Winner Profile
Tom Beahon
Castore
‘Do what you know’ is good advice, but the Beahon brothers can be glad they never heeded it. When they co-founded Britain’s fastest-growing retailer, Castore, in 2015, they were novices in almost every respect.
Tom Beahon was a 25-year-old working for a bank, while Phil, 22, worked at Deloitte. Neither knew anything about retail, supply chain, design, manufacturing, distribution or marketing. But they did know sports, with Phil having played semi-professional cricket and Tom being a former Tranmere Rovers youth footballer.
And, as Tom explains, they were both convinced there was room in the market for a British premium sportswear brand. “The global sportswear market is too big to be dominated by only two brands. Why can’t you build a British equivalent of Nike or Adidas?”
The early days of Castore were spent learning the retail ropes: iterating designs and trying to understand their customer, visiting suppliers across southern Europe trying to convince them to reduce their minimum product runs, talking to banks trying to get finance.
“We didn’t have any sort of marketing budget, so we knew that the product had to speak for itself, and that as soon as someone tried it on they would feel the difference from a Nike shirt. We spent a huge amount of time on the fabrics, making them 5% lighter, 5% more flexible, 5% more durable. Those marginal gains, that attention to detail, really allowed us to stand out,” Beahon says.
They did the hard yards to get customer insight too, literally. Beahon travelled down from Liverpool to London weekly to give samples to personal trainers at premium gyms.
“I used to hide in the toilets because I didn’t have money for the train tickets,” he admits, but describes the feedback as vital. “It evolved into personal trainers wearing the product and we’d give them royalties if their clients bought it, which was a kind of pre-social media influencer marketing. It worked very well.”
The brand grew through word of mouth, with the help of a loan from Virgin StartUp and money from their parents remortgaging their home.
An early break occurred in 2019, when Andy Murray noticed his trainer wearing Castore. That led to a new product range, AMC, worn by Murray in front of millions, and even resulted in the tennis star investing in the business.
“We were probably too small to do a partnership of that size. If you went to Harvard Business School – which I did not, because I left school at 16 – I suspect they would teach you to build the infrastructure, scale and experience first. But we said the opportunity is there now and it might not be next year or next month. Bite off more than you can chew, and then chew like crazy,” Beahon says.
New opportunities: Partnerships and retail
A key part of the brothers’ original business hypothesis was that there was an opportunity for a smaller sportswear brand like theirs to partner with the sports teams that don’t get deals with Nike or Adidas to supply their kit.
“Unless you’re Real Madrid or Man United or Munich or Liverpool, you generally don’t get a bespoke, designed kit,” Beahon explains, adding that sports clubs outside the global elite also generally lack the marketing and digital infrastructure to sell at scale.
“Nike will do $50 billion in revenue this year, give or take. Sometimes scale is powerful, but when you’re doing $50 billion it’s just not economically viable to focus on growing the revenues of a mid level or aspirational Premier League football team. Their scale is our opportunity.”
The first partner to sign up was the West Indies cricket team in 2020, followed by the likes of Rangers, Wolverhampton Wanderers, the McLaren and later Red Bull F1 teams, Saracens rugby club, Bayer Leverkusen, Sevilla and many more.
Simultaneously, the brothers went into physical retail, opening their first store in Chelsea in 2019. They now have 20. Although Beahon describes DTC as the engine of Castore’s growth, he is a big believer in bricks and mortar as a way to capture more demand.
“Not everyone is sitting on Instagram when they want to buy a product. People do like to go shopping so they can discover your brand, feel your product, and talk to a human about it,” he says. “The two channels augment each other. When we open a store we can see the revenue spike online in that location. If you get the mix right, it can be a very powerful combination.”
Funding growth
Castore’s growth has certainly been impressive. By 2021, the business was turning over £17 million. The following year, it hit £48 million, the year after £115 million. In its latest accounts – outside of Retail Index’s reporting period – sales reached £190.3 million.
Equally impressively, Castore achieved that growth profitably, at least until last year when it reported a £28.9 million pre-tax loss as a result of exceptional costs, in particular from difficulties consolidating its warehousing and from fundraising. Operationally, the firm remains profitable.
The Beahon brothers financed growth in seven investment rounds beginning with angels Arnaud Massenet, cofounder of Net-a-Porter, and former Saatchi and Saatchi boss Robert Senior in 2018, with other notable backers including EG Group’s Issa Brothers.
The most recent investment was a $150 million round led by US VC Raine, which valued Castore at £950 million. Beahon wouldn’t recommend the fundraising experience for everyone.
“Anyone who says it’s not distracting hasn’t done one… It can make a good business a lot better and accelerate it, but don’t do it thinking it will make a mediocre business better.” But he has been able to use the funds to develop growth opportunities in international markets.
Although Castore has had a global presence since it started signing international teams, it has had particular success in Europe. Sales there jumped from £900,000 in 2022 to £59.6 million in 2024 – growth made possible by deals with major European sports clubs like Feyenoord and Sevilla, and by the decision to open a warehouse in Rotterdam during the pandemic, which helped it escape the export red tape that has since entangled many British firms.
Castore also recently signed a sub-licensing deal with Umbro, allowing it to market Umbro-branded kit associated with the latter’s partner teams, which Beahon says will allow it to generate more economies of scale in its distribution and digital platforms.
Although there have been setbacks along the way, including a high-profile decision by Aston Villa to ditch the brand over shirts that they said retained sweat, Beahon asserts that Castore is always looking to improve the performance of its products, by sticking to its vision: to make the kind of sports kit that sports people want to wear.
That, he argues, is at the heart of being a great retailer. “We’re not looking to be a fashion brand, following the latest trend. It’s knowing who your customer is and what you’re doing to make their lives better. That’s a fundamental truth for brands and retailers. Methods and technologies will constantly evolve, but the core foundation of knowing why you exist will never change.”
