#19 Castore CEO: Replica Kits Aren’t Too Expensive

0:12Hello and welcome to the first Big Boss interview podcast of 2026. I'm Will Bain and I've got Sean Farrington with me today. And Sean, you've been speaking to a real disruptor of a company, a disruptor who, inside 10 years, has gone from a little-known company in the north-west of England to a major player in their own right in global sports, challenging the likes of Nike and Adidas. Yes, so this is Tom Behan, who's the co-founder, co-chief executive, with his brother as it happens, of Castor. And interesting to use the word disruptor disruptor because it'd be an interesting conversation about whether they are disruptors now are they still a challenger brand that many years in with so many deals with teams right around the world and also keeping an eye on those who are up and coming and maybe trying to eat into a little bit of the market share that Castor itself has nabbed a bit of in recent years so we talked about what the business is like right now some of the bumps in the road that being a kit manufacturer can bring and how you deal with those.

1:16Castor has had a couple of issues along the way, but it doesn't seem to have stopped them gaining more and more deals with teams and sports right around the world. There's been a lot to chat about the environment here in the UK, both in the northwest of England, as you mentioned, that's where Castor comes from, but it's grown from there, as have other brands. What has worked well in Manchester in particular and what may be needed more nationally. It was really interesting talking to somebody who, a decade ago, founded this business and here we are, nearly 10 years later. It's worth reportedly more than a billion pounds and he's still only 36 years old.

1:54Well, let's have a listen then. Here's Sean with the boss of Castor.

2:03welcome to big boss interview to tom behan co-founder co-chief executive of castor thanks for being with us tom great fantastic to be here first question this time of year people wanting to know how retailers have done we'll get into a bit of the nitty-gritty of what it's like running castor and what it's been like running castor but the christmas period 2025 how did it end for you guys? So overall, positive. We saw high single digit revenue growth across the business. And we've got three businesses within our group. Castor, the brand that my brother and I founded coming up to 10 years ago now, we acquired the British premium lifestyle brand Bellstaff, which is a brand that's been around 100 years.

2:47We acquired that last year. And then we've got a smaller business in Yorkshire called Infinity, which is a printing house that supports the two So other businesses allows us to do some manufacturing locally in this country rather than the majority being done overseas. Across the three of them, we saw high single digit growth. Castor was the best performing that had double digit revenue growth. And then within each of them, there's some real trends that you can pull out. So stores outperformed relative to e-commerce, which was reversing a trend that we've seen for recent years. Could be myriad reasons for that, which we can dig into.

3:24But then I think even more interestingly, we did see more international growth than we saw local growth here in the UK, which I think has been driven by some of the local or the UK government policies of the last 12 months. But certainly not the doom and gloom that we're seeing that some of the commentators seem to be reporting from the UK in recent months. About the state of the economy or about your specific part of the industry? So, again, talking about Castor specifically, we are a sports brand. This is a generalised comment, but generally speaking, sport is better protected than I would say most other consumer sentiments.

4:07If you're a football fan, you do not stop going to support your team in a recession or when time is tough. That's quite a well-protected part of your income. You might not buy that nice new winter coat that you would have done in years gone by, or you might trade down from a£150 coat to£100 coat, you're probably not going to stop supporting your team or buying that product. Or if you're going to the gym, if you're a gym goer or you like running, you tend not to stop doing those things. And then, of course, as we get into January, the opposite happens and people become particularly focused on those things.

4:42But generally speaking, sports are a more defensible, better protected part of the consumer economy than I would say most others. So there may be not a bellwether in that sense, but in Bellstaff, we do have a more kind of generically exposed consumer brand. And in that business, as I said earlier, the stores in particular have been performing really strongly. So we are seeing footfall. We are seeing people part ways with their hard earned cash. They're just thinking really deeply before they do that. They are far less spend free than maybe they've been in years gone by. And that idea of stores over online, that would not be a familiar tale of recent years.

