45 million pairs of football boots are purchased every year. 12.5 million pairs end up in landfill.
4bn people from every corner of the planet engage with football. Often it’s a vital cornerstone of communities. How could we take a young entrepreneur's passion for football and sustainability and build a global brand that would change minds, attitudes and the way an entire industry thinks about its impact?
Enter Sokito, a business that designs and manufactures high-performance football boots from plant-based and recycled materials. Ready to enter an industry characterised by retailer and consumer inertia.
Sokito is aiming to build a £100m business within five years, capturing 0.5% of the global football boot market. And longer term, to build the leading, global, sustainable sportswear brand that will reduce sport’s impact on the planet.
Our objectives were crystal clear:
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?
12.5 million pairs of football boots are dumped in landfill every year. Many of their components will take thousands of years to decompose. That’s a lot of waste and a whole mountain of pollution. Sokito is building a business to solve this problem.
Enter Sokito’s young, dynamic entrepreneurial founder, Jake Hardy. Alongside his passion for football and the environment, he is aiming to build the leading, global, sustainable sportswear brand that will reduce sport’s impact on the planet. And build a £100m business in five years.
We set about creating the brand and planning how we would drive awarness and sales. Cost effectively.
We conducted focus groups and interviews with five-a-side amateur players to some of the world’s leading footballers. We listened to and worked with retailers, the media, football boot testers and leading environmentalists.
As well as major innovations in the design and production of the boots, like using recycled carpets, castor beans, corn waste and bamboo, this drove our sustainable innovations like:
Focusing on simple ideas of performance and planet, we created a simple, pure core brand thought
“Change The Game”.
Our marketing and communications strategy has three core elements:
We’d let the players and the product do the talking and to engage the football industry in our purpose, to drive awareness.
We’re taking on big brands, with innovative retailer and media partnerships, promotions, campaigns and tactics. We’re winning major-category sustainability awards. And we’re constantly innovating with our product, customer experience, materials, processes, technologies and research (we’re designing our third model as we write this).
We’re building the brand and the business through a blend of football ambassadors, global trade relationships and innovative digital marketing. We positioned the business and its communications in the right way and let the product and brand speak for itself.
We’re bringing sustainability into the spotlight in the football industry. Driving brand awareness. Lighting up social media. Signed partnerships with most of the world’s top football retailers, from Tokyo to Tahoma, Glasgow to Gothenburg. And outselling famous sports brands.
We’re delivering on both performance and planet.
We’re Sokito, and we’re changing the game.
We’ve built partnerships with nine of the top football boot retailers globally and are selling thousands of pairs of boots in 18 international markets.
We’ve signed 39 professional football league players as investors and ambassadors, from all over the world.
We’ve won awards for our sustainability, including the prestigious Recycling Project of the Year at the 2023 Green Business Awards and the Drum Gold award for sustainability.
We’ve launched social media promotions that have eclipsed those of the major sportswear brands.
We received orders for over 5,000 pairs of boots in our first year of trading. We expect this to grow by 300% next year.
Will Troost-Ekong, a Sokito investor and ambassador and Captain of the Nigeria Football Team, won player of the tournament at AFCON 2024, and scored winning goals in their three matches before they reached the final. All whilst wearing Sokito’s brand new, vegan performance boot, the Scudetta.
In a joint promotion with Sokito, Will Troost-Ekong and Unisport, one of the top European football boot retailers, announced the Scudetta. 400,000 fans engaged with the campaign and over 10,000 registered, more than any other Unisport promotion.
The Scudetta, has been named the second most highly rated performance football boot of the year by the world’s leading football boot tester (JayMike from Unisport).
We’re the lowest price football boot rated above 4 stars on FourFourTwo.
Since we launched in 2023, we’ve created over £5.5m in the equity value of the Sokito business.
