Direction B

Does it work

Nothing here is settled. When the family meets to decide, anyone who disagrees with a verdict says so and we change it.

The four questions it has to answer

Does a club actually want this?

Passes There are two wants here and only one of them is evidenced, so both are stated separately. The town's want is the evidenced half. Spain already buys town clothing every year: at the fiestas, every supporters' club and group of friends orders its own shirt from a printing trade that exists to serve them.

Madrid buys the same thing with no fiesta, in shops selling tee shirts that say Vallekas, Carabanchel or Usera, worn all year. Clothing that says where you are from is not an idea waiting to be proved; it is a working market that nobody has pointed at a club. The president's want is the reasoned half.

What he is being offered is a town that turns up, and the thing he complains about is that nobody comes and nobody joins. An estimate, and only an estimate: the circle around one of these clubs is about a hundred households plus the first team and the bar, and a run filled by pre-orders needs a fraction of that.

What reasoning cannot reach is whether those particular households pay in the weeks the window is open, and that is what the first collection is for.

Objection to expect

Stated pride turns into conversation more often than into payment, and both proofs above come with an occasion attached: a fiesta week, or a neighbourhood a stranger has heard of. That is exactly why the window opens in the town's own fiesta week and closes on the first home match, instead of on a date of ours. Only the collection settles it: three designs for one town, the window open between those two days, and no run made until paid pre-orders cover it, so being wrong costs design time. Count the share of the club's own households that pays inside the window; likes and messages are not evidence.

Would enough clubs pay this price?

Passes The club's side is settled by the shape of the deal: it pays roughly what it pays for kit today and nothing more, so there is no new price for a president to say no to. The town's side was looked up rather than guessed.

Garment for garment in Spain today: a printed fiesta shirt is about seven to nineteen euros and a printed fiesta sweatshirt fifteen to thirty; a neighbourhood tee shirt from a Madrid shop is ten to twelve; a plain hooded sweatshirt from a high-street chain is eighteen to thirty; a club scarf is nine to twenty-five; a current-season replica shirt from a big club is a hundred to a hundred and fifty.

None of those are our numbers: they are what the shops charge, and what a person in the town compares against. The price has to clear the printed fiesta shirt, because this is designed clothing made once and numbered rather than a print job, and sit near the neighbourhood tee, because that is the same purchase made for a place.

A tee shirt in the twenties, a sweatshirt in the high thirties to mid forties.

Objection to expect

A fan pays for a big club's shirt because it is a big club, and a town of a few thousand is not that. True, which is why the price is nowhere near it: what it has to beat is the printed fiesta shirt and the neighbourhood tee, on design, on being made once, and on the club standing behind it. What shop prices cannot settle is whether the town's own families will pay more than a print shop charges for the same feeling; the window answers that and whether they want it at all, in one test.

Can we make it at that price and still earn?

Passes The strongest of the four, because the costly version of this idea was designed out. Each design is made once, in one ordinary run on the factory we already use, and only after enough people have paid in advance to cover it.

The shirts that are not for sale are made in the same run, so nothing needs a small rushed production and nothing needs a payer from outside. What is left over sits on a shelf in Madrid, not in a warehouse.

The campaign is Karim's time and six example films already exist; making a season's posts once, before the season, is what keeps it from becoming a job nobody has.

Objection to expect

A run still needs enough takers, and the number that decides it has never been written down: the smallest run our own factory will make of one design. Until Nader writes it down the go rule has a number missing on one side of it. Everything else in the arithmetic is here.

What would stop a club saying yes?

Passes The club risks nothing and we carry the risk, which is the easy part. The president sees three designs for his town and his page before he signs; the town buys or it does not; the factory runs one more design inside a normal batch. Two real hurdles and both have an answer.

Somebody at the club has to post every week, so that person is named at the first meeting and written into the deal, and a club that cannot name one is not signed.

And somebody has to count who was at fifteen matches, at a club that has no administration to speak of: that is counted on the club's own page, from a code on the matchday post a fan taps from the stand, which is a small page on a store we are building anyway.

Objection to expect

A club where nobody has ever bought a season ticket may not start because we printed a shirt, and the named person may post for a month and stop. The first is why the abono count is measured at the end of a season rather than promised. The second is why the deal says what the minimum is, one post a week, and why a club that goes quiet gets no second collection.

