Once a random football phenomenon, UK company now gets specific with its obscure soccer tops
Surprise Shirts, a booming start-up that sends out random football tops to curious shoppers, has branched out and gone select!
Set up during the pandemic, Surprise Shirts dispatch mystery football tops to curious fans delighted to receive a secret gift on their doorstep. Sourced worldwide and now delivering to hundreds of countries, Surprise Shirts have put the fun back into football fashion, garnering tens of thousands of followers in no time.
A sister brand to the successful main operation, Select Shirts now seeks out specific tops, however obscure, garish or downright bizarre, season by season, home and away, outfield players and keepers.
That’s obviously a lot of shirts so, as indicated in Libero’s initial feature about this post-pandemic phenomenon, the Lincolnshire-based firm now has another office up and running. In Montevideo.
Enterprising teenager Louis Jones, who hit upon the concept during lockdown after doing one paper round too many, is nothing if not ambitious!
As he told Libero: “The shirts are sourced from various different places, manufacturers, clubs or brokers all around the world. Since we started we’ve gained a significant number of contacts all over the globe, so that’s how we’ve managed to source such a wide range of shirts. We’re expanding our contacts all the time, of course”.
“We are keen to grow our business as much as possible… we’ve set up an arm of our business in Latin America, based in Montevideo, which has seen a successful first month of trading.”
A sneak peek at the Select Shirts currently on offer reveals a Podbeskidzie Bielsko-Biała top from 2018-19, a recent Castellaneta away shirt featuring the ever-popular Peru-style sash and the current Las Vegas Lights change strip, looking for all the world like a toddler’s first practice with felt-tips. It does carry the LFL badge, though, a thing of neon beauty. This is a club, after all, whose players are rewarded with casino chips.
With the wide world of football now available with only a couple of clicks, what’s next for Surprise Shirts?
As Louis has already revealed to Libero: “We’re open and receptive to growing in as many was as possible… There are cards up our sleeve in terms of ways we want to expand”.
