'What can we do better?' - Inside Sokito's bid to reinvent football boots and challenge the big brands

Like many kids in England, Hardy had a dream growing up and, like many kids, it became clear at some point that his initial dream wasn't going to be reality.

"I definitely wanted to be a footballer," Hardy recalls with a laugh. "I think at one point I thought that I could have, and then soon realized that was nowhere near good enough."

At 15, though, Hardy was playing at a semi-professional level, and it was at that time that he bought himself a new pair of boots. The problem was that they didn't fit. Hardy decided to sell them off and, when he did, he got back twice as much as he paid, allowing him to reinvest and buy himself two new pairs of boots. From there, it spiraled. Two pairs of boots became many, and Hardy quickly became a guy known for switching up what was on his feet every time he played.

"I got to a point where I'd wear a completely different pair of boots for every training session and every match," he says, "and it was because I had so many. I was buying and selling them, and it progressed over time to me becoming more and more interested and nerdy about it.

"I've always been, I suppose, a product person, like quite tactile, materials and builds and things. It's always been, I suppose, in my blood because my dad had always worked in product at a factory level in the Far East. It just grew from there. I slowly started taking them apart to see what was inside of them, and then repairing them myself, and then selling them on."

Sokito developed from that love. During a visit to Vietnam, Hardy was struck by the waste generated in footwear manufacturing. The problem extended beyond the factory floor: according to Sokito’s estimates, 12.5 million pairs of boots end up in landfills across the U.S. and EU each year. Hardy wanted to make boots that reduced that environmental toll without compromising performance.

"Football is the biggest connecting factor in the world," Hardy says. "It connects more people than anyone else. It's the reason we're talking, right? It connects everybody, but it's also contributing to the detriment of the planet, which means that, at some point, people may not be able to play football because of rising temperatures or displacement, and that just didn't sit right for me. That was the start of the journey."

And so Sokito was born, but it was born into a world that is often unkind to new arrivals. Starting a company is never easy, but doing so in a world dominated by some of the world's most recognized companies? Calling it a challenge is underselling it.

Finding something you love is, generally, somewhat easy. Actually turning that love into a business is one of the hardest things you can do. Hardy's push to do just that took years.

At 20, he quit his sales job to pursue Sokito full time. His friends and family were supportive. If it didn't work, he could always sell metal again, right? In the meantime, he was delivering beer and washing pots. From 2 p.m. to midnight, he'd work at the local pub. He'd then wake up at 5 a.m. and work on Sokito until midday. He slept on friends' sofas. For large chunks of those early years, he couldn't pay himself a salary.

To launch Sokito properly, Hardy knew he'd need athletes' help and would have to bring them on as investors, since there was no big sponsorship money to give them. It was a tough sell, he admits, because he didn't even have a shoe to show them. Yet somehow, he managed to convince two to hop on board at the same time after spending about a year trying to show them the vision.

The first was John Bostock, a Tottenham and Crystal Palace product who has spent the last two decades playing just about everywhere imaginable. Fortunately, Bostock lived down the road from Hardy's parents' house. After seeing a post about Bostock's boots breaking, Hardy messaged him on Instagram offering help.

"I'm not a salesperson," Hardy says. "I'm not going to push something. It has to feel right."

The second was Jamaican international Adrian Mariappa, best known for his time at Watford. Hardy connected with him after searching for a list of vegan athletes, believing that they would be the most likely to understand his mission of building something eco-friendly.

"We messaged pretty much every single one," Hardy recalls. "These athletes are getting pitched investment options all the time from brands. They have so many places they can put their money, but if you talk to them and say, 'Right, this is our plan and what we want to do' and you go back a year later and say, 'We did that, and we have done this on top of it', then it's like, 'Oh sh*t, these guys are actually legit'. That's usually what gets people after a bit of time."

Hardy has convinced a lot of people over the years. There are now 90 professional athletes that own part of the brand. Among them are names like Troost-Ekong, Ola Aina, DeAndre Yedlin, Millie Bright, Trevoh Chalobah and Miles Robinson. Sokito's boots are sold in 46 countries just four years since its official launch. This summer, Sokito boots were worn at the World Cup and, just this past weekend, NFL star Jake Elliott wore the brand's Scudetta cleats while kicking for the Philadelphia Eagles.

Sokito is now multinational and multisport. The process of designing a boot, largely, remains the same. It's athlete and environment first, and all design is done with that in mind.

Sokito has a new shoe launching in October. That one has been two years in the making. And yet the process never stops. Hardy recently met with MLS players Yedlin, Sebastian Ibeagha and Mathias "Zanka" Jorgensen to start mapping out the next big project.

