Rowing is a sport fixated with excellence. The perennial pursuit of perfection, the poise, control, balance and strength required to propel a boat faster than your opposition. It is a sport that both demands and deserves the very best to allow athletes to perform at the highest level, and yet it has so often been left behind in the race for technological innovation.
It was this same drive to offer something more that led Ryan Morrison to found Rival Kit in 2017 whilst Kit Secretary at Edinburgh University Boat Club,. Expecting to enjoy his new role on the committee of one of the UK’s premier boat clubs, Ryan instead found himself weighed down in late deliveries, poor quality apparel, and inane complexity around order windows and procedures.
“I remember racing at the British Championships in October and having to borrow someone else’s all-in-one after they’d raced in it” Ryan recollected. It occurred to him that if he was struggling to hook athletes up with basic performance apparel, he probably wasn’t the only one – and so Rival Kit was born. Originally predicated on the promise of no minimum orders and a two-week turnaround time – something Ryan acknowledges was ‘ambitious’ as the company scaled – the company has developed into a hub for rowers to come and purchase every item of clothing they could possibly need for the season. In creating Rival, Ryan wanted to drag the sport into the 21st century where e-commerce and online shopping is the dominant form of trade.
“When we were trying to order kit, there were always a million different people in the way of a simple request,” explained Jenny Stevenson, Rival’s co-founder and Head of Design. “We wanted to create a system whereby clubs, universities and schools could speak to one person as their customer service representative and have the process handled efficiently”.
In a way, Ryan was out to make his previous role the best on the committee . If athletes can purchase their kit individually, it removes the need for clunky order forms and bulk distributions of everyone’s kit. With Rival, Kit Secretaries enjoy all the fun of designing and creating great kit without any of the previous hassle. “Our growth in the last three years shows that there was a clear gap in the market for this type of service” said Ryan. Despite fast-becoming one of the UK’s leading rowing apparel providers with over 150 clients, Ryan and Jenny still remain true to their customer-orientated principles. They liaise directly with clubs and are striving to become the ‘one-stop-shop’ for any and all rowing teams who want to partner with a versatile and dynamic young company who produce great quality kit for affordable prices.
It may seem to a layman that rowing and perhaps Rival are behind the trend – e-commerce and online shopping has been pervasive in our lives for well over a decade now. “To be honest, it’s actually really difficult to execute with custom kit,” said Jenny. “If you go and shop at ASOS or New Look, you’re requesting to buy one thing which there may be 10,000s of already in circulation. Due to the bespoke nature of custom kit, those numbers are far smaller and makes each item much more expensive”.
Like all start-ups, Rival have experienced their share of peaks and troughs in delivery and go-to-market speed of their product. Ultimately, though, they’ve now developed their online shopping operation to the extent that they’re scalable across a number of different verticals and regional geographies. Ryan explained “We’ve developed our proprietary processes and software to the point where we’re able to maintain strong, uniquely differentiated relationships with clubs and schools but operate at scale too”.
One story that summarises Rival is one both Ryan and Jenny laugh whilst telling; an athlete had left their kit on the tube (a hazard all of us who live in London are intimately familiar with) and needed their full kit bag replaced. A few years and suppliers ago, this may have meant living on borrowed kit for the foreseeable future; Rival had most of his stash replaced by the next day. That’s a rate of response that even the likes of Amazon would struggle to match.
Now operating with a team of 10 in the same city where the company was created, Rival are on a clear mission to transform the world of custom kit. COVID-19 shook the foundations but also allowed the group to reset and refresh, paving a clear path for sustained growth as we emerge out of the pandemic. “We need to just take stock of where we are,” laughed Ryan when asked about plans for the season back at the beginning of September. “The clubs have been really forgiving over the past year, but we want to make sure we’re in a good place and able to nail every order for our customers”.
The white space is endless. In no uncertain terms, Ryan wants to be servicing every single boat club in the UK. Like all good duos at the helm of an insurgent brand, Jenny builds upon this in acknowledging that she wants the company to remain true to supporting the rowing community in as many ways as possible. “We want to help transform big ideas from individuals into reality, even if that means we often commit more time than we should,” she said. “We want to keep that at the core of our brand and diversify in a way that enables our projects to fit together and support one another”.
In a world dominated by the narrative of a bottom line, a razor-sharp focus on relationships and people could be the key to setting Rival apart from the rest.
Rival Kit is an official partner to JRN.
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