The Kit-industrial Complex: Part 2
Meet the companies driving North America's explosion of wildly creative soccer jerseys.
This is the second installment of my reporting on the jersey subculture in American soccer. You can read the first part here.
Playing in an amateur soccer league in Philadelphia after his college career at Skidmore ended, Robby Smukler looked around and had a realization: Everybody looked terrible. And that struck him as strange. Why did they look terrible when not looking terrible was also an attainable option?
It seemed to him that adult amateur soccer was a social exercise as much as a sporting one, a way of keeping or making friends as adulthood consumed the rest of life. A men’s league team was an identity, a tribal kind of thing. Yet that identity wasn’t reflected by insipid, off-the-rack uniforms—or worse, professional teams’ pricey replica uniforms with off-brand numbers printed on the back.
Smukler had been designing and making soccer jerseys as a hobby. It dawned on him that the amateur game might provide him with a market for them.
As a child, Smukler would sketch sports uniforms during class. When he played the Madden NFL video game, he would create 32 fake teams just so he could design new logos and jerseys for all of them. Now, as a college graduate with a job as a paralegal consultant in the medical marijuana business and some money in his pocket, he would pay a company to make his designs come to life. Then he would post them on Instagram. A friend warned Smukler that his habit of putting real sponsor logos on his fake jerseys might get him into legal trouble and that he ought to incorporate to protect himself.
So that’s what Smukler did. He called his company Icarus FC and started selling custom jerseys with personalized badges to amateur teams, attracting clients primarily through social media. Never mind that he was an international affairs major at Skidmore—a school with soccer jerseys Smukler describes as “boring… but I was just happy to have a jersey”—with no design background whatsoever.
He made his first sale in March 2018. He quit his job and went full-time in 2019. Today, Icarus FC has designed and produced the jerseys of more than 600 soccer teams, almost all of them amateurs. “The majority of our clients is practicing once a week,” Smukler says. Icarus also makes concept kits, like the popular Mesopotamian Premier League Collection consisting of entirely fictional “historical” teams like Kingdom of Kush Football Club.
Smukler, who is now 28, has hired a full-time employee and several part-timers. He moved the business from his apartment to a warehouse. By selling uniforms at around $55 each – cheaper than the replica jersey of a professional team but more than a mass-produced, template uniform – Icarus grossed $350,000 in 2019 and is on pace to generate well over $600,000 this year.
Icarus FC makes uniforms that speak to, and of, the people who wear them. It injects identity into even the lowest-level team, bringing individualism to the collective. Smukler made a cow-hide patterned uniform for an English team called FC Roast with a cow in its logo. Whether wittingly or on instinct, Icarus tapped into a swelling appetite for bespoke soccer apparel. It caters to a market that wants its uniforms to be, well, less uniform.
“In a traditional sense, a kit is how you identify yourself from an opponent,” Smukler says. “There’s now a realization that they don’t have to do the old-school thing and go to a soccer shop, pick out uniforms for the team—there’s no joy in that. Now teams, together, are building this kit that’s gonna reflect their little group, with designs flying around in group texts. They just want something fun to play in on Sundays.”
Before it made Providence City FC’s popular donut and shark kits, and before it designed and supplied those of the New York Cosmos and several other professional teams, including one in the Netherlands, Toronto-based company Iniaria found a gap in the market.
Saverio Michielli saw that supplying off-the-rack kits to local soccer teams didn’t always make sense for retailers. Your neighborhood soccer shop had to speculate how many uniforms it might sell that season because the major sportswear brands required many months of lead time for their orders. And the shops would have to keep lots of designs and in stock in different sizes, because a shortfall of one jersey, pair of shorts or socks might cost them the sale to an entire team. That left shops stuck with lots of unsold inventory—leftover uniforms with last year’s already-dated designs. Meanwhile, the margins on those uniforms got thinner and the quality worse as the business became commoditized—the cheapest mass-market uniforms have dropped in price from about $30 per player two decades ago to less than $15 today.
Michielli realized that a custom, made-to-order business with higher-quality uniforms and a much shorter turnaround time could find a place in that market. So in 1999, he started Inaria.
