Kick Game is a high growth brand which stocks exclusive, collectable, and rare sneakers and streetwear by big names such as Nike, Off-White, Air Jordan and Yeezy. Launched in 2013, Kick Game ships worldwide via its popular Shopify webstore and operates through six UK retail stores.
On today's podcast, we speak to CEO of Kick Game, Alicia Thompson, who shares her story of how the brand's innovative marketing strategy achieved 353% revenue growth, leading them to nab 4th fastest-growing brand in the UK in the Brightpearl Lightning 50. She also revealed how the business intends to maintain high levels of growth going forwards...
Show Notes | Series 2, Episode 8 | Kick Game
About our podcast
Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 E-Commerce Growth Hacking podcast, hosted by Caroline Baldwin, is a bitesize 15-minute podcast that gets under the hood of highly successful e-commerce brands to discover the key technologies they are using to power growth.
About our guest
Kick Game is an omnichannel footwear and apparel brand which stocks exclusive, collectable and rare sneakers and streetwear by big names such as Nike, Off-White, Air Jordan and Yeezy. Launched in 2013, Kick Game ships worldwide via its e-commerce webstore and also operates through six UK retail stores. With a reported 353% revenue growth, they placed 4th fastest-growing brand in the UK in the Brightpearl Lightning 50. For this podcast, we spoke to Alicia Thompson, CEO of Kick Game.
Transcript highlights:
- “Kick Game started nine years ago but our growth has truly been phenomenal in the last three years. Essentially we’re an omnichannel sneaker reseller - we have a Shopify online store and six physical stores in the UK, and in recent years we’ve been really focused on our product and marketing to help us grow.”
- “During Covid we grew a lot faster than we thought - my operations team were holding down the fort as the orders came through. There’s been a shift towards athleisure and streetwear becoming more high-end fashion, and that’s trickled down into sneakers globally - in the US and the UK. It’s a combination of hip hop music and the rap scene fuelling it; customers seeing talented artists wearing sneakers, so that’s organically fuelled us from an economic standpoint.”
- “We’ve really focused on online content through different channels. So it was the digital side combined with a real life focus that has helped us a lot. Over the last 24 months we’ve really evolved our website and we’ve been gearing up for when the retail world finally goes back to normal. We always knew people would come back to the high street, so we wanted to lead with digital but also gear up for the fact that real-life retail was still important. We’re using our physical stores to engage with our customers and create in-store digital content and encourage user-generated content; basically pushing those two sides so that they coalesce from a marketing perspective.”
- “We started our first YouTube shows at the start of Covid. Our Covent Garden store closed, which we’d just fitted out - so we set up a pop-up and used that space as a way to connect with our customers and community. We started a show called ‘Just In’ - promoting what was hitting that week in terms of sneaker drops, hidden gems, etc. One of the Founders is close with a number of rappers such as Fredo, so we got him into the store, for example. The Youtube show format has been done in the US, but we wanted a British take on it, and the show has really developed in the last few years - it’s entertaining but comedic and we have fun with our guests. Tiktok has been very successful for us as well but Youtube has definitely been our main point of focus in the last few years.”
- “We grew faster than we expected and that was a huge challenge for the operations team and tech team - all the systems supporting our growth were very strained, so we had to scale quickly. We were using external developers and now we’re setting up our own in-house team so we could keep up with demand while also filling the gaps, operations-wise.”
- “Once stores reopened we had to move quickly - so there’s also been challenges around that, in terms of recruitment and ensuring our team really pulls together and is passionate about what we’re creating. We’re 150 strong now and when the team feels they can step up, we feel invincible, so after what we’ve experienced we now know we can get through huge challenges and be really proud.”
- “Christmas is approaching so things seem less daunting now we have a strong team to get us through. The economic climate makes things interesting - it’s going to have an impact but we seem to be in a category that’s a bit insulated. Our customers are prioritising footwear it seems, perhaps because a lot of our base is younger customers that still live at home, so thankfully we are heading into Christmas with a lot of positivity.”
- “Over the last 12 months we’ve really relied on tech to support our growth. Because of the unique nature of our business we have to track every single pair of shoes, know where it is, who it belongs to, and what we bought it for - so there’s been a lot of work linking the website and ERP system behind the scenes. We’ve recently expanded into the EU - which we pulled back on post-Brexit but now we’ve done a lot of work to set up a warehouse over there and have systems there as well. WMS systems don’t really fit our business model so we’ve got an advanced inventory system to carry out a lot of processes for us.”
- “Having an in-house development team has helped massively, we’ve found that completely remote teams don’t work for us entirely - the day-to-day challenges we have in retail are sometimes better investigated in person.”
- “It’s fantastic to have made the Lightning 50 - I knew our numbers were strong but didn’t realise we’d rank so highly. The founders and myself are over the moon. It’s a huge pat on the back for our team and a huge cause for achievement and we’re having some drinks for it tomorrow night.”
Top takeaways
● Kick Game is the 4th fastest-growing e-commerce retailer in the UK according to Brightpearl’s Lightning 50 - and also won 2nd place in the Fashion category and their home city of London.
● Despite the challenges to the retail industry in recent years, the brand reached a phenomenal 353% growth rate.
● The tech that’s driven their growth includes a Shopify website, advanced inventory management software (built in-house) and a popular YouTube channel.
● Kick Game pushed through Covid store closures by launching its YouTube show, ‘Just In’ which uses a comedic interview format and promotes new products.