Saints To Produce Their Own Kit For 2014/15 Season Tuesday, 1st Jul 2014 09:14 Saints have announced that the team kit for the coming season will be manufactured independently for the club rather than have a major brand name manufacturer. This is not a new move for Saints, they produced their own kit from 1999 till 2008 when Umbro became the official supplier, back then though the reasoning behind producing their own kit was financial, under the deal with Pony of the £40 cost of the shirt, £5 was manufacturing costs, another £5 profit for the manufacturer, £10 royalty fee to the club and then £20 was profit to the retailer. This meant that if a shirt was sold say in JD Sports, Saints would receive only £10, whereas with taking it in house and selling only from their club shop they could increase profit to £35 per shirt. In 2008 however with the club heading to stormy waters financially, they could not afford to risk the outlay to do this, so it was easier to strike up a deal with Umbro to manufacture the kit, Saints still kept it in house sales wise so still retained the lions share of the profit. Umbro proved good partners for the club and were supportive as we went in administration, however for last season Nicola Cortese struck up a deal with Adidas. Whoever did the negotiation with this deal did not do their job well and Saints ended up with a poor design which was off the peg and identical in many ways to the strips of half the Premier league not to mention other League clubs. The price was also off putting for what would become one of the poorest selling shirts in recent years, Saints retailed in at £49.99 whist most Premier clubs with the identical styled Adidas kit charged £44.99, with Bristol City who themselves had an almost identical shirt to Saints retailed theirs at only £39.99, put bluntly the supporters felt ripped off. In December our ex Chairman had fallen out with Adidas and the deal was terminated, however when he left St Mary's and Katharina Liebherr's people took over they found one problem they had to deal with was the fact that there was no kit supplier for the 2014/15 season. Negotiations with Adidas were opened and although these went well and Adidas were now happy to work with Saints again, the problem was timescales, for a company the size of Adidas, you could not just put in a major contract into the schedules and fulfill it in such a short time, therefore for this season Saints were forced to look elsewhere. Therefore we are back to producing our own kit, this does not mean we have opened a sweat shop in St Mary's, what we have done is engage someone to design the kit and then found a company to manufacture it, there are plenty of those around as anyone who has watched lower league or parks football will tell you, but rather than wear the logo of one of these companies, Saints have chosen to give an air of independence by using their own brand again. Just what the design will be we wait with baited breath, Imlead to understand that the club are aware that the last two kits did not represent the heritage of the club, that they did not make the shirt stand out, but rather blended us in with the pack, that being the case a return to stripes may be on the cards, but again Im lead to believe that this might not be possible for this season. So Saints have got their kit back literally and hopefully now we will not revert to kits that look more at home at Anfield or Nottingham Forest. Photo: Action Images Please report offensive, libellous or inappropriate posts by using the links provided.
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