CASE STUDY
Castore:
The Brand That Outran Its Own Legs
STRATEGY & INNOVATION - MARCH 2026
Two brothers who were not good enough to play professional sport built a billion-pound sportswear company in eight years. Castore grew revenue from one million to 190 million pounds in six years, signed partnerships with Red Bull Racing, McLaren, Newcastle United, and England Cricket, acquired Belstaff, and secured INEOS as a strategic investor. The company also lost six major football kit deals, shipped jerseys without crests, produced shirts that ripped on live television, and became the most complained-about kit supplier in the Premier League. Every fact in both of those sentences is true at the same time. That is the case study.
Chapter 01
Brand & Reputation Management
Talk With Clarity
Castore's brand promise is three words: Better Never Stops. The problem is that the market heard those words and held the company to them, which is exactly what a brand promise is supposed to do and exactly what Castore was not ready for.
Tom and Phil Beahon founded the company in 2015 in Liverpool after leaving careers as a footballer at Tranmere Rovers and a cricketer in the Lancashire leagues. They had no fashion experience, no contacts, and no outside investment. They remortgaged their parents' home. They lived on a thousand pounds a month. They packed boxes late into the night. Then they gifted product to influencers, got stocked at Mr Porter and Harrods, and signed Andy Murray as both ambassador and shareholder in 2019. Within four years of founding, Castore had established itself as a premium British challenger to Nike and Adidas with a clear voice, a clean aesthetic, and an aspirational positioning built on the founders' authentic sporting pedigree.
The reputation crisis that followed was a direct consequence of the brand voice working too well. When you tell the world your product never stops getting better, and then Saša Kalajdzic's Wolves shirt rips at the seam on the pitch, and Piero Hincapie's Bayer Leverkusen crest peels off during a match, and Aston Villa players complain that the kit absorbs sweat until it weighs them down, the brand promise becomes the prosecution's opening argument. Castore did not have a communications problem. They had a promise-to-delivery gap that no amount of messaging could close.
Tom Beahon's public response was revealing. He told Prolific North that Nike and Adidas face identical challenges but challenger brands get judged by a different standard. That statement is both true and strategically irrelevant. The consumer does not grade on a curve. The brand said better never stops. The product stopped.
The mistake most brands make is assuming that a strong brand voice protects you during a crisis. A strong brand voice amplifies a crisis. The sharper your positioning, the more visible your failures become against it. Castore's clarity was a gift when the product delivered. It became a weapon when the product failed.
DWI Tool: The Promise Pressure Test. Write your brand promise on a wall. Beneath it, list the three most common customer complaints from the last twelve months. If any complaint directly contradicts the promise, the promise is doing more damage than silence. Either fix the delivery or rewrite the promise. There is no third option.
Chapter 02
Company Culture & Internal Communication
Build From Within
The Beahon brothers moved Castore's headquarters from Liverpool to Manchester in 2021, signing a thirteen-year lease on a five-floor building at One Central Street. The move was announced alongside a commitment to create 300 new jobs. The building would house an innovation hub, product development studio, content studio, and in-house store concept. By 2025 the company had over 500 employees across five continents.
This was a deliberate act of cultural architecture. Phil Beahon explained that Manchester's concentration of sport, technology, fashion, and creative talent made it the right long-term home. The city is home to two of the world's biggest football clubs, a legacy textile industry, and a tech startup ecosystem. Castore was positioning itself inside a cultural ecosystem that would reinforce its identity every day simply through proximity.
The internal philosophy of Better Never Stops functioned differently inside the building than it did outside. Externally, it was aspirational positioning. Internally, it became an operational demand that justified relentless pace. The company scaled from roughly 30 people to 500 in four years while simultaneously managing partnerships with Red Bull Racing, McLaren, Newcastle United, England Cricket, Rangers, and a dozen other organisations across football, motorsport, rugby, and tennis. That velocity explains both the growth and the quality failures. The culture rewarded speed. The market punished shortcuts.
Tom Beahon described leadership as something you learn on the job, acknowledging the difficulty of transitioning from knowing every employee by name to managing an international workforce. That honesty matters. The internal culture of a founder-led company either matures alongside the company or cracks under the weight of its own ambition. Castore experienced both simultaneously.
