Stories
Athleisure has seen a rise in demand as consumer behaviour adapts to the desire to incorporate sports and fitness activities into our daily routines. Buoyed further since Covid-19 by a workforce working from home and exercise being one of the few outlets of release, activewear is now a multi- billion euro market. A fledgling Irish brand hopes to disrupt this space via a luxury strategy.
Keohane Athletic Club is an Irish sportswear brand on a mission to infuse meaning and storytelling in sports design. Their motto “running on memory” fuels their design aesthetic and the community they are trying to build.
The founders, Paul Galvin and Ashley McDonnell, make for an unlikely duo, but the sum of their partnership is proving key to the development of a relatively new concept in this space. Galvin, a former All-Ireland Kerry footballer is known for his prowess both on and off the football field. This isn’t his first fashion rodeo either. His menswear label for Dunnes Stores is a bestseller.
McDonnell, a former athlete herself with 13 All Ireland medals under her belt, is an Irish technologist within the luxury industry. She began her career in Paris at the headquarters of the world’s leading fashion brands, amongst them LVMH Group’s Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. She later joined Google as Global Luxury Account Manager at the EMEA Hub in Dublin, helping iconic fashion and beauty houses revolutionise their businesses and marketing strategies through technology.
Earlier this year, she moved to Geneva to join luxury fashion and cosmetics group PUIG as global e-commerce and digital media manager, working with brands such as Christian Louboutin, Jean Paul Gaultier and Paco Rabanne.
The two met after Galvin watched McDonnell interview British Irish fashion photographer and film director Perry Ogden for Polimoda Fashion School and the two began collaborating. While Galvin comes up with the creative ideas, McDonnell overseas the business end. “I’ve been working now for eight years in digital media and bringing brands to life so we’re taking the luxury approach, the way luxury brands build themselves with storytelling, but it works. I help Paul translate his ideas into stories that can be told on digital platforms and then eventually within retail as well, although for now we are direct to consumer and club focused.”
Storytelling is at the heart of the brand, and each product is designed to remember forgotten Irish sporting figures and teams, the resulting prints represent memories of times past, but with a contemporary aesthetic. “Our goal is to bring meaningful design and storytelling to Irish sportswear, and to provide Irish people and teams around the world with a product they will wear with feeling and a sense of connection,” says McDonnell.
The collections to date have been rife with meaningful motifs. For instance, the Transatlantic print long sleeved jersey features a replica print of the St Louis ship which carried GAA teams and Irish emigrant passengers to New York from Cobh, and is inspired by an archive image Galvin found of the Kerry football team in 1931 training aboard the deck of the St Louis as fellow passengers watch on. Meanwhile, the Places jersey is a camouflage print, made up of maps of Tralee, Kerry, Munster and Ireland.
“It’s cultural storytelling,” notes Galvin, “with plenty of scope because I have stories that relate to other counties and remembers players, teams, jerseys and cultural figures. A lot of these figures in hurling and football from the 1900s were also politicians, military, writers, poets and all sorts. It’s very rich from a cultural point of view. So it will become an Irish storytelling brand.”
Although the focus for now is the Irish consumer, to date half of their sales have come from outside of Ireland. “We’ve seen a lot of interest in the US which makes a lot of sense with the Irish population over there and with the UK as well, but we’ve had orders from Singapore, California, London, so we know there’s a thirst for sportswear that’s more expressive and not something you’re going to see on everybody,” says McDonnell. “Everything is moving towards a more niche focus anyway. I see it with what I’m doing everyday with PUIG – niche fragrances, niche fashion and that’s going to be the same with sportswear as well.
“Especially when athleisure is so popular and you don’t want to be wearing the same thing as everyone else, you want it to be able to tell a story, and say it was designed in Ireland by an Irish designer and it commemorates actual sportspeople that achieved great things. That’s what we know is going to make us different and in terms of our actual goals and objectives, business-wise, get our direct-to-consumer model strong in Ireland and then we’ll start looking at different markets, but it’s already clear, the US will be really important for us.
“We’ll look later at the retail focus. Because of the print, if you see it in person it’s much more impressive, it’s hard to tell that story digitally, so we know that there’s a space for us in retail as well so we’ll look at that later. It’ll probably start with a pop up but then go into a permanent space. If you look at fashion sales, it’s growing online, but it’s still less than 10 per cent of fashion sales overall. So there is still a big opportunity for us. I love the concept of O to O, whether it’s online to offline or offline to online, you can test a lot with having pop ups with limited stock, where you scan a QR code and it’s going to be with you at home in a day or two, this kind of stuff is going to be the future for the brand.”
Completely self-funded by Galvin, Keohane Athletic is much more than a pet project. But with so much talk about overconsumption of late it begs the question, does the world need yet another brand? “I did it because of all the other brands, actually. Too many brands, particularly in the GAA sphere, under-serve clubs in terms of teamwear design, they undersell communities from the point of community storytelling,” he said.
Technology will play a major role in the brand’s development. “We want to leverage 3D, AR and VR,” says McDonnell. “We are looking first within Ireland and have had some really interesting conversations already. There’s such talent in tech here that we don’t want to underestimate that. In terms of our size guides, chatbot assistants, these are all things we have in the pipeline. Even in terms of actual physical product and design.
“Paul finds inspiration in everything so our biggest problem for the next year is figuring out what time to launch what items because we have so much ready to go, which is great. We want to have variety. It’s not about mass-producing products that could be from any brand and putting our logo on it, a lot of thought goes into every single item, which is what differentiates us and hopefully what people will appreciate.”
Data driven collections will also help inform stock and direction. “Coming from my background, you can really dig into what are people looking for, how people choose colours, materials and making sure we can leverage all that information as well and that’ll help us have the most responsible production. We don’t want to end up in situations where we overestimate how much we’re going to sell or end up with dead stock. Immersive e-commerce, 360˚ rotation, videos on all of our product pages so you can see how the product looks on the models which we are very excited about. We just want to make it as easy as possible for someone to envision what this product looks like in real life, especially if they aren’t actually seeing it in any stores yet.”
Galvin has also spent a lot of time researching responsible materials. “It’s something we’re very aware of and want to make sure this is a responsible brand in every way, not just in its storytelling, but also in its production. Everything is produced with sustainability in mind.”
While Brexit and Covid have proved logistically testing for the new brand, Galvin says the biggest challenge is yet to come: “Penetrating the market, getting people to stop for a minute and look under the hood and see the point of difference. Realising they could hang this on their wall as well as wear it. Design has to mean more and there’s a lot of meaningless design and meaningless brands out there.”
