WINGING IT!
How two brothers with no knowledge (and no capital) built sportswear upstart Castore into a £1billion brand that’s now snapping at the heels of giants Adidas and Nike
TOM BEAHON is buzzing. The freshfaced 34-year-old has just been on a call with the Prime Minister’s Business Council of chief executives from firms including Nationwide, Lloyds Bank, Scottish Power, Rolls-Royce and Greggs. The idea is for them to help Rishi Sunak take the pulse of British business – or as Beahon puts it ‘to get a shopfloor view of what is going on in the economy’.
‘I’m not a massively political person but I’m honoured to be asked,’ he says in a soft Scouse accent. His appointment to the Government’s advisory panel is the latest milestone in a short but meteoric commercial career.
In less than a decade Beahon has gone from ‘Mum’s kitchen table in Liverpool’ – where he and his brother Phil started the Castore sportswear brand with a £25,000 loan from their parents – to what he calls ‘the top table’ in Downing Street.
The pair are very much joint partners, but it is Tom who prefers the media limelight to his younger brother. Together, they have grown their business into a challenger brand taking on industry titans Nike and Adidas.
Sales more than doubled to £115million last year and – impressively for a fast-growing young business – there were chunky profits too, totalling nearly £15million.
‘Not many businesses do that,’ he beams. The only way is to be ‘obsessive’, he insists. ‘It can’t just be a day job. You have to live and breathe every detail of it.’
Castore’s distinctive winged logo adorns England cricket shirts, and the kit of Formula 1 team Red Bull and Newcastle United until the end of this football season.
The firm has 500 staff and 25 stores, including one in Dubai. It recently moved its head office to Manchester – the original ‘Cottonopolis’ and home to sportswear brands such as Umbro and JD Sports. A recent fund-raising valued Castore at £950 million and the Beahons’ majority stake at £500million – at least on paper – after a capital injection led by investment bank Raine.
Backers include tennis star Andy Murray and the Issa brothers, Mohsin and Zuber, owners of the Asda supermarket chain.
Murray is an important partner in the Beahons’ success.
The two-times Wimbledon champion has had a joint venture with Castore called AMC since 2019. It makes shirts from regenerated nylon and yarn, which Murray wears exclusively on court. But it is on the Issas that Beahon heaps the highest praise.
‘Our role models since my brother and I started the business have to be Mohsin and Zuber. They were the guys who backed us when it would have been easy not to,’ he says.
‘They wanted to help the next generation of entrepreneurs and saw Phil and I were passionate and ambitious. They believed in us.’
Having failed to become professional sportsmen – Tom was let go by Tranmere Rovers, his local football team, Phil didn’t make it as a Lancashire county cricketer – the Beahons’ big idea was a simple one: to set up a premium sportswear brand in a sector where Nike and Adidas had ruled the roost for decades.
‘I can’t think of any other genuinely global market dominated by just two brands,’ Tom says. For him, Nike and Adidas had got too big for their boots and were now trying to appeal to everybody. He saw a market ‘ripe for disruption’, in the same way that Tesla upended car-making and Spotify transformed music. ‘We thought if we can create a British premium sportswear brand we should be able to appeal to people who are more serious about their health, training and fitness than the big brands,’ he says. ‘Markets, consumers and technology evolve and incumbents need to be challenged. They will not innovate as the status quo works for them.’ That led him to wonder if Adidas and Nike were ‘doing a brilliant job for every sports team outside the global elite’. He says: ‘I didn’t think they were. I felt we could offer something different and superior,’ in terms of fabric quality and performance. The challenge was to turn that dream into reality. Here was a business with no capital whose founders had no knowledge or experience of the sector.
Unlike some start-ups, the Beahons didn’t go on BBC One’s Dragons’ Den. Tom says: ‘There’s no singular route to success.’
Instead they turned to their parents, who re-mortgaged their homes to provide the seed capital. Tom and Phil’s mum was a teacher, their dad worked in construction.
‘We were a very normal, working class family,’ Tom recalls. His parents were a huge influence, instilling in the brothers ‘a massive work ethic’ of ‘rolling up your sleeves and getting on with it’.
Their parents had originally hoped the boys would go to university. After their rejection on the sports field, the brothers wanted to be ‘in control of their destiny’, Tom remembers.
So they started knocking on the doors of countless clothing suppliers until one, a factory in Portugal, agreed to take them on.
But there was no grand plan. Tom says: ‘It was just hustle – it’s a very un-British thing.
He adds: ‘You need to have deeper levels of perseverance than anyone who isn’t an entrepreneur will understand.’
Designers praise Castore’s kit quality while the Beahons speak of ‘marginal gains’ like slightly lighter fabrics.
But it’s not all been plain sailing. The first big controversy came
‘There’s no secret sauce – just hard work’
last year when Aston Villa’s ‘wetshirt’ fiasco prompted complaints from male and female players. They said sweat-soaked Castore jerseys affected their performance. It was a setback from which the Beahons learnt hard lessons.
‘We’re not perfect,’ Tom admits. ‘You bump your head and you bump it again, but you slowly work out how things need to evolve.’ There have been other growing pains. The biggest may be learning to let go and delegate as Castore’s break-neck expansion continues.
‘At the start you do it all yourself. It’s on you. You wake up at 5am, you don’t go to bed until 1am. You do whatever it takes to be successful,’ Tom says
But when a business reaches a certain size, say 50 to 100 employees, ‘you need a different skill set’ from the one that got you there in the first place.
‘And that’s hard,’ he admits. ‘A lot of founders really struggle with it. As a leader your role changes from being the do-er to the person who sets the vision.’
He also thinks entrepreneurs are made not born, saying: ‘Just because you didn’t go to Eton, don’t believe anyone is better than you or has a right to succeed. You can learn the core characteristics of being successful in business. In this country we do a dis-service to young people wishing to start a business if they think they can’t do it because they are not innovators. They just need encouragement.’
Tom hopes he and his brother will become role models inspiring budding entrepreneurs. He says: ‘It’s not an easy one, but being an entrepreneur is a viable career option. There’s no superpower or secret sauce, just hard work.’