SPORTS DIRECT
BROKEN BUT BETTER
BRIEF
Here’s a brief that’s as traditional as they come, the consumer PR agency’s brief since the dawn of time: please, please can you just help us make people think our brand is cool?
How do you get a brand like Sports Direct into the coolest of tastemaker titles like Complex, HypeBeast and HighSnobiety, just in time for the Euros?
IDEA
Being culturally connected is one of the most underrated skills in PR. Sometimes the answer to a brief is simply knowing the single individual who sits at the centre of a client’s Venn diagram.
In this instance, that individual was Mr. Rav Matharu, AKA “Clothsurgeon”. Not only is he one of the coolest streetwear designers working in London today, he’s also a former professional footballer.
Here’s Rav: “To become a professional footballer was my dream from the age of seven. I had a good run at it, but then at 19, that ambition came to a halt. Not being able to play professionally long-term meant I needed to divert my passion elsewhere. I was at a loss until I found my way into streetwear and tailoring.”
We partnered with Clothsurgeon to produce an entire fashion range and worked with him to develop the narrative to sit behind the suite of products. His creative process opened up some old wounds, which made for an incredibly compelling story to accompany the collection.
“The collection was inspired by my shattered dream to reach the top of the game. It’s that merging of a broken past and brighter future that informed my interpretation of the collection and sparked the design process which uses patchworked, vintage fabrics from old kits, stitched and rebuilt back together.”
Conceptually, the idea of stitching distressed and faded vintage tracksuits back together formed the perfect analogy for Rav’s journey from pro footballer to fashion designer.
Nice, right? Broken but better.
RESULTS
We were able to use the campaign to secure splash after splash on the tastemaker hype sites that we were so keen to be on (Hypebeast, Versus, Wonderland, Complex. Total reach: 216M).
And, a little PR agency had an idea that resulted in a fashion collection for the UK’s largest sports retailer. Not a jokey, limited run, PR product but a super-premium product sold across Sport Direct’s retail landscape. And that really doesn’t happen very often. If an advertising agency had done it, you’d never hear the end of it.
