Tom Beahon, co-founder of sports apparel brand Castore, has revealed how he and his brother Phil convinced Sir Andy Murray to invest in their company.
The Beahon brothers launched Castore in 2016 and were determined to secure a high-profile investor to elevate their brand. Tom Beahon, who shares CEO responsibilities with his brother, told an upcoming episode of 's Boardroom Uncovered podcast that securing the double Wimbledon champion as a backer was not straightforward - but said the effort was well worth it.
Murray is among the investors in the Manchester-based firm, joining the ranks of billionaire Issa siblings Mohsin and Zuber, New Look's Tom Singh, and PureGym founders Peter Roberts and Brian Scurrah.
Other shareholders include The Gym Group's John Treharne, Working Title Films' co-chairman Eric Fellner, and Net-a-Porter co-founder Arnaud Massenet.
Tom Beahon was asked how they secured Murray's investment - and told .: "With difficulty – is the short answer".
He added: "The partnership with Andy, I think, was probably as close to perfect an example that you could get of entrepreneurial hustle.
"I am a big believer in the maxim of the harder you work in life, the luckier you get. Working with Andy exemplifies that.
"We'd created some product, which sounds really easy, but actually it's quite hard to do. We built a website which sounds really easy and it's quite hard to do.
"We'd convinced some people to part with their hard earned cash in return for our product, which is when you're starting out is this big, seminal moment and we started to gain some traction.
"We were still a small business, but growing quite nicely. We were profitable.
"Probably because of our Merseyside upbringing, we've both always had this mindset of, you need to generate profit in order to be a real business."
The co-chief of Castore added: "We were growing nice and steadily, but we'd always had this ambition right from the beginning of wanting to be a global brand.
"So being very proud to be British but wanting to be global, which most people thought was crazy and I understand why they did. But to us at least it made complete sense.
"When you have that mindset, it actually became very straightforward to reverse engineer, okay, how do we become global?".
"We need to have globally recognised athletes wearing our product on a global stage. So we thought about athletes that would fit our brand DNA.
"Andy embodies all of those characteristics perfectly, and we essentially gifted product to everyone around him. So his coach, his physio, his personal trainer, his psychologist, all these guys and girls.
"So Andy would just keep seeing the brand. Not particularly sophisticated, but, you know, it worked.
"When we got introduced to him – it sounds really cliched, but it's completely true – there was just an instinct chemistry.
"I can't speak for Andy, but very much I got the sense that he liked the fact we were young, British and had these big ambitions.
"And once you've got that chemistry and natural affinity, the rest of it kind of flows quite naturally from there."
Last November, Castore was named the º£½ÇÊÓƵ's fastest-growing retailer by Retail Index, which evaluates companies based on their revenue growth over a two-year span.
According to the data used for this ranking, Castore experienced a seven-fold increase in sales from 2021, culminating in £115m by 31 January 2023.
A month earlier, that the business had fallen into a loss despite a £75m surge in sales.
For the year ending 4 February 2024, Castore reported a pre-tax loss of £28.8m, a significant drop from the pre-tax profit of £14.6m seen in the previous 12 months.
Yet, the company's turnover witnessed a substantial rise from £115m to £190.3m during the same timeframe.
The accounts revealed exceptional costs exceeding £24.4m within the year. Even setting aside these additional expenses, the firm's operating profit fell from £16.5m to just £399,148.
, England's rugby teams are set to swap Umbro for Castore as their kit supplier following this year's Six Nations. The new kit agreement is scheduled to commence in May, a decision reached after months of negotiations between the Rugby Football Union and Castore.