The mistake is confusing a founding philosophy with an operating culture. Better Never Stops is a beautiful founding story. It is a dangerous operating principle if it means the team never pauses long enough to fix what is broken before launching what is next.
DWI Tool: The Velocity Audit. Count the number of new partnerships, products, or initiatives your organisation launched in the last twelve months. Now count the number of existing operations that received a quality review in the same period. If launches outnumber reviews by more than two to one, your culture values novelty over integrity. That ratio will eventually become visible to your customers.
Chapter 03
Customer Experience
Design the Experience
Castore built its customer experience model on a premise that was genuinely innovative: a digital-first, direct-to-consumer approach that would give the company faster feedback loops, more consumer data, and higher margins than the wholesale-dependent model used by traditional sportswear brands. By 2023, roughly 80 percent of sales came through online platforms. The company took over Newcastle United's e-commerce operations entirely, redesigning the club's online store and launching a wider merchandise range. This was not a kit deal. It was a retail infrastructure takeover.
The ambition was correct. The execution was catastrophic in specific, highly visible ways. Newcastle fans received home jerseys without the main sponsor printed on them. Rangers supporters reported pre-orders that never arrived, jerseys without club crests, and prints that disintegrated after a few washes. The Telegraph reported that Newcastle received so many complaints about customer service and delivery delays that the club's management concluded the partnership reflected badly on them. Staff privately regretted signing the 30-million-pound deal.
The lesson embedded in this wreckage is precise. Castore understood that controlling the customer experience end to end was the strategic advantage. They were right. Owning the e-commerce layer, the product design, and the retail presentation gave them a structural advantage over brands that hand a generic template to every club. The problem was that owning the experience also means owning every failure. When Nike ships a flawed product, the club blames Nike and the consumer blames Nike. When Castore ships a flawed product through a store they designed and operate, the failure is indivisible from the brand.
The retail expansion continued regardless: 25 new sites opened in a single year, concept stores in Dublin and Dubai, an in-house store at the Manchester headquarters. The physical footprint was growing at the same pace as the digital complaints. Castore was building beautiful rooms while the plumbing leaked.
The mistake is scaling a customer experience before the experience is reliable. A direct-to-consumer model is only an advantage if the consumer's experience is worth repeating. If it is not, you have simply removed every intermediary who might have absorbed the blame.
DWI Tool: The Returns Conversation. Pull the last one hundred customer service interactions from your primary sales channel. Read them as if each one is a brand review, because it is. The tone, speed, and resolution quality of those conversations is your actual customer experience. Everything else is a showroom.
Chapter 04
Strategy & Innovation
Think Beyond Now
The Beahon brothers identified something that the established sportswear giants had allowed to calcify: mid-tier and smaller sports clubs felt neglected by Nike, Adidas, and Puma. The big brands prioritised their marquee partnerships and treated secondary clubs as template exercises, offering generic designs with a different badge stitched on. Castore positioned itself as the premium alternative that would give these clubs the attention, bespoke design, and commercial partnership they could not get from the industry leaders.
This gap in the market was real, and the strategy that exploited it was brilliant in conception. Rangers, the first football deal in 2020, was worth 25 million pounds over five years.
Newcastle followed in 2021. Then McLaren. Then Red Bull Racing. Then England Cricket on a ten-year, 25-million-pound agreement. Then Aston Villa, Sevilla, Bayer Leverkusen, Wolves, Feyenoord, the Republic of Ireland national team. The partnership portfolio accumulated at a speed that would have been remarkable for an established brand. For a company less than a decade old with fewer than 500 employees, it was staggering.
The innovation was genuinely present in the product philosophy. The founders argued that Nike, Adidas, and Puma had converged on essentially identical fabrics sourced from the same Far Eastern suppliers, differentiated only by logo. Castore claimed to work directly with factories to engineer fabrics that were measurably lighter, more technical, and more performance-oriented. The AMC line with Andy Murray embodied this approach. The ECB partnership included a commitment to produce the first completely recyclable sports collection using natural fabrics.
