Direction D
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 Yes, and the reasoning is a chain rather than a hope. One club has worn the same design three seasons running, academies rarely change design and already have their fabric bought and held, multi-year deals are negotiated club by club, and at renewal both sides try to hold the same quote for the same design.
A fixed design surviving several seasons is not a foreign idea being introduced here: it is what these clubs already do quietly, without a name, a term or a price.
The club is being asked to formalise what its peers already do, and its two recorded kit problems, buying too much at the start and too little at the end, stop existing rather than being managed. The estimate is a yes on one condition, that he is proud of the design he is committing to.
Objection to expect
Design is not a commodity to these presidents, and the record proves it: one club wants its town's church sublimated onto the shirt. A pitch that sells permanence as relief from admin, saying nothing about what the club still gets to choose, misreads its own best evidence. So the changing layer is part of the offer from the first sentence: the base design is in the cloth and stays, the sponsor's mark and the names and numbers are pressed on and change every year, and a genuine redesign can still be bought at a price written into the deal. What nobody has done is ask a real president the question in Spanish in the actual words. There is a clean tell, and it costs one conversation: if he asks what discount he gets for giving up a redesign, he heard a restriction; if he asks how long we will hold his cloth, he heard a commitment.
Would enough clubs pay this price?
Passes The price does not move, so the question is not whether a club will pay more but whether the same price buying a strictly better property moves one. On EKANA's own record price is not what decides at this level: the one deal recorded as lost went to a bid nearly twice EKANA's, and the conclusion drawn at the time was that price was not the barrier.
What decided it was an answer to a question about getting more shirts quickly, which is the exact factor this line raises furthest.
Objection to expect
A president might try to price the sacrifice and ask for a discount in exchange for the fixed design. The answer is that there is no discount, because the price is already the cheapest custom kit he can buy and the commitment is what pays for holding his cloth. If he insists, he has told us he heard a restriction rather than a commitment, and that is worth knowing in the first meeting.
Can we make it at that price and still earn?
Passes On cost, yes, and the reasoning is short. Holding a club's fabric is not new money: a specific fabric already carries a minimum bigger than one club's order, we already absorb it, and the leftover already sits in our own store, worth nothing because the design it belongs to is going to die.
This makes that same purchase worth five years instead of one. Against it we stop paying for a tech pack, a sample round, new artwork and a fresh dye lot at every design change.
Objection to expect
The genuinely open half is not the cost, it is the shape of the revenue, and it is arithmetic rather than a mystery. A design change forces a whole club to buy again at once, and that spike is given up. What comes instead is a smaller flow every year, from a club that has stopped shopping, that nobody else is competing for. Whether that trade is positive is a calculation Nader can do from records he already holds: how much cloth a club's design consumes across its life, what a repeat run costs against a fresh one, and what a club's real annual replacement volume looks like once growth, turnover and late registrations are counted rather than the design change. It has never been worked out because nobody has ever had a reason to ask.
What would stop a club saying yes?
Passes Three real objections, each answered in the deal rather than in the pitch. A new president wants his own mark: a genuine redesign is still possible and costs what it costs, a full re-buy by every family, which is what it costs today invisibly; this stops charging for it silently rather than forbidding it.
The sponsor changes: what is sublimated is in the cloth and permanent, what is pressed on is not, so a Madrid print shop changes the sponsor and the names in a day, and the permanent part of the shirt is smaller than the word permanent implies.
A colour clash or a federation rule forces a change: the commitment is to a design, not one shirt, and the alternate is agreed at the same time as the first.
Objection to expect
The hurdle that is genuinely ours, not the club's. This direction needs a maintained record of what is in storage and a reorder trigger that works, and both are broken today: nobody knows what is in the store to draw on, and an order can stall on a hang tag. A promise to hold a club's cloth for five years is only as good as the shelf it sits on. That is the real price of this direction and it is paid at home.
Price and cost
Price position relative to the market
Three things we make every idea pass
- Clearly different. For one reason rather than several.
- Every other offer here is more of everything; this is the only one that asks a club to give something up, and what it takes away is a practice every supplier group follows identically.
- Any rival can advertise unlimited replenishment, and two in Madrid do.
- Holding a club's cloth for years is the part a rival would have to want.
- Several problems at once. And all from one cause.
- Buying too much in a design's first year and too little in its last, a top-up that does not match, the material wait, the dyeing wait behind it, and a fabric minimum bigger than the order it was bought for.
- Every one exists because the design has an end date.
- Simple for five clubs. On the offer; the risk is what it needs from us.
- One product, no website to build, no channel to run, no sponsorship to sell, no partner to find: five clubs is five designs made once and five lots of cloth on a shelf.
- What it does need is a maintained record of what is in the store and a reorder trigger that works, and both are recorded as broken today.
- That is ours to fix, and the first thing to do if this wins.
Does it contradict itself
One found It is in the tagline. The shirt is sold as the thing that does not change, and the deal then lets the sponsor's mark and the names change every year and a full redesign be bought outright. Both cannot stand as written: either the headline promises less than it sounds like, or the flexibility is hidden until a president finds it.
The resolution here is to say it in the pitch, at the first meeting, rather than keep it as an answer to an objection, because presidents care about their own design enough that hiding the freedom they do get would cost more trust than the simpler sentence saves. Nothing else contradicts.
