The Untold Story Behind Cristiano Ronaldo’s Global Fashion Brand.
This is the untold story of the small team, whose pure passion and grit, inspired the creation of a global clothing brand.
I will never forget walking into that room for the first time. It was raw, old clothing samples lined every inch of the walls like wallpaper. Fabric cut-outs lined corners of the only desk that stood firm in the centre of the room. In the heart of Woodstock, Cape Town — nestled into a corner room of a mass clothing manufacturer, would become the engine room of Cristiano Ronaldo’s luxury clothing brand. The holding company in South Africa bought the trading rights to use CR7 aiming to leverage off it’s existing manufacturing prowess. We had a premium denim supplier in Denmark, product design and manufacturing capabilities, but to be real, that was kind of all we had.
Cristiano ronaldo’s meteoric rise as a global icon has been unprecedented. The global football superstar is what many people call a GOAT — greatest of all time. To put it into perspective, Cristiano has 20 million more followers on Twitter than Mr. Twitter himself — Donald Trump. 130 million followers on the gram, and the YouTube search volume of a small country. Everything he touches turns to gold, right? Not quite. We needed to prove that this fan-base had tangible value for us. Put CR7 on a pair of boots, which Nike does, with their billion dollar contract, and it’s clear the boots are worth their weight in gold. We’re not selling boots, we are selling premium jeans and comfort-driven menswear apparel. How much of this fanbase was going to prove to be immaterial to the product we were selling?
We launched The Future of Denim campaign on the 8th of October, 2017. Strapped with second-hand GoPro’s and just about every sample pair of jeans we were selling. Our Creative Director hopped on a plane from South Africa to Madrid to film our campaign. On an exclusive location, the CR7 jeans were laid out on a long table. While sorting through the sizes revising the shoot plan, a casual Cristiano Ronaldo walks up beside the table, picks up a pair of jeans and with a smile says “I love these jeans”. Holy shit it’s Cristiano.
We burst onto the global scene with The Future of Denim Campaign. At the time we were selling exclusively on CR7.com selling to over 60 countries worldwide on our Shopify store. Three of us, in what we called the engine room in Woodstock were somehow running this global fashion brand. We learnt the Shopify best practices in weeks, we tuned into every meet-up and Webinar we could find around the world. Our CR7 Denim Instagram page grew to 650k followers in over a month.
We were managing the online store, taking all the product shots, running the digital marketing campaigns and creating content for Cristiano Ronaldo to post to his channels with a combined total of over 200 million followers. We had one designer. We were forced to push ourselves in area’s that I didn’t even know existed. It didn’t matter. 18 hour work days were the standard. Everyday we were pushing our comfort zone. Creating content with the worlds attention bred a euphoric sense of creativity and child-like sense of unbound possibility. We we’re a startup out of Cape Town, South Africa with the weight of the worlds attention resting on our shoulders.
The CR7 Junior brand logo and concept was first sketched on an old piece of paper in a Bootlegger coffee shop just one week before we were due for the global launch in November 2017.
We had footage of Cristiano Ronaldo Jnr. This was the first time that his son was in-front of camera. He killed the shoot, he has this charm and confidence about him that was so impressive. We were building hype for the junior brand launch without a clue of how we were actually going to launch it. Our creative director was in Spain handling contract agreements. We were down to 2 of us to launch a global kids wear brand. The challenge was set and it was starting to sink in. It was the longest and most rewarding week of our lives and we managed to pull of the Junior launch. 350k Instagram followers in just one week. We went live on CR7.com with only 5 garments that all nearly sold out within the first week. CR7 Junior and Cristiano Ronaldo Juniors personal brand was born.
It was pure grit and the willingness to be constantly pushing yourself, there just wasn’t time or someone else to simply take the responsibility off your hands. when your team is small, there is a sense of brotherhood loyalty. You never want to let the team down. There was a unity, an underlying belief that somehow the three of us could create a truly innovative global clothing brand. When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious. CR7 became our belief.
We learnt to rather apologise and take risks than become stagnant and wait for things to come our way. Cameron and I installed and tested Shopify plug-in’s such as ReCart which sends personalised abandoned cart messages straight to your Facebook Messenger. We were getting calls from the management team in Porto saying people are getting pairs of jeans in their Messenger inbox’s, we could back it up with the numbers. Taking the simple risk of testing ReCart generated an extra $25 000 in monthly sales. The honey was worth the sting.
Working without a plan may seem scary. But blindly following a plan that can’t exist in the real world is even scarier. We couldn’t of waited 6 months to create an agency size campaign. We didn’t have the capital to outsource. We tested, gained insights and adapted weekly. It was an amazing experience to be apart of and it had injected us with even more hunger to create global E-commerce brands.
We have passed the brand onto the giants of industry, but our South African startup DNA will forever remain the heart and soul of CR7 Denim.