5:28Can you detect what's changed in the mentality of some shoppers there? So we have made a decision or have done for the last 18 months now to maybe be slightly counterintuitive. And we've looked to invest in physical stores at a time where many other brands have been pulling out. So there's two parts to that, not just opening new stores. So we've said, OK, we think that there is demand for a Castor store in Leeds or Newcastle or different suburbs of London. And we've got an open new stores invested in no sites, hired new staff. But in addition to that, we've invested within the existing retail estate that we've had.

6:08So we've spent north of three million pounds in the last 18 months investing in, fitting out, upgrading the stores themselves. so we see this real divergence of technology and AI in particular will become ever more prevalent over the next 12, 18, 24 months. I do think that is now an irreversible change. I think a lot of people, let's talk about a bubble and it is kind of too much money gone into AI. My personal view is that we're at the very, very start of that. And how does that link with the store experience and what you're doing? This divergence will come where generally the world will digitise more and more.

6:49Humans, consumers will spend more and more time online. But because they are spending more time online, there will never not be that desire for that human interaction, that in-store experience. but that in-store experience will change seismically versus where it was 10 or 15 or 20 years ago. In my opinion, you're not going to have these big box Identikit department stores that pile it high, sell it cheap. You are going to have these bespoke curated experiences where people can get something that is impossible for the digital world to offer them. that might be a really highly trained, well-educated member of staff that's very passionate about the brand.

7:35No matter how intelligent these chatbots get, it's going to be quite difficult for them to replicate that human experience. It might be the physical environment that they're in that makes them feel that they're walking into a sporting environment that inspires them to go and buy that running shirt or start that extra training programme that they might have been considering. I mean, it sounds like something our parents might have told us the high street would have been like many, many decades ago. Does it feel to you as you talk to others in the retail industry that there is maybe some of them who've seen a booming high street in the past that it's returning to that?

8:14A boom may be an overstatement. I'm not sure. And I'm an eternal optimist, Sean. But even I would struggle to use the booming high street. I do think there'll be this divergence. I think the winners in the consumer world will be one of or both of either incredibly strong digitally. So they will have these very seamless, internationalized, consumer-centric, individualized experiences online. The ability to trade in multiple languages, multiple currencies, distribute product very quickly all over the world. And we're seeing that investment go in from the big winners, particularly in the US. but there will be, and I don't think this will ever go anywhere, it will certainly never vanish, this desire for people to have that human interaction, that physical interaction, but it will be a change.

9:05So the high street in 2030 and 2035 will still be there, there's no doubt about that in my mind. It's going to change significantly from where it is now, never mind where it was 10 years ago. We're at that time of year where we'll often talk about changes on the high street after the Christmas period. At the moment, we're hearing that the likes of Claire's Accessories going to be going into administration again, potential buyers being sought and the like. Do you see more opportunities coming up on high streets for you to move into? Would those Claire's Accessories stores be of interest to you?

9:40Yeah, it's a great question, and it's never nice, obviously, seeing any business fail. What I would say is I spend a lot of time speaking to CEOs. I think it's such an important aspect of being a leader to have the ability to step away from the trenches, try and look beyond the parapet, beyond the next quarter, the next two quarters, and have a vision for, well, what do the next five years look like? How will the world evolve? How will my market evolve? How will I position my business to capitalise on those trends? That, for me, is really the definition of a leader, being able to have that vision.

10:16and dare I say it may be something we've been sorely lacking as a country from a political perspective in recent years, something that is undisputable now in my mind, as I've spent a lot of time speaking to CEOs, is the vast majority, I would say probably 80 % of CEOs in the UK are thinking about reducing headcount, are looking at cutting costs, and there's two big reasons for that. One is technology and AI in particular. Every good CEO that I've spoken to is looking in a very granular way at every single aspect of their business and their workflow and their processes, whether that's manufacturing, whether that's marketing, product design, whether that's delivery and distribution.

