👕 Reece Wabara: Man City to £50m
This week The Long Play brings you the story of Reece Wabara. The 29-year old who retired from football at 26 to build the eCommerce powerhouse Manière De Voir.
Meet Reece Wabara.
On 22nd May 2011, Reece Wabara made his Premier League debut for Manchester City, coming on for Pablo Zabaleta in the last game of Manchester City’s successful season.
Ten years later, Wabara no longer plays football. Instead, Reece runs the £50m e-commerce fashion empire Manière De Voir.
This week, we look into his amazing story.
Despite being a talented defender, Wabara never quite made it at the top level of the game.
In the years following his debut, he went on loan to several clubs trying to play his way into a very competitive Manchester City system.
In late 2013, Reece founded Manière De Voir whilst on loan at Doncaster Rovers. Reece is very good friends with Liam Morgan who was building a fashion brand himself at the time, Gymshark.
The first Manière De Voir collection included T-Shirts, Hoodies and tracksuits and was largely modelled by friends and other footballers Reece had relationships with.
It wasn’t long before the luxury sports brand started to take off. By 2017, MDV had 300k followers on Instagram with some high profile clients sporting the gear.
In 2017 Reece had a decision to make. Plagued by injuries and torn between trying to make football and fashion work simultaneously, Reece decided to officially retire in 2017.
Shortly after, everything changed.
In 2019, sales grew 42% year-on-year with Manière De Voir posting a record £1.1m profit on revenues of £10.3m.
A year later, the profit tripled. Manière De Voir posted £3.3m profit on £23.4m revenue.
Manière De Voir has never taken outside investment and now employs 24 people.
Reece started the brand with £15,000 capital and the business is entirely built on Shopify. Facebook Ads are used to scale the business aggressively.
Infact, after the growth in 2020, Reece made an eBook outlining how he used Facebook ads to scale MDV. The Facebook Ads Blueprint cost £500 each and sold 1,000 copies in a week.
With rising costs, slow supply chains and crippling GDPR regulations on Facebook Ads, the eCommerce landscape is set to be a challenging arena for Reece and other retail store owners in 2021.
However, in March of this year, Reece posted a very encouraging tweet to his very engaging Twitter feed:
A brilliant success story from Reece, who is still only 29 years old.
More stories of this nature in the coming weeks.
🏀 The interesting case of Ben Simmons
It’s no secret that Ben Simmons the Point Guard for the Philadelphia 76ers wants to leave. Late last season Ben Simmons passed up on a WIDE-OPEN dunk at a critical point in an elimination play-off game against Atlanta. Whilst not entirely his fault, the 76ers lost that match and were ultimately eliminated.
Simmons is one of the highest paid players in the NBA and is due $33m this season. However, the new NBA season starts in two weeks and Ben has not shown up to the 76ers pre-season training camp. In a similarly interesting turn of events, the 76ers have decided not to pay him. The $8.25m payment (25% of his salary) Simmons was due on October 1 was withheld by the franchise and placed into an Escrow account.
If Ben isn’t traded before the season and refuses to play for the team he is set to lose with $227,000 EACH game missed. He even recently like a post on Instagram breaking down the fines he is facing for not reporting to work!
I’ve never seen anything like this before I have no idea how this pans out. Off-the-court, Ben is dating Maya Jama which has absolutely no relevance on this story but you know… worth mentioning.
👕 Raheem Sterling launches his own brand, 1692
Earlier this year Raheem Sterling shocked many by becoming one of the few global ambassadors of New Balance.
After leaving Nike and becoming a free agent in 2019, his signature was one of the most sought after in the space, with Puma rumoured to be willing to pay £100m to secure Raheem and make him their highest paid ambassador.
That deal collapsed however, and New Balance secured his signature a year later.
Last week, Raheem hosted a star-studded event in London where he launched his own brand, sixteenninetytwo.
Similar to Reece, the Man City star’s brand is contemporary and is targeted at fashion conscious individuals.
Fred Perry is a massive fashion retailer in the UK with revenues of £122.2m as of 2019. Before long, I expect todays crop of British athletes to leverage their platforms to build even bigger brands and become staples of the English high-street.
Reece and Raheem have already taken their steps!
📺 The best thing I’ve seen this week:
I’m Jordan, I enjoy bring you these articles every week. Especially inspiring stories like Reece’s. Reece doesnt speak often, but Lewis Morgan who exited from Gymshark with a £100m payout has begun a YouTube channel where Reece is a regular guest. See the most engaging episode below:
See you next week.