingly, again we can bring value to that chain. Because we have a supply chain, because we have a digital platform, a way of engaging with customers that adds value and makes us an important part of the ecosystem.

Yes we do, and it works. So at risk of stating the obvious, the more teams that we partner with, people are seeing your logo, your logo is becoming more trusted. You have their data, but more importantly there's just that trust. They see your brand. You're not any other direct-to-consumer that we all get constantly on our Instagram feeds. You're elevated above that. So the cross-sell, there's a natural synergy in our business where we can partner with teams and offer them something that the big brands, Nike and Adidas, were not offering them before. So we can add and create value for them. In addition to that, our own brand, the Castore brand, grows off the back of these partnerships through the brand awareness that they give us.

It's a tough one. And this is not, genuinely it's not evasive, but the answer is my brain doesn't work like that. So when we've had difficult moments—and there's been a lot of difficult moments, either publicly and the nature of dealing in this market is that everything is scrutinized, so you accept that stuff happens publicly which is not always good fun. But honestly my brain just doesn't work like that because any setback, any challenge is just an opportunity because you learn so much more from it. And we've been on a journey where there's been periods where you're just growing so fast, like the rate of growth that Castore had. It's not really in our nature, again we're kind of Northern working-class guys, would get beaten out of you if you talk too much about yourself. So we just don't really think like this. But we've grown faster than any business that I know, and when you're on that trajectory there's a genuine risk that you think you can do no wrong—not because you're an arrogant person, but it's just human nature. You're like wow this is working. So you need the challenges, the setbacks to make you a little bit more introspective and say well why did that happen, how do we make sure it doesn't happen again. It's the reason we decided to raise the money, was we need to invest in the processes and the systems and the infrastructure. I don't think we'd have made that decision if we hadn't had some of those setbacks along the way.

Yeah, yeah, honestly I've not had a huge amount of time to think about it because you are just in the trenches every day. And as you said, probably externally it looks like the journey for Castore has been a complete hockey stick, but the reality is every day there's a problem, every day there's an opportunity.

I do, and I think it's a really interesting point. More than the Goldman Sachs man—I've got nothing against that man—but again you've got to have a point of view and it's got to be sincere and authentic. For me, I've got a genuine belief that there's so many—I don't think that I'm kind of unique, I don't think I'm uniquely intelligent. I think I can work hard. I'm not going to be falsely modest, I've definitely got a few brain cells in my head. But if I think back to my days at Tranmere, and again well documented how few people make it as professional athletes, but the characteristics and skill sets that are instilled in you, have you've been through the academy system, the professional sports system, and then get discarded, I genuinely think there's a huge amount of untapped talent and potential. Because those people just don't know what to do, they're young, they've taken a big punch in the face at an early stage in life and it's hard to see well I can't go and start a business. Phil and I have been able to do it. And if I was going to do kind of content for anyone I'd love it to be to that person and be like I was in exactly the same position as you where I didn't really know what the hell I was going to do with my life. The thing that I thought I was going to do got pulled away from underneath my feet but I've managed to make something of myself hopefully. There's no reason why you can't do the same.

It's really difficult is the honest answer. And as the founder or co-founders, the biggest risk is that you don't evolve and you think that what has made you successful is what will continue to make you and the business successful, and it won't. You can't be the guy that is touching every single product that's designed or in contact with every single retailer or whatever else that is. And you can only learn this through experience, or I've only learned it through experience. There's really three things. As the business gets bigger—I don't think there's a binary number, I don't think once you cross 10 million or 50 million or 200 million revenue that you all of a sudden change. I think you learn it and it happens organically. But I've learned there's really three things that you can impact. Number one, you have to set the strategy. People need to know why they're getting out of bed every day, what is the North Star, what are you trying to achieve? For Castore that is: we want to create a British sportswear brand that competes on the global stage. If we achieve that that is something really exciting that everyone involved in the journey is going to be incredibly proud of. So your job is to set that strategy, something that hopefully can inspire everyone. Secondly, it's your job to create the roadmap and say well how do we achieve that? That's a big vision, a big goal, it's really exciting, but how do we get there? What are the strategic pillars? If we deliver against 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, that big goal is achievable. And again that's not easy and that will evolve and there'll be things that change or things that evolve based on how your competitors react. But it's the founder's job to set the roadmap. The final piece, which is the hardest, is to get the right people in who are better than you at marketing, at product, at operations, at logistics, at technology, but then build a culture that allows those people to thrive. I say to people all the time I will never be disappointed in anyone for making a mistake. What are we as a brand? We are a speedboat in a market of oil tankers. We are Tesla in a traditional automotive market. We have to be pushing the edge, we have to be finding the marginal gains. Saying the word culture is really easy, building an environment where people take on what you're saying and live and breathe it, and it gets passed—we've got 500 people now, more than—and to have 500 people think like that is really difficult. And it only happens if you get the right people in beneath you who understand what drives you and then they're passing it through to everyone else in the organization.