11:04Can AI, can technology help me do that process quicker, more efficiently, more cheaply? and that will result in a significant reduction in jobs in my view and i think that will start to happen as quickly as this year i think 2026 will be the year where we really see the accelerant of ai being embedded within businesses and that will reduce jobs available to human beings there is then a second part to that which again i don't like to be one of these people that criticises a government because it is incredibly difficult and I've never walked in their shoes but for the government to impose a national insurance tax which is a direct tax on jobs at a time when technology is evolving at the rate it is and business leaders are looking already at how they can reduce headcount to make their businesses more efficient not only is that utterly illogical, economically, in my mind, that has resulted in, as I said, CEOs, 80 % of CEOs I've spoken to, thinking about reducing headcount.

12:12How does that play out when you talk about that number of bosses thinking about that? How many jobs are we talking here in the industry? Well, I mean, economies are dynamic things, right? So if you take a step back and look at the industrial revolution of kind of centuries gone by, and then the telecoms revolution, and then the internet revolution in kind of the late 90s. No one can predict at the outset of these things, Warren Buffett or anyone in between, can predict exactly how it will play out. When the internet was starting, did anyone know that Amazon would go from being a seller of books online to the Everything store and also have the world's biggest cloud computing platform?

12:54No one could have foreseen that, not even Jeff Bezos. So I don't think it's possible as we sit here today in January 26 to predict the direction of travel, how the exact route that the economy will take and how many jobs will be lost in certain areas and created in other areas. I think that's really difficult. But the destination where we're going as an economy where a lot of entry-level jobs, graduate jobs, process-driven jobs will just not be there, that is very clear in my mind and I think very clear in the mind of many CEOs, how the economy evolves to create different jobs, I think is on the one hand very challenging, but also incredibly exciting because if we get this right as a country and an economy, we do have the opportunity to be a more productive economy than certainly we've ever been in my lifetime and possibly more productive than we've ever been before.

13:54How do you prepare for that as a business if there's not going to be those entry-level jobs, as many as there were in the past, you are still going to need a talent pipeline coming through at some point. So what do you do? Absolutely. So I guess the first thing I do is try and educate myself, which involves speaking to people who are more intelligent on this subject than I am, which is not that difficult. There's a lot of people out there that are far more clued up on this stuff than me. but I try and speak to people who are living and breathing AI in particular how this technology is is affecting people and then I try and spend a lot of time thinking about in a world where a lot more things become commoditized so a lot of processes and systems become commoditized it will not be a competitive advantage to do certain things because all of us will have uh in our phone at the touch of a button, something that has, in the not too distant future, superhuman intelligence, without sounding too grandiose or dramatic about it.

14:56So in that world where we all have access to superhuman intelligence at the click of a finger, what are the things that are irreplaceable? What are the competitive advantages? So I would say brand is a competitive advantage. You can't replicate heritage. As I said earlier, Bellstaff has 101 years now of history. But Castor doesn't. Correct. So you can't replace that. That was, for me, a big reason or a big part of the attraction of acquiring Bell Staff last year. No matter what AI does, it will not be able to create a 100-year-old brand. Heritage is irreplaceable. Look at what's happened in the sports industry in recent years.

15:36The investment from the Saudis in particular, they've launched a golf league in Live Golf. that cannot, will not replace Augusta, St. Andrews, the Masters, these timeless heritage assets that are irreplaceable. They will attract ever more eyeballs. What will change is the monetization of Augusta, of the Masters, of these heritage assets, the way that they connect with customers, the way that customers can be monetized, to use a word, that a lot of people in sport don't like to use. that has already changed significantly in the last 10 years and we're only at the start of that journey so your purchase of bell staff would it be fair to call that like a bit of a diversifying within the business if you've got this fresh brand that's grown so quickly in castor that actually part of you is thinking you that that might not continue that huge growth we've seen and we need something that has a longer term brand resonation so so castor has grown incredibly quickly every year since we started the business in 2016.