"We involve the players in everything," Hardy says. "They own the business so they're involved every step of the way. We sit down and go, 'Right, we want a speed boot, and this is how we think it should be'. It's just this incredibly nerdy three or four hour session where you're talking about materials, stud placements, length, what you want it to feel like. There are things that haven't been done in boots before. There are running shoes that someone likes that they want involved in this shoe. It's really detailed."

From there it's off to the designers to work on initial concepts. That process takes about six months and results in a tech pack, which goes to a factory and results in an initial sample. That's when the process really gets messy, though. Even the slightest change can throw off the balance of a shoe, setting back months of progress by altering something as small as a centimeter of material.

"You'll be 12 months down the line and be like 'Oh, we've nearly got it'," he says. "It goes to wear testing with the players and feels really good, but there's a little bit in the heel we have to change. You change it, and the whole shoe is different, and you have to start again."

Eventually, though, it all settles into place, and the boot looks and feels right. From wear testing and lab testing, the boot then gets pitched to retail about six months in advance. Then comes production, the boot launch, marketing, distribution. It's a big process, and Hardy stresses that it takes an army to get a boot from those initial phone calls and into the hands of customers.

Hardy knows that, in comparison to others, though, his army is small. Sokito is no Nike, no adidas, and no Puma. Catching the big boys is a long way off, if it ever happens. But Sokito doesn't have to catch them to find its own place in the game.

Hardy's biggest role model, his company's north star, isn't Nike or adidas. It isn't any of the other traditional football brands, either. No, when Hardy envisions what he wants this all to look like, he looks at ON.

For years, ON was a small running shoe company. In 2019, that changed when tennis star Roger Federer joined the business. The company is now worth billions. Yet even that success leaves it competing against much larger rivals. It shows both how vast the market is and how much room there is for newcomers to build their own business.

How do you make up that gulf? Well, you don't. You just find your own place in the ocean. That applies to music, where SoundCloud allows artists to bypass record labels so that talent can shine through. It applies to Instagram and TikTok, which have allowed creatives to showcase their own work in whatever field they choose. And, yes, it applies to football boots, too.

"If you said to someone 10 years ago that there's a brand that's going to take a huge cut of the running market, you'd say they were insane," Hardy says. "There's opportunities in everything now, though. Look at cars. With the electric car manufacturers, they've approached an industry which is owned by giants, which are powerful, but slow moving. They looked at that industry and went, 'What can we do better? As a consumer, what would I want if I could design it from scratch?'

"That's what we're doing. Building everything with athletes is really important. Using sustainable materials and reducing the impact? It just feels like that should be the case. How we release product is important and is not driven by marketing cycles. There are things which were either frustrating or just seemed wrong when looking at the industry. We don't have to follow any of these norms of the industry which have been set over 20-30 years. We can go, 'That doesn't really make sense, so let's do the opposite and let's do what does make sense'."

That industry is changing by the day. Post-Covid, even the big brands have changed how they do business. Prior to 2020, the big companies were firing out sponsorships in volume, signing as many athletes as they could to boot deals. Because of that, virtually every player in the Premier League was wearing Nike, adidas or Puma.

That's no longer the case. Smaller brands, like Sokito, can carve out their own little niche, allowing athletes to both partner with a brand they believe in and be a part of that brand not just as a sponsored player, but as an owner. They can design the products. They can determine what colours or innovations make sense. And, maybe, if it all works out, they can do so without sacrificing the guaranteed money that comes from the big companies.

"The big ones will still exist, right?" Hardy says. "Those enormous boot deals for superstars will still be there, and that probably makes sense for players in that position. I think there's a kind of player empowerment movement at the moment, which is where it's all coming from. They're understanding and appreciating that they're the valuable ones in this rather than the brands. If they have personality and willingness to explore it, they can take their personal brand and earnings a hell of a lot further by thinking outside the box.

"If you look at it now and say, 'Right, if I turned out 20 grand a year', for example, 'will I get 20 grand a year back from doing something where I'm not getting paid immediately?' The fact is, if it's executed well, then yes, maybe, and possibly a hell of a lot more."

So, for Sokito, what is success, then? How does a small fish approach the bigger ones? When Hardy sits in his living room 20 years from now with a new boot in hand to tinker with, what would make him proud?

It's difficult to explain, he says, but, in the end, he'll know if it all worked out. So, too, will the athletes alongside him that have helped him build a childhood dream into something he still can't quite believe is real.

"It's about impact, and that's quite hard to measure, but we're fairly happy with that approach," Hardy says. "We're not saying that success is selling for 200 million in two years' time or that success is selling 50 million pairs of shoes in a year. Those things are way down the line. We want to continue growing the brand in the right way, and not compromise on our morals. We want to make impact. We're working on a lot of ways to do that. We're working on a foundation. We don't send any product to landfill. We redistribute it all. We recycle.

"Football can have such an amazing impact on everybody. It's so uniting, and we want to really be at the forefront of that, and make some really good shoes as well."