The strategic innovation extended to commercial structure. Castore did not merely supply kits. They embedded themselves in clubs' commercial operations, managing e-commerce, broadening merchandise ranges, and sharing revenue in ways that aligned the brand's growth with the club's commercial performance. This was a genuine structural innovation in the sports partnership model.
The error was believing that strategic innovation could outrun operational capacity. The idea was never wrong. The infrastructure was simply never given time to mature before the next deal was signed. When you acquire the Umbro professional licence for key European markets and then use it to quietly continue supplying Rangers under a more reputable brand name, the market reads the manoeuvre correctly. Innovation cannot replace reliability. It can only amplify it.
DWI Tool: The Capacity Ceiling. Before signing any new partnership or launching any new product, ask one question: can our current operations deliver this at the quality level our brand promises? If the answer requires the word "should" or "probably," the answer is no. Sign the deal six months later, after the infrastructure exists.
Chapter 05
Grow On Purpose
Tom Beahon was 25 when he co-founded Castore. Phil was 22. Their first qualification was failure: Tom was good enough to play youth football at Tranmere Rovers and attend the Glenn Hoddle Academy in Spain but not good enough to become a professional. Phil played semi-professional cricket for Cheshire and Lancashire but reached the same ceiling. They translated that experience of being nearly good enough into a brand built for people who take performance seriously regardless of whether they compete professionally.
After leaving sport, both brothers moved to London and took finance jobs specifically to learn how to raise capital. Tom worked at Lloyds Bank. Phil worked at Deloitte. They applied for two separate 20,000-pound startup loans from Virgin StartUp. The entire founding sequence was a deliberate programme of self-development disguised as career decisions. Every move was an investment in a capability they knew they would need later.
The talent strategy as Castore scaled reflected the founders' own trajectory: find people whose skills were forged in adjacent industries and give them room to operate. The Manchester headquarters was designed to attract talent from the overlapping ecosystems of sport, tech, fashion, and retail that converge in the city. The innovation hub and content studio were not amenities. They were recruitment tools, physical signals that creative and technical talent would have the space and resources to do serious work.
Andy Murray's role in the company extended beyond endorsement. As a shareholder and collaborator on the AMC product line, Murray brought the perspective of an elite athlete who understood exactly what performance apparel needed to do. The partnership model with Murray became a template: athletes as co-creators with equity stakes, not interchangeable billboard faces.
The mistake in talent development that Castore illustrates is the assumption that the founders' learning speed can be replicated across an organisation of 500 people. Tom and Phil Beahon grew through controlled failure. They had time to pack boxes, learn from bad fabric, iterate on design. The organisation they built did not always give its people that same latitude. When you hire 300 people in two years while simultaneously onboarding a dozen major sports partnerships, the new arrivals inherit the pace without the context. They execute without understanding why the brand exists in the first place.
DWI Tool: The Founder's Shadow. Ask every employee hired in the last twelve months to describe the company's founding story in their own words. If fewer than half can do it accurately, the organisation has scaled faster than its culture. Slow down the hiring and speed up the storytelling.
Chapter 06
Workflow & Performance Optimisation
Work Smarter, Not Louder
The operational model Castore built was designed for a company that did not yet exist. The direct-to-consumer infrastructure, the club e-commerce takeovers, the in-house design and innovation studio, the multi-sport partnership management across football, motorsport, cricket, rugby, and tennis: this was the architecture of a mature global sportswear company operated by a startup that had been selling products for barely five years.
The ambition was the correct one. Controlling the entire value chain from fabric development through design, production, digital retail, and fulfilment gives a brand structural advantages that wholesale-dependent competitors cannot match. The feedback loop is tighter. The margins are higher. The data is richer. The brand expression is more consistent. Every strategic argument for this model is sound.
The execution gap manifested in the operational details that consumers experience directly. Delivery delays. Missing design elements on shipped products. Quality control failures visible during televised matches. Supply chain breakdowns that meant fans could not purchase the kit they wanted during the window when their enthusiasm was highest. Each of these failures was an operational workflow problem, not a strategic one. The strategy was right. The system behind it was not ready.