16:45When you're going through a growth trajectory, it's the founders, to my mind, the founders' job, the CEO's job to think about, okay, well, what does the next stage of growth look like? Because what made you successful yesterday is not guaranteed to make you successful tomorrow. One of the biggest kind of drivers of capitalism is the nature of competition. If I offer the market something that Nike or Adidas were not, it might be a product offering, it might be a digital offering, they will react. They will not allow me to continue doing that, and that is what we have seen happen. Where have you seen that?

17:22Because to many of us seeing the brands in the sports stores on the various teams around the world, we might not get a glimpse into what's going on behind the scenes there. So we, Castor, worked out a model whereby we could partner with sports teams to do two things. One, help those teams grow their revenues better than Nike or Adidas were, because we would say to those guys, look, Nike sponsor Barcelona, Adidas sponsor Real Madrid, that's their priority. You're probably not their priority. You will be a priority to me. we're going to create more bespoke products we're going to work more collaboratively with you than those big guys can we will have a more agile business model that will be more responsive and reactive than those big guys can their biggest strength which is their size and scale we're going to make a weakness for them by being more agile a speedboat in a market of oil tankers and then we're going to try and use technology and digital platforms more creatively than they have because they are traditional brands to connect with customers to connect with fans to help you grow your revenue that worked very successfully what those guys have which i don't have is multi-billion dollar balance sheets so if they want to sponsor a team partner with a team that i am currently partnered with they can afford to pay not slightly more 5x more 10x more 20x more than i can afford and they can write it off as a marketing cost i don't have that luxury so i need to be constantly one step ahead that's the nature of innovation so you are you at a different phase now of Castor.

18:56Does it feel to you, I mean, we spoke many years ago about, you know, those first five years or so of the business and growing it from a startup. Do you still feel like, are you a startup? Are you a challenger? I think I'll always have a startup mindset. I don't think that will ever change. And I think that's such a powerful competitive advantage to not be bureaucratic, to not make decisions by committee, to be entrepreneurial, to think long-term, to take bold action and have a different risk profile than maybe a manager does. A manager exists to get their salary each month to earn a bonus at the end of the year.

19:32A founder, not to say those things aren't important, but you are an owner of the business. You're thinking, well, how much value can I create over the next 10, 20 years? That for me is a big differentiator between founders and managers. so I don't think we'll ever lose that mindset equally I now have 1200 staff across the three businesses that we own naturally you will have a different mindset and way of thinking about things when you have 1200 staff and shareholders and a board of directors than when it's two brothers sat at their mum and dad's kitchen table with literally nothing to lose there's no downside at that point so take every risk that you can because what's the worst that can happen You literally have nothing to lose.

20:20So, of course, there's an evolution there. We've evolved as a business. The market has evolved. What doesn't change is that desire to be entrepreneurial, that desire to be innovative, that desire to have to be one step ahead of your competition. Because no matter how quickly I grow for the next 10 years, it's unlikely that I will be $30 billion a year revenue, which is where Nike is. so if I'm not going to be the biggest I have to be the fastest. And have you noticed others coming up on your coattails a little bit as well whether it's on your coattails that might be doing a disservice to other brands in recent years particularly in the northwest of England it feels like it's quite a hub for this kind of innovation where we've seen the likes of people might notice it in their gyms on the high street the likes of Represent or Adenola all of a sudden do you have competition from a different angle that you didn't have those years ago?

21:17So it's fantastic that the Northwest has become a genuine hub for, I think, firstly, entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, it's a great place to start a business in the Northwest. I am undoubtedly biased, to be clear, but I'm equally incredibly proud that we've started our business, Castor, in the Northwest. We've created jobs in the Northwest, and there is a deep pool of talent in this part of the world, really well-educated, high-skilled, driven people, communities. There's an ambitious outlook on the world in this part of England that is a fantastic place to start a business. I see it as the opposite of competition.

