Louis Jones, a Coventry City fan, has had a remarkable five years since creating his own company, but even he could never have expected where this journey would take him.
He’s the founder of Surprise Shirts, a mystery shirt box company which he started at the age of just sixteen – and it has grown exponentially, with a couple of shirts being handed out to friends turning into over 1,000 shirts on a website that has touched every corner of the globe.
A unique part of their story is involvement with a club called Uprising FC on the island of Anguilla in the Caribbean. With a population of 15,000 and just one football league, it’s obscure – but this is the story of how they became known all the way across the Atlantic Ocean.
I had a chat with Louis about the cross-ocean collaboration.
PlayStyles (PS): Uprising FC, Louis. It’s just the most incredible thing to me. Can you just talk through that a little bit, and how it came about?
Yeah, it’s crazy, I would say that’s probably the kind of craziest place that the business has led me to.
In 2022, we ran a competition on Twitter to win some tickets to join us in hospitality at a Coventry game. A guy called Gareth Thomas won. He was a football blogger, so I just got talking to him at the game. Got on really well. Seems a nice guy.
He tells me that he’s the media officer of a club in Anguilla, and immediately, I go… “where’s Anguilla?” Because nobody’s ever heard of it, right? It’s a little island with 15,000 people in the Caribbean.
He tells me all about the club. It’s just a local club, but they play in the top flight because there is only one division!! It’s all FIFA-recognized. All the games are live streamed. It’s professionally organized. They’ve got commentators on the games. You can watch it for free. And I just thought, ‘this sounds incredible’.
I thought, ‘right, I’ve got to watch that’. So logged into YouTube that night, they were playing, and just watched the game live stream. The commentators know the players, so they were taking the mick. You know, it was it was hilarious and I just fell in love. That kind of standard of football being so varied. Some people who aren’t great footballers, some clearly better than the others, the kind of, you know, Caribbean dried out pitch. Uh, you know, I just fell in love there.
PS: I can completely get that. Football is a special thing. How does this turn into a collaboration?
But what struck me was that Uprising were wearing a very plain grey strip. Something kind of ticked in my brain and thought, that’s the perfect opportunity to help a club however many thousand miles away it is. So we at Surprise Shirts brokered a deal where we put them in contact with a kit manufacturer to design essentially the first properly commercialised kit in Anguillan football, really.
So we put up an amount of money to Uprising to sponsor that. We put our logo on the front and in turn, organized all the logistics for getting the kits produced, helped design them, and then we stocked them in our Surprise Shirts boxes as well. So that was kind of the dawn of the relationship. There’s this team in Anguilla playing in the Anguilla Football League, watching it on live stream, wearing a Surprise Shirts-sponsored kit. That’s really exciting, really cool design.
The guys at Uprising loved it so much that after that, they asked me to be the Commercial Director. A year ago, I was in Anguilla, got to meet all the guys, went there for a holiday. And later in the week, I trained with the team a couple of times and I made my debut for Uprising FC in the Anguilla President’s Cup. So all of that came about just from a chance meeting on social media, designing kits, and then becoming the Commercial Director of a club.
We’ve just released new kits, and the away shirt sponsor is a former Anguilla international and West Indies international cricketer-turned reggae artist, a guy called Omari Banks. We negotiated that sponsorship deal with him when we were on the island. So it’s local businesses sponsoring it now rather than us, but we’ve helped design them again and broker that deal.
PS: I completely forgot you played for them. That must have been surreal.
That means I haven’t milked it enough.
PS: 100%. Do you know how much of a financial uptick your work with them has caused for them?
Uprising earned a sponsorship fee from us, and then on that first deal, they earned a commission from the manufacturer for every shirt sold. So if we bought one, every shirt that we bought for our surprise boxes, they got a kickback.
In that first season increased the club’s playing budget over 300%. Which is mental. I mean, it’s not big numbers, right? But for an amateur football league… there’s no funding for the clubs outside of the FIFA grants that they get just to insure the players for if someone gets an injury or whatever. So yeah, it made a massive difference.
PS: The power of football fashion in full force! What’s your involvement nowadays?
I’ve actually stepped back from my role as the Commercial Director. I’m still involved, you know, I still support the team, still speak to all the guys, but just on a day-to-day, we just haven’t got the time. I’m very proud of the legacy we’ve left. There’s an Uprising FC Supporters Club group chat with people in seven different countries, supporting the club, watching every game, buying the new shirts, sponsoring players.
We took what was the ultimate grassroots football club in terms of… no social media exposure, so remote, so far from everything. It’s the essence of football, really, that club, the community, the people that are involved, you know, it’s mates that work together, it’s brothers, it’s things like that, you know, a real community club. And just through the power of social media, it helped raise the profile and raise some massive funds for the club.
It’s one of the best things I’ve ever done.
A big thanks to Louis for getting involved with the piece. You can find his company at surpriseshirts.co.uk – where you can purchase a mystery shirt box for adults and children – with a range of exciting options available.
Anguilla isn’t the only small island PlayStyles are covering this week: soon, you’ll be able to hear from the designer of a poignant shirt for the final UN-recognised country in the world without an official football team.