I guess the answer is I don't know. And I've got enough problems to worry about of my own so I don't spend too much time thinking about other people's problems. But I think there's one aspect of that is Bring It On because I love a challenge, I love being competitive, I love going toe to toe with anyone and seeing who wins. They're very similar, I love a good fight, I love a good row. Part of me is Bring It On, competition makes everyone better. But there's another aspect which is probably the more important, which is generally in business logic drives decision making. And for the businesses that those guys are, of the size and scale that they are, to build the infrastructure, to put the focus and the energy into the partnerships that we do is just not economically rational for them to. That's not to say that they won't for a period, but long-term I just don't see that happening because it's not economically rational. Markets function best with specialism, and we can offer something to a segment of the market that the big brands are not willing or able to. I do think it's really interesting and maybe it'll be something that Harvard write a case study on at some point, but Adidas had I think a 50-year head start on Nike. So the biggest sportswear brand in the world, and Nike have clearly massively outgrown them and massively dominate them. And I think a more interesting question as to whether those guys will kind of come in try and eat our lunch is: do Adidas try and compete with Nike anymore? Have they just accepted failure and accepted that they can no longer be as good as the swoosh? I think that's a really interesting question. I can't think of many examples in the corporate world where a brand has been overtaken and dominated by another in a way that they have accepted failure, or maybe just accepted their place in the ecosystem. Because there's always going to be multiple players and if you can't compete right at the top but you're still doing a 35 billion market cap, it's a difficult position. One thing I do worry about is kind of the unbundling of the ecosystem though. When you look at the rise of Hoka and you look at the rise of On Running in particular, they're much more of a concern I think for Nike than Adidas. Because they're specific product, specific product. The genesis of Nike and Adidas is in footwear. If you have the CEO of Adidas on here or Nike, team sports is not a strategic priority to them, let alone any team that isn't Real Madrid or Barcelona. So I think Nike do 40 billion a year in shoe sales, which goes to show you the size and scale. So if someone takes 5% of that off them it's a big deal. What we're doing is non-core for them. But for me the better way of looking at it is: are they ever going to focus on it? So we can't compete head-to-head with them on balance sheet, if they want to pay more for something than us they will always win. Where we can look a club in the eye and say well they might pay you more but you're making a short-term decision. Will they be as focused on growing, will they share data, will they expand the product range, are they going to care about this as much as you do or as much as we will? And that is where I think we will always compete, is by being the growth brand, the brand that wants to help teams grow.

The latter, so completely open. As I said earlier, when we started it was just two guys with a big dream and a load of passion and a load of energy, but with no clear vision of success in inverted commas. So we knew, like I said, we felt there was a gap in the sportswear market, we knew there was a gap in the team sports market, and we felt well let's work really hard and try and fill that gap. But there was never a thought of it can get to this revenue or it can get to that size, or if we get that big someone will buy us. It's just never been part of the discussion or thought process. There's so much room still to grow. We've grown quickly but there's so much room still to grow. If you create a great business and are really focused on building something great, having a great product, building a great brand, adding value to teams, creating value within the sports ecosystem, there's always going to be exciting things. Who knows, maybe we'll buy one of them, but there's always going to be exciting things available.

Sounds good.

No such thing as challenges, only opportunities.

Your home one.

So for us the UK, because if you can do it you've proven, and then everyone else looks at you and says they can do it there.

No one's going to partner with you because you're British unless you can add value for them. So get off the ground in your home market, once you've done that you're off to the races.

I don't have a target list, genuinely. The way I think about that, I'm a big believer in life—sorry this is not quick-fire, so they never really are—I'm a big believer in life that control the inputs and the outputs look after themselves. So I guess translate that to our business: if we create a great brand, a great supply chain, a great distribution network, a great technology platform, teams—my job is focused on the next time you've got a football club CEO or a Formula 1 Chief Commercial Officer sat in this chair and they're thinking about who would I partner with, I want that person to think I should go and speak to Castore, they're definitely interesting, like they're worth a conversation. I focus on that, and if we focus on delivering that the exciting partnerships will come, there's no doubt about it.

I feel like I should have a better answer. The honest answer is—my I fall asleep before my head hits the pillow, that's the honest answer. I'll try and give you a better one now. What worries—it's not, I wouldn't say worries honestly. Again I think the nature of starting your own business is you become so accustomed to dealing with anxiety. As I said earlier, nothing that happens in business is going to cause me more anxiety or stress or worry than not being able to pay my mum back. So I've looked the worst in the eye and I've come through it. So against that context nothing really compares.

