Meet the London Players who Co-Create, Launch and Endorse a Football Revolution
“No Özil, no Pogba, no Messi. Players like us – we’re the faces of Glitch”
Daniel, Lucas and Robert from London are passionate footballers, social media experts and just three of the many creative minds behind ‘GLITCH’. The revolutionary football boot concept is exactly right for them. They reason why it’s so perfect for this trio is that it is made by them.
Personalization has been hot for years; everything from managing your own music choices, creating a unique workout for your exercise needs, designing your own trainer with your favorite color and fit, most consumers can find a product to fulfill their every need.
At first glance, Glitch fits in the above group; it’s an unusual new take on football boot design. A second look reveals huge hype and massive interest.
The game changers
Daniel Adjei and Lucas Siqueira first heard of GLITCH while on their way to a football tournament. Daniel is 23-years-old and passionate about the game. Lucas is three years younger, and a sports science student at Brunel University in London. In many ways they’re chalk and cheese, but they do share a few key attributes: they both live in London and they’re both totally mad about football and now mad about the new boot with interchangeable skins and their part in the testing of not only this new footwear concept, but also the product launch and community creation around GLITCH.
Around 90 young players were invited to help pre-test the product, critiquing and improving it at every stage right up to the launch. Approximately two dozen players are now working for the project either at customer service or fitting sessions or are involved in content and product creation. “GLITCH is a perfect example of our ‘Open Source’ philosophy,” says Marc Makowski, Director of Business Development. “We believe you can only create genuinely cool products if you bring in creative thinkers from a whole range of different fields, letting them influence the product by giving them scope to develop their ideas. For example, the guys on this project know exactly what it takes to make a really good boot. But they also excel at inspiring others.”
Recruiting more dedicated followers of football
Robert, 21-year-old student and amateur footballer explains, “We choose people who are about our age, who love the game as much as we do and live in London,” to bring into the GLITCH community via an exclusive digital code on Instagram, for example.
Robert runs the chat function on the GLITCH app and answers questions from the GLITCH community. Daniel participates in co-creation sessions, helping to shape the design in ways that reflect what the players actually want. Lucas, the team communicator, uses his smartphone to create key elements such as videos for the GLITCH app. The first of these has already racked up more than 100,000 views, while his Instagram following grew from 15,000 to over 23,000 in the space of a few days.
A revolutionary launch
“Forget everything you knew about the process of launching a brand-new football boot” – that’s how the ‘SoccerBible’ football blog described the GLITCH revolution. The scale of the revolution is clear from social media, where GLITCH is attracting the same level of interest and response as conventional product launches backed by big-budget media campaigns. For a product currently available in only one location and worn by fewer than 2,000 players, that’s a huge achievement – and a sign of things to come.
“What really surprised us was how the community turned GLITCH into their own product,” says Makowski. For him and his colleagues, the project is an equation with lots of variables. A revolutionary product. An untested marketing model. Extremely close customer contact. External creatives working with the adidas brand to define every aspect of the product. All this plus a trial run in London– a city regarded as one of the most important in the game. According to Makowski, “it’s like a baptism of fire.
”That said, the home city of Robert, Daniel and Lucas offers a clearly defined playing field. The ‘London lab’ is ideal for testing, developing and modifying new ideas in real time before rolling them out on a global scale. If something doesn’t work, it hasn’t cost the earth. And if it does work, it can be scaled up quickly and easily.
One thing is certain: new styles will continue to be developed in collaboration with the GLITCH community, although the location, mechanics and regularity have yet to be decided.
Ultimately, it depends on those who use and design these outstanding products: co-creators such as Lucas, Daniel and Robert.
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