Batman Part 4
Most people would probably think the launch into India was it for Mongoose. But weirdly, it wasn’t. Despite the lack of sales into India, we considered the launch a relative success. Mongoose were becoming known in the industry, we’d continued our PR push and UK sales were buoyant.
Production issues had been solved too, in the UK, we had a large 1500 bat order coming in from India; made possible by the sales and payments made by retailers for their March-May 2010 orders. UK sales had been directly impacted by the Hayden innings, and the press from the IPL. In 2010, the IPL was the only cricket on terrestrial TV. IPL games would peak at audiences of 560,000, the England Test matches in Bangladesh which were taking place at the same time were averaging around 160,000 viewers.
Our sales from March-May were around the 950 bat mark (£57,000), compared to 300 (£25,000) in the September-December period. We’d hired 2 new salesmen, one of whom was an incredibly talented South African sales manager who later went on to run the company after its administration in 2012.
In May 2010, we were also awarded an industry award for the ‘Greatest technological innovation in Sport’ for the previous year. The award, won the previous year by the now banned Speedo Swimsuit demonstrated some of the waves we appeared to be making in the industry.
The company was still far from profitable, we had 25 sponsored players on the books at this point. Alongside the superstars of Matthew Hayden, Jimmy Anderson and Andrew Symonds were the less famous, and less talented likes of Mohammad Ashraful, Malinga Bandara, Phil Edwards, Suraj Randiv and Adrian Shankar. Some contracts were for incredibly high values too, one such player was earning in excess of £15,000 a year and some county players were on retainers in excess of £10,000. That’s a lot of bats we would have to sell.
Investment
Despite our spiralling costs of sponsorship, we did in August 2010 secure further investment for the continued expansion of the brand. We still had bold plans to conquer Australia, India and South Africa; and we also needed to plug the hole in the bank account which was making production for the upcoming 2011 season difficult. We’d taken on various loans of the 2010 season, to fund ongoing production and sponsorship fees.
Our previous round of investment had been back in November 2009, and shares were valued around £30. The company was considered to be worth around the £800,000 mark. This investment new round raising £220,000 would be at a value of £75. The company was now worth over £2m and optimism around the brand was incredibly high. The India mess had not dampened any spirits.
Production for 2011
For me, this was also the most exciting time for Mongoose. We’d go to the drawing board, and come up with some crazy ideas which we would try and get manufactured in India. We always used to read the pantone guide for what they felt would be the key colours for the next couple of seasons, and for 2010/11 we decided on a bold colour scheme of pink, purple and red.
Often people ask where the inspiration for our ranges came. Most interestingly our bat sticker range inspiration came from the strangest of all places. Generally speaking bat designs, back in 2010, had been very square in style, and one of the greatest challenges is making this identifiable from 100 yards away.
Our solution was to try a new shape. And this new shape came from women’s fashion. In 2010 the ‘off-the-shoulder’ style of dress was on every catwalk, and we loved it. We decided to take this style, and run with it as a new design of bat sticker.
Pads and gloves, also hadn’t progressed much design wise since around 2005 when Puma launched their bright orange Classic range. We wanted to push that boundary, and use our full colour scheme so any standard of pads/gloves would match with any of the bats (we’d taken the unusual step of using a different colour to represent grade of bat).
For much of June/July 2010 our office was awash with various drawings, scribbles and computer mockups of what we may produce.
Production with India, and the suppliers was always difficult. And we never quite got anything right first time. Here’s a few examples of what they came back with based upon the designs above:
