Blog > News & Trivia

Inside Clothing Brand Blakely's Commercial Partnership With Norwich City

31 Oct, 2024
Inside Clothing Brand Blakely's Commercial Partnership With Norwich City

In the last decade, an increasing amount of professional football clubs in the UK have penned lucrative front-of-shirt sponsorship deals with gambling companies, and these firms have started to become ubiquitous at the top level of English sport. Other businesses have often struggled to compete with the amount of cash that the likes of Betway, BK8 or Stake.com are able to splash out to get their names emblazoned on a Premier League shirt.

Today 11 of the English top flight's 20 clubs are sponsored by betting companies, with many of these deals signed in an attempt to cash in before the introduction of a ban on front-of-shirt sponsorship deals with gambling companies from the 2026/27 season. But elsewhere in the English football pyramid, some more outside-the-box commercial deals are flying under the radar.

In July, Championship club Norwich City announced a brand-new front-of-shirt sponsorship deal with the Norfolk-based clothing brand Blakely, who became the club's principal partner for the 2024/25 season. Currently, Blakely is the only fashion brand operating as the main sponsor for a club in England and Wales' top two divisions (the only other professional club with a fashion-affiliated sponsor being League One Birmingham City, who are sponsored by US streetwear brand Undefeated). In this article, we'll be exploring how this partnership came about, speaking to Blakely founder and CEO Gareth Newman about the relationship between Norwich City and their new sponsors, and examining how the ties between football and fashion continue to develop.

What Is Blakely?

Blakely is a Norfolk-based clothing brand founded in 2012 by Gareth Newman, a local entrepreneur who after seeing first-hand the quality of fabric used by certain US clothing brands, became desperate to replicate this quality in the UK. After slowly growing from a bedroom business to operating out of his parents' garden shed and employing a steadily growing team, he first began seeing significant growth after placing a greater emphasis on marketing and delegating more to experts. Blakely eventually took on a 42,000-square foot warehouse in the north Norfolk countryside, and currently employs 70 staff, with £37m of global sales recorded in the last 12 months alone.

"There were six years where it seemed hopeless, I was putting every last penny I had into this business and everybody else probably thought I was delusional, but I genuinely believed in what I was creating," Newman tells us. "I thought I could do it all organically, and that my product quality would allow it to eventually kick on itself, but it just didn't gain enough momentum on its own. Once I started to use marketing to help get the name and the products out there, and when I'd brought in people that can do specific roles rather than me being a jack of all trades but master of none, that was when the business started to explode. I'd already focused so heavily on product quality that when people received it, they were impressed. Things started to snowball, and where we are today is far greater than I could've ever imagined."

Why Did Blakely Move Into The World Of Football?

Blakely's rapid recent growth has allowed the company to seek out new markets and audiences. The most crucial arena they've delved into is the world of football; after signing the summer deal with Norwich City, Blakely helped unlock access to millions of football fans all over the country. And when it came to the decision on which club to sponsor, there was only ever one candidate.

"I grew up watching Norwich," says Newman, who has been a fan of the East Anglian club since he was a child. "Virtually my whole family supports the club, and I go to all the home games. It's probably every Norfolk business' dream to be the front-of-shirt sponsor for Norwich City. So many Norfolk businesses have appeared on the shirt: Norwich & Peterborough, Aviva, Colman's, Lotus, so it's always been in the back of my mind that maybe one day we might be able to do it."

It was when the latest local sponsors, Lotus, pulled out of their role as principal partner of Norwich City (after the Norfolk-based sports car company appeared on the front of the Canaries' shirts from 2021 to 2024) that Blakely saw an opportunity to get involved. "The club reached out asking about general partners because they have a tiered system for partners," says Newman. "I didn't really want to just do the little bits; I wanted to get heavily involved if we were gonna get involved at all. We jumped on the chance to get properly involved rather than just being a bit-part player."

Asked his thoughts on why it's so rare for a fashion brand to sponsor a professional football club, Newman says "I think that the fashion industry makes certain associations with football clubs… maybe fashion is a little bit resistant to football as a sport, especially with the historic associations in the media. That said, there are now higher fashion companies doing football replica shirts, there are several that are now doing their own version of a football shirt, especially retro-looking ones. So it's perfect timing in a way."

Inside The Commercial Partnership Between Blakely and Norwich City FC

Back in 2021, Norwich City angered fans by penning a controversial sponsorship deal with Asian gambling firm BK8; just three days later, they were forced to cancel the £5m deal after being faced with hundreds of complaints and criticism of the company's provocative, sexist marketing material. It was crucial that the club got their next sponsorship deal right, and their partnership with local firm Lotus was widely viewed as a positive deal. However, the fondness many fans felt for the car manufacturers (who had previously sponsored City's away kit from 2003 to 2006) meant there was added pressure for Blakely when the clothing brand took over from them.

"A lot of people were sad that Lotus had gone, but others were grateful that it wasn't a betting brand [replacing them], and that we're local," says Newman. "I think some people doubted the deal was as big as it was, because they'd never heard of us at all, but that wasn't the case at all. We had a customer base of over two million even before the Norwich partnership, so we still had our own demand, but the Norwich partnership has really helped us elevate it locally. Being an online business, people will be buying from us in our region but they won't even know that we're local. We wanted to build awareness and build community, especially locally."

Community schemes in the Norfolk region have been crucial to Blakely's early work with Norwich City. Inspired by the success of the indoor hybrid fitness race event Hyrox, they recently hosted the Blakely Apex Games, a community competition and sample sale staged at the Norfolk Showground. This is part of a broader effort to "become more heavily involved in active events" in the region.

"We've worked really closely with about 15 gyms locally, doing a big sponsored activation or event each weekend where we offer free clothes, and that led onto us doing the Apex Games," Newman says. "We had Norwich City's U21s team competing against the local gyms, and against individually entered teams and the Norwich partnerships team. We also recently did a fun run for World Mental Health Day, hosted by Norwich legend Darren Huckerby at the University of East Anglia (UEA)."

These events have clearly had buy-in from those running the Championship club. Discussing the new partnership during the summer, Norwich City's commercial director Sam Jeffery said: “Blakely are a Norfolk-based brand on a rapid growth journey, with huge global aspirations that we hope and believe we can assist them in achieving. It's an outstanding brand to adorn our shirts and we're so excited to be working with Gareth, Andy and all the team." The club's head of sales and acquisitions, Ed Turnham, added: "We were driven to find that new partner who saw the relationship with the club as more than a pure badging exercise, with collaboration at its core. The partnership will be unique across the footballing landscape, and another example of Norwich City pushing boundaries."

What Is The Future Of The Partnership?

The run-up to Christmas will be Blakely's busiest period of the year, and the fact that the brand's name is emblazoned across the chest of players like Josh Sargent, Borja Sainz and Angus Gunn as they compete towards the top end of the Championship, is only likely to boost business. Newman still finds it surreal watching his boyhood club don shirts with his company's logo on. But he insists that despite his personal passion for football driving the initiation of commercial partnership, the rest of his team recognise the significance of the sponsorship.

"Everyone within the business is super pumped that we're involved with Norwich," he says. "To come from the garden shed eight years ago to now seeing it on the front of the shirt at Norwich — it's the first time I've felt proud of what we've achieved. As a business owner you're always wanting to do more, and you expect to hit certain targets, and it can be an anti-climax, but with Norwich I was able to sit back and go 'We're actually doing something here.' It's fulfilled me in ways I could have never imagined."

If you'd like to find out more about the lucrative commercial deals involved in modern football, check out our guide to the 10 biggest sponsorship deals in history.