simonw wrote:
I appreciate there's a commercial angle and that the figures clearly show that certain colours sell better than others. In a sport with little money those things are important, however when the stats show blue is a popular colour and then everyone ends up playing in blue there's clearly an issue. There are only 12 teams in SL - if you can't design two shirts that are different enough to avoid a clash in every fixture something's gone wrong somewhere. No reason a Super League team should ever need three shirts. Oxen obviously have a reputation for churning out shirts for fun. I thought it bizarre we'd launch an entire training range for a one-off friendly against NZ but the 'coaches range' really made me laugh. Each to their own but I think the desperate need to get their logo on every player, coach, umpire etc might well be raising the awareness of the brand name but it's hardly positioning them as a high end quality manufacturer. For me all that does is highlight how cheap the manufacturing process must be (pop a blank shirt in, hit print).
We have had 12 kits since Oxen took over just over 2 years ago
They're definitely are going for the quantity over quality business model.
I think 3 per year is probably OK, home, away and special charity kit for Magic.
There is absolutely no need for any club to have a 3rd kit.
As people probably know I'm not a massive fan of Oxen I think we as a club should be aiming higher, but it's obviously commercially the best way to go otherwise they wouldn't be doing it - I think outsourcing everything to Oxen including the retail aspect must be appealing to the club.
Out of all the manufacturers in SL personally I like the stuff Hummel produce, it seems of a higher class to me and they don't seem to have the endless releases and sales that we have.
Id really like to see Castore and Umbro get into the RL market they both produce some great stuff for other sports, the Umbro football stuff looks great to me.
What I will say is that because of the amount of sponsors we seem to have any shirt will look a bit of a mess unless the are implemented properly onto the shirt
For example hull and Wakefield have managed it well this season