What it needs from us
- Nader does the fabric arithmetic from records he already holds, buys and holds each club's cloth, and fixes the storage record and the reorder trigger, without which this cannot run.
- Karim does the design, which goes up rather than down here, and writes the rule on what is sublimated and what is pressed.
- Carolina builds one tech pack made to be repeated rather than superseded.
- No new hire, no new supplier, no new capability.
Where the idea came from, and what we would do next
The ideas that went into this direction
- In the last year before a design changes, clubs deliberately reorder only a small amount so they are not left with unsold stock. Remove the design's end date and that behaviour has nothing to protect against.
- Contracts spanning more than one season are already standard at this level, so a commitment to a design is a formal version of something presidents already sign.
- Clubs mostly already know how much to order, with one exception: late registrations cause a shortfall, usually in the final year before a design changes. That shortfall is exactly what held cloth covers.
- Ordering is not the pain; what happens to kit afterwards is, and the club's leftover stock and the family's own kit are two different problems. A design that does not die answers both without a take-back scheme.
- Several lower-tier clubs specifically want their own design, such as a town landmark sublimated onto the shirt. That is the reason the design work goes up here and the reason permanence has to be sold honestly.
- Money is moving from one large seasonal order to many small ones, which makes minimums and over-ordering stop making sense. Cloth bought once and drawn down is a way of serving small orders without a new production model.
- Fewer styles and colours on the standard templates, which is what a catalogue narrow enough to be repeated for years actually means.
- A narrower catalogue tied to holding stock, taken here as holding cloth rather than finished garments.
- EKANA sits just below the specialists on almost every factor and only cheaper, which is where price wars happen. This direction moves off that line by going down on the factors it currently shares with them.
- Kit tears in normal play and suppliers already replace it free of charge. On held cloth that replacement stops being a small rushed order.
Ideas it leaves out, and why
- Blank garments held in a few styles and colours, printed per order as they come in. This direction holds cloth, not finished garments, and the design still goes into the fabric at the factory. Blank stock has been rejected once on an estimate and never costed properly, and nothing here needs it to be true.
- Producing from blank stock kept locally and printed per order, to remove over-ordering, the replacement wait and the boxes of unsold kit at once. It answers the same pains with a production model EKANA does not have. Holding a club's cloth answers them with the model EKANA already runs for academies.
- Taking kit back at the end of the season and recycling it for a discount on the next order. It rests on two unverified things, whether a Spanish recycler pays or charges, and collecting garments from hundreds of homes. A design that does not die makes the hand-me-down work instead, which needs nothing from anybody.
- Packs made up per child and delivered on one agreed day, with families ordering and paying online by a deadline. It fixes one season. This fixes the years, and mixing the two would put two offers in one deal.
- A rebuilt website for the club, delivered inside the kit deal. Nothing about how the club looks changes here, and nothing in this deal pays for it.
- Clothing cut and styled for the street, carrying the town's name, sold to fans and townspeople. A different buyer and a different market. This sells less, to the squad, for longer.
- Special shirts made once, a hundred of a design, in a single ordinary run. It is a way of making something scarce. This direction is built on the opposite, a garment that is always available.
- Extending the professional-kit treatment down to the youngest teams, across more garment types. More garment types is more variety, and this direction goes the other way: only what can be repeated for years.
- EKANA runs the club's online shop and the club's cut lands automatically. A top-up here is a draw against cloth we hold, not a storefront. Every direction could add a shop and none would be different for it.
- A code on the kit that ties match footage and player data to the shirt. It depends on an outside platform nobody has approached, and it adds a reason for the shirt to be reissued, which is the thing this direction removes.
What we would test with real clubs before committing
The fabric arithmetic
- Who
- Nader, from records he already holds. No club involved.
- What we ask
- Work out how much cloth a club's design consumes across its life, what a repeat run costs against a fresh one, and what a club's real annual replacement volume is once growth, squad turnover and late registrations are counted rather than the design change.
- When
- Now. Nothing else should be tested first, because an unpriced version of this would tell the family nothing.
- What we would learn
- The annual flow from a club that has stopped shopping is worth more than the spike a design change forces. If it is not, the direction is wrong on its own terms and nobody has to talk to a club to find out.
One academy, this autumn
- Who
- An academy, and one is already an EKANA customer.
- What we ask
- Offer the deal as it stands: a design fixed for a stated number of years, cloth bought and held, top-ups at the same quote, the sponsor and the names pressed on and changeable.
- When
- This autumn. Academies are available all year, so this is the only direction on the table whose first real test does not have to wait for the November window.
- What we would learn
- It signs a term that names the design as fixed and the cloth as held. Academies already rarely change design, so a no here is a serious no.
One president, at his contract expiry
- Who
- One club president, inside the window when his current supplier contract runs out.
- What we ask
- Put the offer in front of him in Spanish, in the actual words: this design does not change for the years we agree.
- When
- Clubs start listening around the end of November and deals close by late March.
- What we would learn
- Which question he asks back. If he asks what discount he gets for giving up a redesign, he heard a restriction and the pitch is wrong. If he asks how long we will hold his cloth, he heard a commitment.