Let us set the scene, it was just a typical Sunday evening back in late November 2020, and our team was preparing for another week ahead during a second national lockdown in the fight against COVID-19.
The uncertainty around grassroots football made it a gloomy time for us all, and the sporting world was hurting. When out of nowhere, a notification popped up on the company’s phone to say that someone had tagged us in a tweet. Then it went off again, and again, and again…..
The phone didn’t stop buzzing. What was going on? Had someone hacked into our account? Not another problem to face during those uncertain times.
SWAZ Goes Viral
No, a man name Joe Parton had tweeted a funny series of supermarket football shirt designs using our SWAZ football kit designer, using the branding of supermarket chains from around the country as inspiration.
“I don’t know how your Sunday’s gone, but I’ve spent mine making football shirts for every UK Supermarket (a thread),” tweeted Joe Parton.
On further investigation, Joe, a football kit enthusiast and fellow fan of the BBC series ‘The Office’ according to his bio (thumbs up from us), had created a home and away shirt for all of the top supermarkets including Sainsbury’s, ASDA, Morrisons, Co-Op, Iceland, Lidl and Aldi, to name a few.
His inspiration when creating various supermarket football shirt designs came from a quick look in the wardrobe at an old Tesco uniform, from where he used to work. The fun idea took off and people re-tweeted and liked the post, with an incredible amount of comments and further retweets, until the online world visited our website and started getting involved by creating more custom made football kit designs, using our 3D football kit designer tool.
Supermarket Football Shirts at Centre Stage
There were over 44,900 likes, and near 7,000 retweets with a lot of the named supermarkets getting involved and responding to Joe, which led to fast-food chains, car brands and even makers of teabags jumping on the bandwagon.
Within 24 hours of Joe’s first tweet, the thread had been covered by BBC Sport, Joe.co.uk and even Talk Sport, who featured the story on the Paul Hawksbee and Max Rushden show.
An incredible 24 hours to raise the spirits of not only the SWAZ office but by the numbers, put a smile on several thousand faces across the UK and beyond and grasped the attention of some football media royalty.
We wanted to thank Joe, so we decided to make him a couple of the shirts as a gift. Check out the Aldi kit we’ve produced using his design, a showcase of how we can take any design made using our 3D football kit designer and turn it into reality.
ALDI away at the weekend lads….?
Have a scroll down our Twitter feed to check out the thread and use our 3D kit designer to create a few football kit designs yourself.
“I wouldn’t have achieved such a huge response without finding SWAZ’s brilliant online kit designer. It’s crazy to see two of my designs get produced, they top any of the other shirts in my collection. Fingers crossed some of these shirts might make it to the shelves!.”
— Joe Parton