21:55I see it as this is a rising tide that lifts all boats. So we all have slightly different positions in the market. Castor is a premium performance brand. Adenol is more focused on women's wear and maybe more of an athleisure brand. So there's less direct competition. There is more of a benefit. The more brands that are being launched in Manchester and the North West, the more people they're attracting, the more investment they're attracting. That is the definition of an ecosystem and we all benefit from it. What more does that ecosystem need? Investment in the north of England has been a very big political hot topic for a long, long, long time now.

22:33Do you feel like you've seen the rewards of the words of many politicians? on the one hand yes and again it's always slightly dangerous to talk about individuals but i do think it's true to say that andy burnham has done a fantastic job for greater manchester attracting inbound investment making it a place that students want to stay after they graduate from the fantastic universities that we've got in manchester liverpool leeds newcastle birmingham Manchester is a destination for many of that talent group which is brilliant and again that feeds off itself that means more businesses want to launch here that means there's better housing here that means that the tax rate locally is higher for me that is a great example of how it can work well so locally I think it's been fantastic nationally it's far more difficult to be as excited so as i alluded to earlier the lack of coherence that we've had at national level for me is really difficult to understand a government cannot be simultaneously in my mind pro-business pro-entrepreneur pro-wealth creation while simultaneously want to increase taxes and make workers' rights more robust.

23:53Whilst there is a debate to be had, and this is probably not the show for it, about is it right to kind of increase workers' rights, and that is a very valid debate, it's clear in my mind that by doing that, by increasing the workers' or launching this workers' rights bill, certainly at the same time as increasing national insurance will result in less people being hired. Whether the government know that or not, or whether their advisers have explained it to them or not, I don't know, but that is crystal clear in my mind. If you want to reduce the amount of people smoking in the UK, you introduce a smoking tax.

24:31If you want to reduce the amount of people speeding on roads and in road accidents, you have speed cameras. That is a tax on speed. You will reduce people's speed. You will reduce jobs by introducing a job tax. The government will say at the moment, this money needs to be raised from somewhere to pay our way. Completely agree. And no one's saying it's easy, but you cannot say that you're a pro-business, pro-growth government. They came in saying that their number one priority was growth. And then they said, well, we're going to reduce disability benefits, the winter fuel allowance. We're going to make these changes to the welfare state that will allow us to save money.

25:09You turn on those things and then come and tax jobs. Not to dwell too much on the politics, as you say, but just given that you mentioned Andy Birdham, I mean, whenever he gets talked about, the mayor of Greater Manchester talks about on a national level, do you expect the policies to continue for Greater Manchester? They would if he had more of a national role at Westminster? There seems to be a bit of a discrepancy between what you're describing locally has happened and what may well happen and what his views would be nationally. I think you could put it this way. What Andy Burnham has achieved in Greater Manchester is fantastic.

25:50It's been fantastic for business. I think it's been fantastic, albeit there's always nuances to this. It's been fantastic for society more broadly. He has made Greater Manchester a fantastic place to live, work, start a business, grow a business. That is fantastic. It's brilliant for me and Castor to be here. is that replicable at a national scale i don't know are there elements of what he's in what he's introduced here that would be replicable at a national scale my strong instinct is that absolutely yes there would be so whilst there's bigger challenges at a national level kind of logically there are also bigger opportunities so if he if andy's been able to attract businesses to Manchester in the way that he has locally, could he do the same attracting businesses to the UK more broadly?

26:47I don't see any reason why he couldn't. So I do think that's going to be a really interesting development to watch over the next 12 months. Getting back to Kitts, which is more what we'd associate Castor with over the years. You talked about the areas that you might grow into. How do you pick where you might go into next? Is it, I don't know, certain sports, certain size of businesses, what's happening with those individual sports at a moment in time? So there's several factors, all of which there's an overarching factor, which is the commercial consideration. So if you think about different sports categories, football, rugby, cricket, Formula One, they give you pillars that you can look at.