Price and cost

Price position relative to the market

This is the market the town's clothing really competes in, and it is not the kit trade: it is everything else a person in that town could put on instead. The town's piece sits above the cheapest fan items and below the big fashion brands, which is where the book puts an offer whose protection can be copied piece by piece. The commonest alternative of all is not on the chart, because it has no price: most people in the town buy nothing, and that is what the window is really up against.

Three things we make every idea pass

Clearly different. Everything that happens after the boxes arrive is flat on the floor for every supplier on the picture, and this line is the only one anywhere near the top of it.
Several problems at once. Nobody wears the club, the club cannot reach its own town, the club has no money of its own, and almost nobody buys a season ticket because nothing comes with one.
Simple for five clubs. If the discipline holds: one collection per club per season from the same templates, one campaign batch per club made before the season, one run per design after pre-orders, and the club's own named person posting.
- Five clubs' accounts run by us is not simple, and is not offered.

Does it contradict itself

One found The direction cuts what the club has to do down to almost nothing, and then depends on somebody at the club posting every week for nine months, at a club whose own page says it has no communications person. Both cannot be loose at once.

So the ask is made hard rather than hoped for: the person is named in the first meeting and written into the deal, the minimum is one post a week, and a club that will not name anybody is not signed. Nothing else in the package asks the club to run anything.

What it needs from us

Carolina designs the collection and the shirts that are not for sale; Karim makes the season's films, posts and games from templates he is already building; Nader brings the club, opens the window and sends the run to the factory. No new hire.

Extra ask, small. A cushion for the pieces of one club's first run that pre-orders do not cover, held in Madrid until they sell.

No run is made until pre-orders cover its cost, so this is not a gamble on a collection nobody wants.
A factory run comes in whole numbers, so the first run is made a little larger than the pre-orders that triggered it, and those extra pieces are paid for before they sell.

Where the idea came from, and what we would do next

The ideas that went into this direction

EKANA is not a shirt seller but the builder of the community around the club: the pride of the community is the product and the clothing is how it shows. This is the sentence the direction is built on.
The pitch when we walk in: we want to dress your team and gather your community around your club.
Rep your hood: people already wear where they are from, and it is never the club two streets away.
Filter the treatment down to your Preferente team the way Nike filters it down to Manchester United. The treatment exists; it has never been pointed here.
The advertisement the campaign is built on: kids watching a big team get its new shirts ask what if we go up, and the same kids at their own club ask what about us.
Going to the neighbourhood's young ones in their own words, with what if we go up.
A shirt earned by watching a number of matches, which commemorates what the person actually did, the way a finisher's medal does.
Every season ticket comes with a shirt, so that holding one finally means something.
The season-ticket shirt is there to help the club sell memberships it has never sold, which is why the low count today is the opportunity and not the obstacle.
Social templates so the town has something to start following.
Campaigns and small games made to be shared.
A semi-automated way to keep the town interested online: a season of posts made in one batch before the season starts, so nothing has to be invented weekly by a club that has nobody to invent it.
Clothing of the local club, cut and styled to be worn in the street and carrying the town's name, sold to fans and townspeople.
Customisation beyond the football kit, for the community and the parents, sold through the club so the club earns more, even if only on one side of the shirt.
One hundred, one run: the shirts that are not for sale are made once, one run per design, alongside the collection, which removes the need for small fast production.
What a streetwear drop actually runs on is a date, a closing day and a number, not design muscle. That is what the fiesta window and the numbered piece take from it.
A fiesta committee already dresses its people from a print shop in days, which shows the want is real and gives the collection the week it opens in.
Real Madrid runs this loop in-house and smaller professional clubs buy it from agencies: the mechanism exists at every size of club except this one.
Kids' sizes of every piece, because the kid who asks is a parent's purchase.
One dated, numbered collection a season, so old designs are never made again.
The event shirt made only for the people who signed up and paid first is the simplest shirt that is not for sale.
Clothing made only for a confirmed group tied to a real milestone, paid before production.
The store where the club never holds stock is how the clothing gets sold, not what makes this different.
The club's cut landing automatically on every sale.
The club's page and three shirt designs built before the first meeting, so the president sees his club finished before paying.
The fan, the season-ticket holder and the barrio kid are people nobody in this industry pitches to.
Turning small-club merchandise from a functional obligation into something people want is the flip this direction makes.
The shirts that have to be earned sell something the industry does not even price.
Building for the people around the club was the first of the three options the non-customer work opened.
EKANA as the engine of a club's community, made to run itself.
To beat a Real Madrid shirt the local piece has to be clothing first, buyable one at a time, and carry the name of the town it is from.
Keep the kit's functional standard and add the part the industry never sells.
Transactional becomes relational, catalogue becomes own, seasonal becomes year-round, obligatory becomes wanted, invisible becomes worn in the street.
Seeing beats numbers for a club president, which is why he sees three designs before he signs.