Castore's workflow challenge is the classic scaling trap: the processes that work beautifully at a small scale actively break at a larger one. When Tom Beahon is personally reviewing product quality, quality is excellent. When quality review is distributed across multiple factories, multiple sport verticals, and multiple markets simultaneously, the standards fragment. The company acknowledged this. Beahon described the Rangers launch as a moment where they underestimated the demand and were not prepared for the intensity of a football club's fanbase.
The mistake is treating operational readiness as something that catches up. It does not catch up. It falls further behind with every new commitment unless the organisation deliberately pauses growth to invest in infrastructure. Castore's revenue went from 49 million to 190 million in two years. The operational team needed to mature at the same rate. Revenue is a number on a spreadsheet. Operations is a system in a warehouse. They move at different speeds.
DWI Tool: The Warehouse Walk. Once a quarter, every member of senior leadership should physically follow a single order from the moment it is placed to the moment it arrives in the customer's hands. Touch every system, observe every handoff, experience every delay. The distance between the boardroom strategy and the warehouse reality is the distance between your brand and your customer's experience.
Chapter 07
Sustainability & Waste Reduction
Wasteland
Castore's partnership with the England and Wales Cricket Board included a commitment that positioned the brand ahead of every major competitor on sustainability: the first completely recyclable sports collection using natural fabrics. The matchday kits would use recycled materials. England athletes would co-design the teamwear. The pricing would be set lower than typical international kits to make the sport more accessible to younger audiences.
These commitments reveal a company that understands sustainability as a commercial strategy rather than a compliance exercise. Recyclable materials, athlete co-design, and accessible pricing are three separate value propositions unified by a single insight: the next generation of sports consumers will choose brands that respect their values, and the brands that move first will capture loyalty that lasts decades. A ten-year deal is a long enough horizon to build that loyalty structurally.
The Belstaff acquisition in August 2025 added a different sustainability dimension. Belstaff had been losing money every year since INEOS bought it in 2017, with pre-tax losses of 18.3 million pounds in the most recent accounts and falling revenue. Castore acquired a heritage brand with a century of craftsmanship and a wardrobe of iconic products, then proposed to revitalise it through Castore's direct-to-consumer infrastructure and supply chain expertise. This is sustainability in its purest business sense: giving new life to something valuable that was being wasted by mismanagement.
The broader sustainability question for Castore is whether the rate of partnership accumulation generates its own form of waste. Six major football deals lost in two to three seasons means six sets of tooling, design templates, supply chain relationships, and commercial infrastructure built and then abandoned. That is waste: intellectual, operational, and reputational. Every failed partnership leaves behind sunk costs that could have compounded into long-term value if the relationship had been maintained.
The mistake is measuring sustainability only in material terms. Carbon footprint, recycled polyester, biodegradable packaging. These matter. But the most corrosive form of waste in a brand-driven business is the waste of trust. Every customer who received a defective jersey will think twice before purchasing again. Every club that terminated a deal early will tell other clubs why. Trust waste compounds invisibly until it becomes a market reality.
DWI Tool: The Trust Waste Calculator. List every customer interaction, partnership, or public moment in the last year where your organisation failed to deliver on its promise. Assign each one a recovery cost: the time, money, and effort required to restore trust with that specific audience. Sum the total. That number is your real sustainability deficit, and no recycled fabric will offset it.
Chapter 08
Positioning & Category Strategy
Competitive Landscape
Castore's positioning insight was sharp enough to build a billion-pound company on: the global sportswear market is dominated by three brands whose scale has made them complacent, and there is space for a premium British challenger that treats every partnership as bespoke rather than template. Brand awareness sits at roughly 14 percent in major markets compared to over 60 percent for Nike and Adidas. Nike's annual marketing spend is 4.3 billion dollars. Castore's 2022 marketing budget was approximately three million pounds. The asymmetry is absurd, and Castore's growth despite that asymmetry proves the positioning was correct.
