£25 was the price that Matthew Burgess charged to re-design his first pair of sneakers for a classmate. Last year a pair which his company customised sold for £10K at an auction.
Matthew, from Boothstown, got into customising trainers at just 17-years-old while he was studying at Pendleton College. He had become the talk of the campus when fellow students would notice him wearing trainers with colourways they had never seen before.
“Pendleton is a big college, you’ve got like 3,000-4,000 people there. So I kept wearing this army camouflage and loads of people would ask.
“They thought they were like fakes from Alibaba or whatever,” he explained.
The shoes weren’t fake but the design was in fact Matt’s own handy work. The Nike Huaraches were extremely popular in the UK at that time - however they only came in one colourway, triple black.
After seeing a local artist who was an inspiration doodle on his Adidas sneakers and post it on Instagram. Matt, who also had an artistic flair, but was too shy to express it, decided to customise his own shoes, which lead to his recognition at college.
Instinctively entrepreneurial, making money was the most important thing in Mathew’s life at that time. After all, he is from the generation that saw how influencer culture can help you climb the social ladder by utilising the internet to build a brand at a very young age.
Before he had ever put a Posca pen to a sneaker, he had tried his hand at a gaming channel on Youtube and a clothing brand.
“Looking back it now, that was influencer marketing without knowing it,” Matthew told the Manchester Evening News.
“Whatever I found a passion in, I’ve always wanted to do something with it. I grew up in an area where there’s some really wealthy people, but some who are really deprived.
“I’ve seen really high wealth and I was right in the middle. I had a friend who used to take me to United games and had private parking.
“I’ve had friends who I wasn’t able to go to theirs for tea. I’ve never not had stuff, but my mum and dad were also not able to buy me something straight away.
“CoD (Call of Duty) and Fifa used to come out about October, but I had to wait until December to get it for Christmas, so it was always, ‘how can I make enough money to be able to buy it when it came out?’
“Things like that are what made me feel like I had to go and get it. Two months as a kid is a long to time to wait, so when you’re 14, 15, 16 all you’re googling is how to make money.”
Once the requests for customisation came in, without missing a beat, Matthew created an Instagram account called MattB Customs and a website to take orders. The formula was simple, classmates would buy their pair of trainers from traditional retail stores and then hand it over to Matthew to customise it with a bespoke design for a fee.
“The first person I did it for, I did it for £25 and it took me like six hours,” he said.
“A new pair of shoes at that time were like £60, for a girl it was like £40. So I thought, I’m gonna make them a new shoe, 'so what would they pay for me to rework it?'
“I realised I wanted to work on new trainers because I was getting some really smelly shoes. When you heat gun a smelly shoe it amplifies it even more, so I was in my bedroom at home smelling people’s feet, so I was like, this is not the one.
“Because I was grafting so much, it was actually good money because I wasn’t paying tax. In a week I was doing around £200, which when you’re 17 is fully good, when you’re still going to college.”
Matt's drive was borne out of the disappointment he felt he subjected his parents to the day he failed his GCSEs. At 16, Matthew left Walkden High School with just three GCSEs in graphic design, media studies and physical education.
“Because I failed my GSCEs my parents were worried that I wasn’t very smart, And I think I was worried as well to be fair, that’s why I was so frantically trying to grab onto things I knew I was good at, because I was thinking I was a bit sh**.
“On results day my mum and dad picked up a friend along the way and he’d also done bad. When I got in the car and I told my mum, she didn’t shout, it was more of a disappointment, and that fu**ing hurt.
“You could just tell that she was like ‘oh God’ what does this mean?'"
Matt's GCSE 'failure' would pale in comparison to the levels of success he was able to achieve in the years since that fateful day, however.
Since creating MattB Customs, he has gone from customising sneakers for punters at the Trafford Centre, to running a lucrative side hustle while at Sheffield Hallam University with the help of close friends, to collaborating with Stella McCartney and having his design featured at London Fashion Week, to building an elite clientele which includes stars like Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Paul Pogba, Marcus Rashford and many more - and working with major corporations like Google and Netflix. MattB Customs is now a world renowned bespoke sneaker customising business.
Matthew himself is a motivated, knowledgeable and determined businessman. But also a personable, down to earth young man, he has managed to keep things very modest and grass-roots, running what is essentially a local family business in Salford.
On the payroll is his younger brother who is following in his footsteps and studying to become a graphic designer, his mum - who he credits with transforming the company - handles some of the financial and admin tasks and his dad who is a former engineer, quit his job to work for MattB Customs.
Among some of the other staff is a friend he met in Sheffield and an old high school friend who Matthew designed a pair of football boots for, back when he was just starting out.
Matthew is now hoping to create opportunities using his brand in the form of apprenticeship schemes for young people in the area who aren’t looking to go to university.
“Being an artist is hard to create money and I’ve been able to create a way for artists to get money and me still benefit and nobody get f****d over," he said.
“The thing I’m most proud about is how much money my business has been able to pay people and them make a living off it. Being able to give people a way of earning consistent good income as an artist.”
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