Castore have confessed that they underestimated the amount of orders they'd need to fulfil their initial batch of Rangers shirts.
The new kid on the sportswear block shot to prominence when Sir Andy Murray wore their gear during tennis matches, and their next major leap was a five-year kit deal with the Premiership giants in 2020. Their first kit made for the club was the shirt worn for their title-winning season in 20/21 but but were criticised by supporters at the outset for supply and demand issues.
There were also questions over the standard of merchandise and co-founder Tom Beahon has told The Athletic Castore weren't best prepared for what would come with handling such a responsibility. They are now partnered with clubs like Aston Villa and Newcastle, Beahon explaining: “We launched the partnership during COVID and the world was so crazy. You could get a call from your factory on a Tuesday saying, ‘Those 250,000 units we told you would be there by Thursday will no longer be there’.
"Like anything, you adapt and find solutions to the problems, but we certainly took some bruises along the way. We were like a youth-team player who got promoted to the first team very quickly.
“The feedback on the designs themselves was positive, but we had a number of challenges getting the volume of kits into the market. I don’t think anything could have prepared us for the avalanche of demand from the Rangers fans.
“They’re known for having a massively passionate fanbase and we experienced the full force of that. We ordered what we thought was a really good number of shirts that would satisfy demand for the first six months of the partnership.
"When we’d sold out in a matter of hours we realised we might have underestimated… that was a classic example of, ‘You don’t know what you don’t know’.
“It’s rare for a new brand to enter this market and even rarer for a new brand to enter it the way we did, with a team the size and stature of Rangers. After that, we were catapulted into a sphere where a lot of teams — not just from football — were asking, ‘Who are these new guys on the block?
"Are they going to be a flash in the pan, or are they a serious business and an interesting option? For us, it was about capitalising on that awareness we had and the fact that these guys wanted to speak to us, but also to try to do it in an intelligent and strategic way.”
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