Slazenger gives ‘full creative control’ to 23-year-old TikTok star

“How I’m reinventing a £250m brand … from my bedroom.” So starts the series of TikTok videos posted by 23-year-old Alexei Hamblin, the influencer tasked with refreshing the Slazenger brand.

According to Hamblin, he was headhunted by the CEO after he began sharing videos where he walked around Sports Direct (which owns Slazenger) and imagined how he would elevate “boring” sportswear into high-luxury items.

His plans won them over, and he has now been tasked with “full creative control” of the 145-year-old sportswear company. He’ll take his 88,000 TikTok followers with him every step of the journey.

Through his posting, Hamblin offers a rare glimpse into how a big sports brand like Slazenger creates. He has documented material-sourcing trips to markets in Guangzhou in China, asked for feedback on sample designs that do not “quite work yet”, and demonstrated what platforms he uses to design clothes for his new “off-court” luxury spinoff.

Crucially, his posting is part of the redesign too – the content is the marketing, and his engaged followers are Sports Direct’s ideal new customers.

Will it pay off? Handing the reins to someone with no experience of running a brand certainly comes with a fair amount of “key person risk”. But there’s a compelling logic to Slazenger’s decision: Hamblin’s the future of the marketplace they’ve lost. He tells his audience that Slazenger used to be so famous that “they were British sports”. They produced the first fluorescent tennis ball in 1935, and the first synthetic leather football. In fact, it was a Slazenger-branded bright orange ball that won England the 1966 World Cup. It followed a traditional sports-marketing strategy – put top players in your clothes and infiltrate from above – but by the 1990s it had floundered.

The company was sold as part of Dunlop Slazenger for about £300m in 1996, and by the time it was bought by Sports Direct its valuation was just £40m. Its downfall was multifaceted: a combination of reliance on traditional marketing strategies, aggressive competition from fast-fashion brands and a lack of investment in innovation.

However risky it might seem, in our new AI-slop short-form video world, brands cannot really afford to ignore this kind of gonzo-social media marketing strategy to stand out. People will not buy a jacket because of a billboard any more, but they will buy it if someone they feel a personal connection to has suggested it.

Data suggests that more than 60% of TikTok users say they are more likely to trust a brand they discover via an influencer than via an in-feed advertisement, while 73% feel a deeper connection to brands they engage with on the platform. In one video, Hamblin spoke to the son of the Slazenger founder, who laughed and said: “It grew into an industry pioneer … without posting a single TikTok.” Now, apparently, all it might take to get back there is wifi, a ring light and 88,000 followers.

Photograph by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images