The category strategy evolved through three distinct phases. Phase one was premium direct-to-consumer sportswear sold through digital channels and luxury retailers like Mr Porter and Harrods. Phase two was team sports partnerships, using clubs and national teams as distribution channels and brand amplifiers. Phase three, emerging now, is portfolio brand building: the Umbro professional licence for key European markets, the Belstaff acquisition, and the INEOS strategic investment. Castore is no longer positioning itself as a sportswear brand. It is positioning itself as a British premium brand group with sport as its cultural engine.
The Red Bull Racing partnership extension crystallised the ambition. Described as the largest commitment by duration and value of a sportswear brand in the history of motorsport, the deal placed Castore alongside Max Verstappen and the dominant force in Formula One. The McLaren partnership preceded it. Together, they gave Castore presence in the most technology-obsessed, design-conscious, globally televised sport on earth. The audience for Formula One skews younger, wealthier, and more brand-aware than traditional football audiences. That is the customer Castore wants.
The competitive landscape has shifted around Castore in ways that validate the original thesis. Nike is retreating from smaller club deals. Adidas is concentrating on marquee partnerships. Puma is caught in the middle. The space Castore identified in 2020, where mid-tier clubs wanted premium attention, remains open. The question is whether Castore can fill it without repeating the quality failures that emptied their first attempt.
The mistake is confusing market entry with market ownership. Castore entered more sports categories in more markets faster than any challenger brand in history. Entering is the easy part. Staying requires operational excellence that the company has not yet consistently demonstrated. A positioning strategy only works if the product lives there permanently, not just on launch day.
DWI Tool: The Stay Test. For every market or category your brand has entered, ask: could we survive a crisis in this space without losing the partnership? If the answer depends on the partner's patience rather than your operational reliability, you have entered a market you do not yet own. Invest in the infrastructure that would make you impossible to replace before signing the deal that makes you easy to compare.
Chapter 09
Strategic Summary & Reflection
Key Takeaways
Castore is the most instructive brand case study in contemporary sportswear because it did the hard thing and the easy thing simultaneously. The hard thing was building a genuine challenger brand with a distinctive voice, an authentic founding story, real product innovation, and partnerships that gave it visibility far beyond its size. The easy thing was growing faster than the organisation could support, which is easy because saying yes is always easier than saying not yet.
The strategic takeaways are uncomfortable because they require holding two truths at once. First: Castore's positioning was brilliant. Identifying the gap between what mid-tier clubs wanted and what the established brands offered was a genuine insight, and the execution of partnerships with Red Bull Racing, McLaren, and England Cricket proved the brand could operate at the highest level of global sport. Second: the operational failures were not anomalies. They were the predictable consequence of a growth rate that outpaced infrastructure development. Shirts ripping on television, crests peeling off during matches, fans receiving incomplete jerseys: these are not teething problems. They are symptoms of a company that prioritised signing the next deal over perfecting the last one.
The Belstaff acquisition and INEOS investment signal a new strategic phase. Castore is building a portfolio of British premium brands with sport as the connective thread. If the operational infrastructure matures to match the strategic ambition, the company has the positioning, the partnerships, and the market opportunity to become what it has always claimed to be: the genuine British alternative to the global giants. If the infrastructure does not mature, the portfolio will amplify the operational failures rather than absorb them.
Tom Beahon's observation that success is never linear is both honest and revealing. The trajectory of Castore proves that a powerful brand story, a clear market gap, and relentless ambition can build a billion-pound valuation in under a decade. It also proves that valuation is a measure of what investors believe you will become, not a measure of what you are. The gap between those two things is where brands either grow up or burn out.
The Beahon brothers packed boxes in their parents' house, remortgaged the family home, and built something that Nike noticed. That is extraordinary. The next chapter depends on whether the organisation they built can deliver on every promise the brand makes, every time, to every customer, in every market, at every price point. Better Never Stops only works if better actually never stops.
DWI Tool: The Mirror Test. Stand your founding story next to your latest customer review. If the founding story still feels true in the customer's experience, your brand is intact. If the customer's experience contradicts the founding story, you have two choices: change the operations until the story is true again, or admit the story has changed. Both are valid. Pretending there is no gap is the only option that guarantees failure.
The kit is evidence. The culture is the work.
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