A Bangor teenager has revealed how a business started in his bedroom during lockdown has led to tens of thousands of football shirt sales two years later.
Rory McLaughlan found himself with time on his hands in 2020, as the then lower-sixth pupil at Our Lady and St Patrick's College Knock was affected by the lockdowns.
The 19-year-old turned it to good use and took the first step in a journey that has seen him establish a thriving business, Shirt In A Box, and provide jobs for others.
Read more: Meet the student bringing street food to Co Down
"I just started by buying two Celtic football shirts on eBay for £20 from Australia and I sold them for £40," he told Belfast Live.
"I then bought a load of Man United shirts, I think it was 11 or 13, at £40 and I sold them for probably about £120.
"And from there I just kept doing it and repeating it, and then in March 2021, I think I sold £3,000 of football shirts in the first weekend of my online store, which was Rory's Football Shirts.
"But I quickly realised that selling vintage shirts and one-off items is a hard business and quite time-consuming and there's a lot of demand for mystery jerseys," he said.
That led to Shirt In A Box, which is where the main thrust of the business is focussed now - customers pay for a mystery shirt to be shipped to them, based off parameters they can define.
The company has about 30-50 shirts at the back-end at a time, with those changing week by week.
They then match that to parameters laid out by the customer, so for instance, a Liverpool fan might choose to filter out Premier League options as they may not want another team's shirt from the same league.
"The response was incredible - we've sold over 35,000 shirts," Rory said.
"We're gearing up for a massive World Cup, we've three offices on the Lisburn Road here now.
"We've five full-time employees in Northern Ireland, three in the rest of the world and about 15 part-time staff, it's crazy how quick it's grown."
Rory is managing all this alongside a finance course at Queen's University Belfast and playing semi-professional football for the PSNI team.
He said he prefers to be busy and explained that their business model is fluid, with the aim of being able to pivot in whichever direction they see fit.
"On top of Shirt in a Box, we've got The Kit Room which is a new business we just recently started up and The Numbers Game which I'm a co-owner of, they're all football based," he added.
"The Kit Room is an online server which provides you access to the latest football experts, so writers for the likes of Sky and The Athletic, then we've got a Fifa Ultimate Team creator.
"The Numbers Game is a betting prediction algorithm and we have Euro Ticket Club, which helps you get to some of the coolest games in Europe for dirt cheap - the other week we had found a way to get to PSG-Troyes for £9 or something crazy like that."
And the sky is the limit in terms of plans for the future, with Rory explaining that he wants to keep driving with that hunger for expansion and disruption.
"I like to say nothing's safe in the footballing industry from ourselves - I don't like to pin myself down to what I'll be doing in six months time," he said.
"We're rapidly changing, we've worked from selling singular jerseys, building out on to Discord servers, to becoming involved in a betting algorithm so that's rapid change.
"Kit manufacturing is an option maybe one day and then also getting involved in running football clubs is something that would always be on my horizon I think."
READ NEXT:
- "It's always made sense" - the Belfast doctor who became an artist
- Tunisian woman on bringing a little bit of home to Moira restaurant
- Live at Botanic Gardens 2023: Aitch announced to perform at outdoor festival
- Northern Ireland property: See inside Gleno family home with six bedrooms and attached annex
For all the latest news, visit the Belfast Live homepage here. To sign up to our FREE newsletters, see here.
