Pentland Brands owns some of the biggest names in sportswear - Endura, Speedo, Canterbury, Berghaus, Mitre. These aren't scrappy startups. They're global brands with decades of heritage, massive distribution networks, and the kind of brand equity most founders would trade a kidney for.
So why are we writing about them on a site aimed at startup founders?
Because when Pentland's innovation team had an idea for a brand new direct-to-consumer product, they did exactly what we tell every founder to do: they tested the idea before they built it.
Pentland's innovation team had been exploring new ways to service customers who were looking to kit out their sports teams - rugby, football, swimming, cycling. The traditional model was clunky. Team managers would trawl through catalogues, speak to reps, go back and forth on designs. It worked, but it wasn't exactly the kind of experience anyone was excited about.
The team had identified an opportunity they were calling Made By You - a digital platform where players themselves could design and customise their team's sports kit. Not a top-down, manager-led procurement process. A player-led one. Think of it as giving the people who actually wear the kit the tools to create it.
It was a strong idea. But strong ideas are cheap. The question wasn't is this a good concept? - it was how should this actually work, and will people use it?
Here's something that surprises a lot of first-time founders: the biggest risk in product development isn't building something badly. It's building the wrong thing well. You can have a beautifully engineered platform, a flawless codebase, a design system that would make a Scandinavian minimalist weep with joy - and none of it matters if you've solved a problem nobody actually has.
The biggest risk in product development isn't building something badly. It's building the wrong thing well.
Pentland understood this. They didn't come to us and say "build us a custom kit platform." They came to us and said "we think there's something here - help us figure out if we're right, and what the right version of this looks like."
That's a fundamentally different brief. And it's the kind of thinking that separates smart teams from expensive mistakes.
We ran a series of innovation sprints with Pentland's team, using a design thinking approach to pull the proposition apart and put it back together again. If you're not familiar with design thinking, it's essentially a structured way of making sure you understand the problem properly before you start designing solutions. It sounds obvious. It's remarkable how often it gets skipped.
In practice, this meant:
We led the sessions, defined the direction for both the current and future phases of the programme, and delivered a prototype that Pentland could use to make informed decisions about what to build next.
If you're a founder reading this, you might be thinking "that's great for a company with Pentland's resources, but I'm working with a fraction of that budget." Fair point. But here's the thing - this approach actually matters more when your budget is tight.
Pentland could afford to build the wrong thing and recover. Most startups can't. Which is exactly why we use the same design thinking and rapid prototyping methodology with early-stage founders that we used with a multi-billion pound brand group. The principle is identical: figure out what's worth building before you build it.
Put another way - if a company that owns Speedo and Endura thinks it's worth spending a few weeks testing an idea before committing to a full build, that should tell you something about how seriously smart teams take validation.
If a company that owns Speedo and Endura thinks it's worth testing an idea before committing to a full build, that should tell you something about how seriously smart teams take validation.
Got an idea you're excited about but not sure where to start? Or maybe you've already started and you're wondering whether you're building the right thing? We've been there - both with global brands and with founders working from their kitchen table.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call with one of our founders. No obligation, no sales pitch. Just a straight conversation about your idea and whether it's got legs. You'll come away with something useful either way.
30 minutes. One conversation. No obligation.
