Horncastle's Surprise Shirts sees stand-out success

Surprise Shirts is the brainchild of former Queen Elizabeth Grammar School student Louis Jones and sees obscure football shirts, still brand new with tags on, from around the world sent out to customers – but they don’t know which shirt they will be receiving until they open the box.​

The Horncastle entrepreneur, 19, was running a paper round from Perkin’s in Horncastle when the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and as he has asthma, he had to stop doing it and was looking at other ways to make money.

"I wanted to start something that would make me that £20 without having to get up at 6am!” he said, “I’ve always liked football shirts and I’m a huge Coventry City fan, and came up with the idea of boxing up a shirt wrapped in tissue paper as a surprise, and it all went from there.”

The shirts come from three main sources – by contacting football clubs offering to take on their left-over shirts, from the manufacturers and brands directly, and also from brokers around the world who will acquire shirts on their behalf.

Shirts are ordered from all divisions in the leagues across the world, ranging from a fourth division club in Kosovo to a charity shirt from Erdington United and even Loch Ness United, which features an outline of Nessie.

Football fans need never worry that they will end up receiving the shirt of one of their rivals though, as his dad Rob explains:

“The assumption is that people will end up with their rival’s shirt and no football fan wants to wear the shirt of their rival, or from another domestic team come to that.

"We will always send shirts from a country other than yours, unless you directly ask us otherwise.”

The business has taken off to such a level, now his mum Kellie and dad Rob are also working the business with Louis full-time.

"I was sat on furlough during the pandemic twiddling my thumbs, and decided to help Louis out with it,” Rob said, “It was really starting to take off then and I was thinking of leaving work to go full-time with it when I was made redundant, so then we put some of that towards creating the website and trademarks.”

Some of the more obscure countries they have shirts from include British Overseas Territory island Anguilla, Macau, Comoros in eastern African, and Turkmanistan.

"One of the craziest shirts we’ve had was from a team in Mexico from the current season which has a bright, geometric pattern,” Louis said, “We tend to go for the really funky patterns.”

"That’s the difference we’ve found between European and Asian and Latin American countries,” Rob added, “They can have six or seven sponsors on them and really crazy designs on them, that’s why customers like them.”

A surprise adult shirt box costs £35.99 and a child’s is £26.99, with delivery for Horncastle and the surrounding areas just £1.

To find out more about Surprise Shirts, visit https://surpriseshirts.co.uk/ or follow their social media pages at https://www.facebook.com/SurpriseFootballShirts/ and https://twitter.com/SurpriseShirts