The exercises and what came out

The three tiers of non-customers

What the tool is

Not everyone who could buy custom kit is buying it. This tool sorts everyone who is not buying into three groups, by how far they are from buying: people who buy the least they can and would leave if something easier came along; people who know the offer exists and have chosen something else; and people nobody in the industry has ever thought to sell to at all.

The point is to find what those groups have in common, not what makes them different. That is usually where new demand hides. On the picture below, the rings measure distance from buying, not how many people are in each group: the outer ring is the group furthest from ever buying, and it is not the largest.

What we did

• We asked the question about the whole teamwear industry, brands, shops and specialists together, never about EKANA on its own. Who does the industry as a whole fail to sell to?
• Two outside research reports gave the wider numbers; Nader's own experience of who says no, and why, gave the rest.
• We did not talk to any of these groups directly.

What came out

Those who buy only because they must:

• Small clubs that shop for the cheapest deal every season.
• The roughly two thousand amateur teams playing in Madrid's municipal leagues, each one run by a single volunteer on his own phone.
• What keeps them reluctant: minimums, weeks of waiting, all the admin landing on one person, and paying for kit they have never seen finished.

Those who know a supplier exists and go elsewhere:

• Five-a-side and veterans' teams, company teams, local societies, padel and running groups.
• They end up at a copy shop, or buy nothing that matches.
• A proper kit feels too formal, too slow and too expensive for a group that size.

Those nobody has ever offered anything:

• The people around a club: fans, families beyond what they are obliged to buy, former players, season-ticket holders, the neighbourhood's kids who do not yet play.
• Groups with a strong identity outside sport altogether: hiking clubs, cycling groups, bands, scout troops.
• The industry has only ever sold "a kit" to registered clubs, so nobody has ever asked these people what they would want.

What all three share:

• They want clothing that says who they are, without the formality, the minimums, the waiting and the admin that a proper team kit carries.

Three ways to go, and the directions were built from them:

• Build for the people around a club, where the biggest unmet pain and the biggest unexplored group turned out to be the same people.
• Build for the reluctant and grudging buyers: a bigger group, but one where several suppliers already compete directly.
• Build for both, since both need the same underlying change: kit in small quantities, without today's admin.