27:41You can look at a sport as a category within each of those categories. You then have geographic categories. So the Premier League is kind of a world unto itself. It's that big and powerful. But you've got the French Football League, the Spanish Football League, the Italian. at any given moment in time, each of those sports and each of those geographies will offer a different risk-reward dynamic. So in any of the partnerships that we do in football, rugby, cricket, Formula One, we will look at what investment will we make into that sport and what return on investment do we think we can get based on the amount of kits and products that we can sell to the fans of that particular team.

28:23If we do a partnership with a Serie A team or a cricket team in Australia or a Saudi rugby team, whatever that is, we'll look at the sport and the geography. How much product do we think we can sell? And then secondly, what do we think the opportunity is for the cast or brand in that region for the fans of that team? So using Saudi Arabia as an example, the sports market is quite nascent. So maybe you will not sell as many football jerseys in Saudi Arabia as you would a Premier League football team or a French League football team. But is the scope to grow the Castor brand in Saudi Arabia greater than it is maybe in some of the more mature European markets?

29:07My view is that, yes, that longer term potential is great. And as I said earlier, one of the biggest differentiators, competitive advantages for being a founder over a manager is I can think in 10 year cycles, most managers don't get that privilege. So I'm very comfortable investing now, even if the short term return on investment is lower, if I believe that investment will position Castor to capitalise over the longer term. A question that's often asked when we hear about businesses expanding in Saudi Arabia is the human rights questions there. How do you approach that, seeing that as a possible fruitful area for Castor?

29:52It's complex. It's difficult. You have to consider it. You're never going to please everyone. I guess in really simple terms, to try and simplify something which is complex and difficult, if the British government see fit to have diplomatic relations and trade arms with a country I don't see any reason why I shouldn't sell football shirts to them so that doesn't mean that you'll ever get every decision right that doesn't mean that you'll ever have perfect information but broadly speaking I'm not a diplomat I'm not a politician my view is if I can grow a business if I can trade internationally with a country that's bringing income to the UK that's allowing me to create jobs in the UK that's increasing the taxes that I can be that I pay in the UK on a net basis notwithstanding I'll never make everyone happy those things are a win in my mind and when you talk about the the different sports the different teams markets that you might look at you've had backing recently part of that belstaff deal that you've talked about from inios who of course the massive petrochemical company also big sports arm of inios as well would you potentially do you have in the spreadsheet lined up for when that man united contract might be up with its uh kit manufacturer at the moment could that be a tie-up we could see so so so that certainly was not the the reason or or any part of our thinking behind the belstaff acquisition with Bellstaff we were incredibly excited about what is a phenomenal in my mind heritage brand as I said earlier you cannot replace heritage it just takes time and grit and blood sweat and tears to build in the case of Bellstaff over over a century so that was the driver behind the acquisition we were very excited about can we help Bellstaff leverage Castor's digital expertise we've built castor in a digital era we've built castor as a digital first brand bell staff was built in a non-digital era in a very much a physical world so we do think there's a way we can help them with that that was the primary reason for doing the acquisition that said i am an entrepreneur i am a an innate optimist i do love doing things that um maybe other people wouldn't have the audacity to try and do.

32:17I'm a big believer that if you're not pushing at the envelope in life, you're not pushing hard enough. So certainly never say never about any big sports partnerships in the future. And you don't seem perturbed at all by the bumps in the road. They've gained a fair few headlines. In recent years, there was the sweaty-looking kits issue that Castor had with Aston Villa a few years ago, and then you didn't keep that contract. Even just in the middle of last year, we saw headlines of supply chain issues with the England Women's Rugby World Cup kit in the run-up. How do you... What happened there? How did that end up going wrong at such a major event?