My side hustle: how Mike Maxwell launched the Football Shirt Collective

How an interest in football shirts turned into a hobby, then a business.

Football shirts might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for fans, a shirt – or even better a collection of shirts – can bring back the memories.

The right shirt can be worth a fortune: Pele’s 1970 World Cup Final shirt (pictured below) sold for £157,750 at auction back in 2002.

Mike Maxwell’s first shirt was Arsenal’s 1991 kit, the season the North London team won the league, and his collection of team colours has since grown to the hundreds.

“We loved collecting football shirts”, Maxwell recalls, “but as we got older, we didn’t have as much time to play football; our wives wouldn’t let us wear football shirts on a Saturday night and we couldn’t wear them to work, so we basically had nowhere to share them and show them off.”

A conversation that would once have stayed in the pub soon became a social media community.

"That community became a website, the Football Shirt Collective which now provides a home and a shopping destination for other fans of football culture and memorabilia.

Here’s how Maxwell turned his side hustle into a thriving business.

The world of side hustles

Side hustles – defined as a second, self-employed job – are becoming big business.

The number of people with side hustles grew by a third over the last ten years and now numbers in the hundreds of thousands, a report by website provider GoDaddy found.

The report also claimed that side-hustlers add £14.4 billion to the UK economy, despite half spending less than five hours a week on their second job.

There’s much in common between side hustles and the rise in self-employment and start-up entrepreneurs.

Unlike the latter, a side hustle gives you the financial security of having a day job but means that balancing time between work and family commitments becomes more difficult than ever.

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From social media to Alan Shearer

As Maxwell describes it “the Football Shirt Collective is really the home for football shirt lovers and those who love football culture and nostalgia.”

The Collective started life in 2012 on social media photo-sharing sites Instagram and Tumblr, for Maxwell, his friends and others to share pictures of their favourite football shirts and relive memories.

As the profile of the Collective grew, they began interviewing professional footballers about football shirts. These included Newcastle legend and now Match of the Day Pundit Alan Shearer, Manchester United’s Dwight Yorke and England player Lucy Bronze.

These interviews needed a place to live and so Maxwell decided to build a website.

At the time he was working in digital marketing and “one of the reasons I wanted to [create the website] was as a chance to develop my skills in this area, but also learn about what works and doesn’t work in an area I’m passionate about.”

When a passion project becomes a business

Having learned to code, Maxwell actually found the process of creating a website “relatively straightforward”: “test it and try it and don’t be afraid to fail”.

But the transition from a passion project to a money-making enterprise was more complicated.

At first, the site provided a place for football shirt buyers and sellers to interact.

Then, explains Maxwell “we thought ‘actually, there’s an opportunity here to basically create e-commerce of the back of this as well' ”.

For example, once you buy a football shirt the Collective will have a good idea which team you support and can send you more personalised offers in the future.

The Collective now has a shop that sells vintage shirts, but also hosts products from other manufacturers including football-inspired fashion and artwork, such as the Compton-inspired shirt pictured below.

They’ve kept the number of sellers low in order to ensure the quality of products and service remains high, Maxwell explains.

“We’re at the stage now where we’re making a profit, and we’re making good markups on products we purchase and sell ourselves.”

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Making time in the day

The Football Shirt Collective now takes up around an hour or two a day, usually first thing in the morning before Maxwell’s kids get up.

However, getting to this point has required strategic thinking as well as early starts.

“One of the key things with a side hustle is you’ve got a vision of where you want to take your project, but the reality is you don’t have as much time to develop it.

"So, you either do fewer things but do them well, or you get things out there but they’re never quite at the level you want them to be.”

Maxwell has tried to resolve this dilemma by getting support from others to create the articles on the website and has partnered with a fulfilment centre to send out football shirts to customers.

“When we get an order, they distribute the product. We pay a fee, but we deliver better service; I can spend my time on better things and the customer can get their product quicker.”

Ultimately, Maxwell says, you’ll only spend time on a side hustle if you’re passionate about it. But once you’ve found your focus, it’s worth looking at support and outsourcing opportunities out there so you can focus on what you do best.

Much more than money

As well as money, Maxwell says he’s got three things from setting up the Football Shirt Collective.

Firstly, he’s gained skills that have fed back into the day job, shifting from consultancy to marketing strategy with more football-focused projects: “in my industry, it’s one thing to talk about it and another to actually do it – and learning from doing it gives you a lot more credibility.”

Second has been the chance to meet some amazing people: not only has Maxwell interviewed football icons but he’s also worked with a new generation of creative entrepreneurs who have been inspired by the beautiful game.

Third, and finally, has been the opportunity to give back. Earlier this year the Football Shirt Collective published Your First Football Shirt, a printed book of interviews with footballers and fans, with 100% of the profit going to mental health charity CALM and The Willow Foundation, which helps seriously ill young adults.

The book is a culmination of the years Maxwell has poured into the Collective: “we’ve built this community: how can we do something for social good with it? That’s been really powerful and rewarding to me.”

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