It's a full-time job. Yeah, so I feel like again I should have a better answer, like oh I go at five and then do a nice ice bath and then run a marathon and then go to the office and I'm there by seven. Unfortunately that would not be the case. I go through periods, so I genuinely I love fitness. I go through periods where I get a personal trainer and I'll really get into it. I like to box, like everyone you get the endorphin rush, I love it. And then I go through other periods where I go so deep into a Castore hole that it is literally my whole existence and I'm probably not the best person in the world to live with and that's not healthy. So you try and find a balance, but I'm not sure I've found it just yet.

So I'm a big, I'm a big early riser guy.

Yeah, yeah, I go to bed early.

So if there's not something going on I'll be in bed before 10:00 p.m. But that is slowly changing and two of the three investors that we've brought in are US-based, so I'm enjoying the 10 p.m. phone calls. But yeah I've always been 5:00 a.m., rain or shine. I'm a big believer in the consistency of hard work. I saw an interview with Vincent Kompany once and he talked about a lot of people work really hard and they've got a load of energy and passion while things are good, and then they don't get the job promotion that they went for or something bad happens, their boss doesn't like them, and then you see their energy levels dip, their intensity, their work ethic will slowly change. So I'm a big believer in you have to be consistent. Working hard is important but working hard consistently is more important. So I'm a big guy for whatever I'm doing I'll be the first in the office and I'll be the last to leave. I know it's a cliche but I've always been like that. No matter what I'm doing, I was like that when I played football, when I went into banking, had no intention of staying in banking but I wanted to be the first guy in and the last guy to leave. And I think that served me really well. So I'll always be a 5:00 a.m. guy, I hope that will never change. Day to day there is no normal. So I love a couple of things: product, marketing, meeting teams. If my day's got any of those three things in generally it's a good day.

For me it's Bernardo. He has this brilliant line where someone says you have an irrational relationship to luxury and he said no no my friend, I have the most rational relationship to luxury. Luxury is the only place where you get luxury margins.

The guy that I grew up most respecting was Steve Jobs. Because we've talked today about having setbacks, having punches in the face, being innovative, people thinking that you're crazy. For me he was the ultimate proponent of that, where he got kicked out of Apple, in his spare time while he was kind of on gardening leave, he went and invested in these amazing businesses and built these amazing businesses. Just hyper-focused on innovation but probably more importantly just dreaming big, just go and do big things. There's so many people in the world that love criticizing, the man in the arena as the old saying goes. Block it out, go and try and achieve something big. It's never going to be a straightforward road. I don't know if we'll create a British Apple, but if you don't try you definitely won't.

I think in terms of what we've achieved it's been an A+. I could not have dreamed, if you'd said to me seven years ago when we started that having Andy Murray, the England cricket team, watching Max Verstappen win races all over the world—beyond the wildest imagination. So in that context it's a star plus times 10. But of course as an entrepreneur you live and breathe every day, you're in the trenches. And when that moment with Max Verstappen or Andy Murray or Jos Buttler winning the World Cup, that happens, and then you come in at 5:00 a.m. the next day and you focus. You're not patting yourself on the back for those things. You're focused on all the things that can be done better. And it's this strange paradox that the bigger you grow, the more you internationalize, the more things there are that you can improve. So from the way I think about things I'd say C+, because there's so much operational, logistical, people, like getting the right people into the right roles in the business as we talked about earlier. Do you go after the Middle East or the Far East or both? What can you do—all of these things, they're the reason to get out of bed every morning, they're the reason that you get excited. And we're nowhere near the potential that Castore still has.

So that Australia moment that you referenced before was I'd say the single biggest. I don't know if it was in terms of revenue—the revenue that we did there might well be other things that have changed since then just because the scale of the business has changed. But that was—for me that was a catalyst. Like I say it gave us that trust. You've got to be really careful not to be emotional about stuff doing what I do because sport is inherently emotional as we all know and you wouldn't be human if you didn't go and watch these things and have a tingle down your spine. Equally when we're making partnerships decisions, the way I think of it, I've got people—if I make stupid decisions I've got 500 staff that might not be able to take their kids on a summer holiday that year, or they've got people to look after. So you can't be emotional about it and I'm always very careful not to be. But the moment that I did get emotional—and I couldn't, it would be impossible not to—was when Rangers won the 55th league title in our first season with them as a partnership. Because it represented so much more. Like it was massive for the club that they just—we needed to win that title for reasons that all Rangers fans know. And for Castore, and I think Phil and I, that partnership—we went into that Rangers partnership as boys and we came out as men. And it was almost this feeling that Rangers have got a passionate, passionate fan base and a global fan base, and that partnership and winning the league gave us the confidence that we can do this. Before it was a belief and an idea, we now know that we can do it. And everything that's happened since then would not have happened if it hadn't been for that move.

No, no, appreciate it guys. Thank you very much for having me.