An old colleague of mine, Max, recently started a side hustle during the UK lockdowns.
His business idea is really simple: iconic football moments on premium white t-shirts.
His company is called ‘FourFourTee’, a play on words on the classic 4-4-2 football formation.
I love it for a number of reasons:
1. It’s niche and ridiculous. Their target market are 1) football fans, that 2) are also part time history geeks, and 3) also have enough disposable income to want to buy a t-shirt that contains a joke that most people won’t understand. Max has immediately excluded 99.8% of the world from his target market, but for the 0.2%, he’ll have their attention.
2. Minimal design. Each football moment is a tiny logo that sits on the left hand side of the chest—it’s deliberately understated. If you see someone wearing the t-shirt, you have to do some work to get the joke—and that exclusivity has currency.
3. It’s spreading fast. When I heard about FourFourTee, I knew a few of my friends would love it, so I shared it in a Whatsapp chat. Within 5 minutes they had come up with 25 iconic football moments they requested to see on a t-shirt. Products that spark this kind of sharing and chatter grow organically—which is the holy grail of marketing.
4. The business model and its operations are simple. FourFourTee is using a print-on-demand business model. When a t-shirt is purchased on their Shopify website, it is printed by a third party, and sent to the buyer. This means they can offer an unlimited number of iconic football moments without having to tie up any capital in inventory. The trade off is the higher cost to produce each t-shirt, the fact it takes about 7 days from order to delivery, and less control over production quality and return logistics.
Finally, I messaged Max and requested the Maradona ‘Hand of god’ moment from the 1986 World Cup—with Maru being Argentine, let’s just say there are more iconic moments in Argentine football than there are in New Zealand football. Within 2 hours, it was available on FourFourTee’s website, and it should arrive within in the week.