Ideas it leaves out, and why

A local business sponsoring the shirts that are not for sale, or the campaign. Taken out of the design on 11 September, 2026. It made the half of this direction that is hardest to copy depend on a business nobody has ever asked, which is the same objection Karim raised about another direction. Those shirts now ride in the collection's own run and need nobody. A sponsor remains something the club can sell for itself, and it is not our money and not our promise.
Paid ads pointing at the community around the club. Nobody has ad money, and an ad for a feeling nobody can buy yet is test material rather than a launch; the campaign travels through the families and the schoolyard instead.
The basketball club and the other clubs of the same neighbourhood in similar shirts. A later stage, once one town's collection has sold, and Karim parked it himself: the centre of it is the barrio rather than the club, which is a different idea.
Extending to the whole neighbourhood before one club has worked. It waits until one town's collection has sold.
A former-players day with its own shirt. Cheap, and it is out of the first story because nobody has checked whether any of these clubs has an active former-players network worth dressing.
The bar sells the collection on match day for a cut. Later, once a collection exists and a bar owner has agreed to sell and account for stock. It is also the one part of the idea that would put a box back in somebody's living room.
A sticker album of the club's kids, sold in packs like a World Cup album. Parked by Karim and Nader themselves, not refused by us: whether it belongs in the package was left for later. What it would need is written consent from every parent for photographs of minors and a sticker drawn per child.
A branded EKANA gym and street collection alongside the club's. It puts our name on the shirt, and this direction puts the town's name on the shirt. It belongs to what EKANA sells under its own name, which is a different question from what a club buys.
A school visit with the shirt before registration opens. Cheap and later; it belongs to the club's own registration drive once the collection exists.
A visible club being easier for a town hall to support. Unverified, and not worth an hour before a fact exists.
The university model: the campus store, the alumni office, the institution that looks like it matters. A way of explaining the mechanism, not a thing to build.
Rebuilding the club's website and redrawing its badge. That is direction A. Whether the two are one idea or two is still open; they are kept apart here so each can be judged on its own, and the same build would not be paid for twice.

What we would test with real clubs before committing

One town, three designs, one window

Who: The people of one town, through a club Nader already talks to.
What we ask: Design three street pieces for that town, open the window on the club's page in the week of the town's fiestas, close it on the first home match, and count who paid.
When: Before any run is sent to the factory.
What we would learn: Paid pre-orders covering the smallest run our factory will make of one design. Below that the run is not made. If covering it needs much more than a third of the club's own households, the collection is too big and gets cut rather than run again. Likes and messages count for nothing.

One film, one town

Who: The same club's community.
What we ask: Post the what-about-us film on the club's channels during the window and count the reactions and the shares in a week.
When: The week the window opens.
What we would learn: Shares by people who are not the players' parents.

Who posts, and what happens when they stop

Who: The first club that signs.
What we ask: Name, in the first meeting, the person who will send out the campaign, and write the minimum into the deal: one post a week, all season.
When: At the signing meeting.
What we would learn: A named person and the minimum in the deal, posts appearing in the first month, and no second collection for a club that goes quiet.

Does the shirt sell season tickets

Who: The first club that signs, and the people of its town.
What we ask: Count what the club sold in season tickets last year, which will be close to nothing, put the shirt behind this year's, and count again at the end of the season.
When: Across the first full season with one club.
What we would learn: More season tickets sold than last year, bought by people who are not already parents of players. The same number, or a handful bought by the usual families, means the shirt did not do it.