After branching out into hockey uniforms as well, Bauer acquired the company in 2012. But in 2017, Michielli and Emily Montgomery bought the business back and turned it into a boutique designer and producer of bespoke soccer uniforms, bringing the entire process in-house. “It’s kind of like you’re going to the restaurant where they’re also the farmer,” Montgomery explains.
Since then, Inaria has thrived by designing the uniforms of several minor league teams, scores of amateur and youth teams, and a line of concept kits. Today, the company is housed in a 26,000-feet facility on the northern edge of Toronto—a white, airy, industrial-looking showroom with 26-foot ceilings and signature jerseys suspended from racks above little patches of artificial turf. In the back, there’s a 20,000-foot warehouse crammed to the ceilings with boxes containing uniforms.
Since taking its current form in 2017, Inaria has mushroomed to over $5 million in annual revenue and 30 full-time employees as it equips more than 100,000 soccer players a year.
An evolving jersey industry—which may be bending away being dominated by the bigtime sporting goods manufacturers—has been driven by a desire by teams to innovate stylistically. “Things are changing and have opened up the door a lot more for boutique brands,” Montgomery says from a sleek conference room. “It’s not just pro clubs. You don’t necessarily have to have 10,000 fans in your stadium to sell jerseys. In fact, that doesn’t in any way guarantee that you will. It’s the combination of good design and interesting jerseys but also the engagement on the digital side—that is huge. Some of our men’s league teams have outsold some of our pro teams. If you do it right, it shows.”
Clubs that build strong online brands around jerseys bring an attractive proposition to potential sponsors. As an ambitious new soccer team, there’s really no choice but to be on top of your kit game. “I think it’s your biggest tool,” Montgomery says.
Absent a uniform sponsorship with a Nike, Adidas or Puma, that leaves companies like Inaria as the conduit to sartorial relevance.
Inaria has found that this even extends to the youth ranks, discovering another fertile market for its custom designs in youth clubs with as many as 10,000 players. Because the youth level is not immune from this new visual emphasis. “There’s been a bigger focus on identity and branding,” Montgomery says.
North American parents spend a lot of money on competitive youth soccer. They expect all aspects of this high-end experience to be of professional grade. That now includes the uniforms. A team that wants to compete for the best youth players, and the premium playing fees attendant to it, needs to look the part with a distinctive, high-quality uniform.
The barriers to entry to the jersey manufacturing business are amazingly low.
Michael Schafer began producing shirts and hats inspired by the patterns and designs of Europe’s legacy clubs because he didn’t particularly like the ones that were already on the market.
Before long, he connected with Gray’s Lake FC, a faux-club—akin to Asbury Park FC—also based in Des Moines. The club, which didn’t yet field a team, wanted to have kits made inspired by the Loch Ness Monster. So Olive & York found a designer and got into the kit game.
The Gray’s Lake jerseys got a lot of buzz on Twitter, which brought Olive & York work from a dozen or so other teams. It has also made kits for supporters’ groups and special, limited-edition jerseys for non-profits and fundraisers. The company is now working on a project with a fully professional team.
“I think teams and supporters’ groups come to us because we can provide a level of creativity and responsiveness that they can't get from traditional manufacturers,” Schafer says. “We like to provide teams and groups a few different ideas at first, usually one or two traditional ones and then one or two crazy, out-of-the-box, bold ideas.”
The teams invariably pick from the latter.
The rapid rise of young companies like Icarus FC and Olive & York, and more established ones like Inaria is fueled by social media. Olive & York does its work almost entirely online. “Oftentimes the only non-digital part is when the jerseys actually get manufactured,” Schafer says.
Biscayne Bay SC, a team in Miami, fell in love with a concept for a new jersey by a designer in South Africa and then reached out to Olive & York in Des Moines to have it made. Soon enough, the jersey were a real thing. It didn’t much matter that the designer, client and makers of the kit were thousands of miles apart.
Because in this business, all that really counts is that the design is good.
Soccer miscellany:
with the big manufacturers utilizing templates as much as possible, there is a huge gap for these smaller companies to flourish in. Happy to see it.