12.5 million pairs of football boots are dumped in landfill every year. Many of their components will take thousands of years to decompose. Sokito is building a business to solve this problem.
Footballers love their football boots. The feel of them, the look of them, the reaction they evoke from their teammates. From children’s first experiences with football, with dreams of being a Lionel Messi, Kelly Smith or David Beckham, those feelings of anticipation, excitement and power that come with choosing the boots, opening the box, slipping your foot into them and tying the laces are hard to beat. The first run out, the first tackle, the first goal – in “those” boots. Whether you’re seven or seventy years old, or have a number 7 or 77 on your shirt, football boots are not just important to footballers: they become a part of you.
Enter a 26-year-old entrepreneur, with a passion for football and the environment. On a trip to Asia, he discovered it was possible to make shoes from recycled and vegan materials. So he posed the question: can we make high performance, durable football boots from sustainable materials?
And equally importantly, the marketing challenge: How would we create a brand that communicated this game-changing idea, in a market dominated by major manufacturers like Nike and Adidas, with huge budgets and an industry firmly planted in its ways?
Objectives
Jake Hardy, the founder, engaged addmustard, a brand, marketing and technology agency that works exclusively with entrepreneurs. With an estimated $5bn market to go after, we got to work.
“I came to addmustard with a football boot and a mission to be the world’s most eco-friendly sportswear brand. Two years on, we have grown Sokito into a brand valued at over £5.5 million. We’re pioneering sustainable, high-performance football boots, maximizing player impact on the pitch, not the planet. Together, we’re changing the game.” – Jake Hardy, Founder
The brief: Create a brand, drive awareness and raise investment to enable Sokito to capture 0.5% of the global football market. And build a £100m global football brand, that leads the way in sustainability. And then build the leading, sustainable, global sportswear brand.
Together, we created the brand Sokito, led by the brand proposition: “Performance football boots for maximum impact on the pitch, not the planet”.
Two pillars of our strategy: performance and planet. Unified by a single thought: “Sokito. Change the game”.
Strategy
But are football boots important to anyone? Sure they are.
We spoke to footballers, player-managers, coaches, kit managers, retailers and competitors in focus groups and research, all over the world. We focused on talking to footballers about their passion for their boots. And we uncovered a truth: that football boots are game-changing. Their feel, their performance, their look. They can make a footballer, whether Sunday League or national team captain, feel completely differently about their game.
Making the boots from materials such as wood fibres, recycled carpets, plastic and rubber, castor beans, corn waste and bamboo had never been tried before. Football boots experience extreme forces while a player is accelerating and decelerating. They also need to grip, on soft, medium and hard pitches and on natural and artificial playing surfaces. But most importantly, they had to perform.
Apart from the numerous innovations we’ve made in the product design, materials and manufacturing, we broke down the core brand thought “Change The Game” and analysed how we could really deliver on that. As an authentic brand, run by a team that believes passionately in its purpose, we have an opportunity to influence more than just football boots: Sokito is making a real difference, right across the sports world, setting examples to the industry, society and other brands about how to innovate and deliver positive impact, on and off the pitch.
Focusing on our pillars of performance and planet, we decided to build our brand, create our communications and make media decisions in the context of changing the game. We have a unique story to tell and we decided to tell it in a way that maximised its impact, with authenticity. We’d let the product do the talking and to engage the football industry in our purpose, to drive awareness.
Through a series of innovations. here’s how we are changing the game:
We introduced the world’s first football boot recycling scheme, making us the first company in the world to recycle any kind of footwear. We’ve won environmental awards for it, including the prestigious Recycling Project of the Year at the 2023 Green Business Awards.
By The Drum, Editorial
