Before any of the accounting and tax work, before Evolve existed at all, I built a football teamwear brand called SK1PR. I started it during COVID, made a genuinely expensive mistake in my first year of sourcing, rebuilt the whole supply chain around a manufacturing partner in Pakistan, ran it for four years, and then sold the majority stake — deliberately not to the highest bidder. This is the actual story, not the tidied-up version.
Starting a teamwear brand while the world was shut
SK1PR started because I could see a gap: football teams, clubs and grassroots sides needed kit — training wear, matchday kit, the everyday gear a team actually lives in — and a lot of the existing options in that space felt generic, slow, or badly run as businesses. Starting it during COVID sounds like terrible timing, and in some ways it was, but it also meant I had time most people don't normally get to sit down and actually build something properly rather than launching it half-formed around a day job.
Grassroots football didn't stop wanting kit just because the world had shut down — if anything, teams coming back from lockdowns needed refreshed kit at exactly the point everyone's budgets were tightest, which meant price, quality and reliability all mattered more than they might have in an ordinary year.
The £5,000 lesson I took in year one
I made a mistake early on that I still think about, because it taught me more than almost anything since. I committed to a supplier without doing the diligence I'd now consider basic — production quality, lead times, communication, the ability to actually deliver at the volumes and deadlines I needed. The kit came back short of what I'd promised customers, on both quality and timing, and I ended up eating a loss of around £5,000 to make it right rather than pass the problem downstream to teams and clubs who'd trusted me with their order.
It was a genuinely painful amount of money at that stage of the business. But the alternative — delivering substandard kit to grassroots teams and hoping nobody noticed, or fighting every customer over a refund — would have killed the brand's reputation before it had one worth protecting. I chose to absorb the cost, be transparent with the customers affected, and rebuild the supply side properly rather than patch it.
Rebuilding around a manufacturing partner, not a supplier
The fix wasn't finding a cheaper supplier. It was finding a genuine manufacturing partner — a Pakistani manufacturer I ended up working with closely for the rest of the company's life — where the relationship was built on actual communication, shared standards, and a willingness to solve problems together rather than a transactional order-and-hope arrangement. That distinction matters enormously in physical products: a supplier fulfils an order; a partner tells you when something's going to be a problem before it becomes one.
Once that relationship was established, quality and reliability transformed. We were able to commit to teams with real confidence, hit lead times consistently, and build a reputation that started generating repeat orders and referrals rather than one-off purchases. That's the point at which SK1PR actually started feeling like a business rather than a project I was trying to keep alive.
Four years of actually running it
SK1PR ran for four years, and most of what I learned about running a business — cash flow discipline, the gap between revenue and profit, managing a supply chain across borders, customer service under pressure, and simply the grind of keeping a small operation moving week after week — came from that period, not from any qualification I held before it. It's a different kind of education to studying accounting and tax professionally, and I think having done both is a large part of why I can talk to founders now in a way that isn't purely theoretical.
It also taught me what actually makes a small brand durable: consistency in product quality, genuine relationships with the teams and clubs you serve, and being straightforward when something goes wrong rather than disappearing until it blows over.
Why I sold — and why not to the highest bidder
By the time I sold the majority stake, SK1PR had a real identity, real customers and a supply chain that worked. I had a few interested parties, and the highest offer wasn't the one I took. What mattered more to me was who was actually going to carry the brand forward properly — someone who'd protect what it stood for with the teams and clubs who'd built loyalty to it, rather than someone treating it purely as an asset to extract value from before moving on.
That's not a purely sentimental decision, though sentiment was genuinely part of it. It was also a practical judgement: a brand handed to someone who understands and respects what made it work is more likely to keep generating value — for the customers, for any earn-out or ongoing arrangement tied to the deal, and for my own reputation attached to something I'd built from nothing. Taking the highest number from a buyer who was going to strip it for parts would have been a short-term win and a longer-term regret.
What it taught me that I now apply at Evolve
Running SK1PR through a founder's actual mistakes — the bad early supplier call, the cash pressure, the four years of decisions that either compounded well or didn't — is why I don't advise clients on structuring or tax in the abstract. I've made the expensive early mistake myself, absorbed the cost rather than pass it on, rebuilt around better partners, and made a considered exit decision rather than an obvious one. That's the lens I bring to every founder I now sit across the table from, whether the conversation is about UAE corporate tax or simply how to run a business properly under pressure.