Our Story
In December 2023, I was walking through a market when I came across a pile of second hand football shirts that someone was selling for next to nothing. I remember just stopping and thinking, what the hell, these are so cheap I could actually flip these. So I took the last R700 I had, money from my grandfather’s inheritance, and I bought a handful of shirts, maybe five or six. I sold three of them before I even made it back home. Then I sold another two on the way. And by the time I got back to Varsity, I realised I hadn’t even spent my own money. I’d used the profit from those first sales to finance the rest. I came back with about twenty shirts and a feeling that I could actually make something out of this.
That was the beginning. It wasn’t glamorous, and it wasn’t some grand plan. It was just me seeing an opportunity and deciding to take it with whatever I had. At the time, R700 was everything I had, and the idea that I could turn it into something was enough to make me try.
In the early months of 2024, I was in a difficult financial position. I had something I needed to pay back and genuinely didn’t know how I was going to get the money together. My girlfriend at the time was the one who helped me find a way through it. We were living together, and she stepped in and started doing markets for me on the days I couldn’t be there. I was training football Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and sometimes Saturday as well, so the only day I could really work was Sunday. She would go out and run the stall while I trained, and she did it for free. That’s something I’ll never forget, because without that, I don’t know that any of this gets off the ground.
We didn’t have a car. Her car had actually been in an accident right around the time we started, so we had nothing. I used to call my friend Rocco, pay for his petrol, and he’d drive me to the market and wait around. We used to get in trouble at football because we were always late. We were dropping her off at the market first, then rushing to training. It was chaotic and messy and completely held together by goodwill and necessity.
Before we even got to markets properly, I used to carry a bag full of shirts to campus and to training sessions and try to sell them to whoever would listen. The guys at football thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. "Callum trying to offload a jersey before a game, Callum pitching shirts to people in the changing room." They used to take the piss out of me for it, made me feel a bit stupid if I’m honest. Those are the same people who now ask me for jobs, which says everything, really.
Our first proper market, we made R2,000. I remember looking at the money at the end of the day and just not being able to process it. For someone who had been getting by on less than R500 a month in spending money, two thousand rand in a single day felt genuinely life changing. From that point, I knew this was real. I knew we could actually build something if we were willing to put in the work.
So that’s what we did. We started doing more markets, three a month, then four, going back and forth, trying different things, figuring out what worked. It was just the two of us for a long time, and we were making it work with very little. I was using grocery money to buy stock. My dad would send me some money and I’d go straight out and buy more shirts, knowing that if I sold even one football jersey I’d have enough to eat for the week. That was the reality of it. That was the level we were operating at.
As things started growing, we realised we needed help. We brought on Calila, and then Daniel not long after, and then we signed with Fourways Farmers Market, which was a big deal for us at the time. Eight markets more a month felt enormous. I couldn’t even picture how we were going to manage it. So I started asking everyone I knew if they wanted to make some extra money. Most of them were skeptical. But I kept asking until I found people who were willing to come on board and give it a shot. Back then I was practically begging people to work for us. Now we have more applicants than we have positions, which is one of those things that still feels a little surreal when I think about it.
From Fourways, we just kept growing. We went from doing about twenty markets a month, which at the time I thought was enormous, we had six racks, we were splitting two rails per market, I thought we were the biggest thing going, to doing thirty five, forty markets a month with seventeen racks. The growth happened gradually and then all at once, and there were long stretches where it didn’t feel like growth at all, it just felt like chaos and hard work and trying to keep everything from falling apart.
By around June or July of 2024, roughly six months after I’d bought those first shirts with my last R700, I was financially independent. I wasn’t relying on my parents for anything anymore. I moved out of the sports house I’d been staying in and got my own place, which was really more of a combined living space and office than anything else, and I still had a small storeroom I was renting for R900 a month to keep stock in. At the time, even that felt like a big financial commitment. I look back at those numbers now and can barely believe what felt like a lot of money then compared to what we’re managing now, running a shop and multiple storage spaces and a whole team of staff.
By the beginning of 2025, I genuinely felt like we were a real business. We were still doing everything the hard way. I was in my third year at university, still training football four times a week, still showing up to every market I could, still trying to figure out how to scale without losing what made us work in the first place. I used to work a Friday night market, get home, sleep for a few hours, wake up at four in the morning to study, write a test on Saturday, and then be back at it again on Sunday. I didn’t fail anything through all of that, which still surprises me a little when I think about how stretched I was.
In April 2025, two days before my birthday, my girlfriend and I broke up. That was hard, obviously, but it also meant I was navigating the business on my own in a different way than I had been before. I still didn’t have a car, which made everything more complicated. I was relying on staff, calling in favours, figuring it out day by day. In May, I finally got my driver’s licence and not long after that I got my first car. I’d never had the money for a car before, so I’d never even had a reason to get my licence. But by that point the business had grown enough that I could make it happen, and that felt like another one of those markers. Another sign that things were actually changing.
At some point in 2025 we started to plateau with the markets. We were doing as many as we could realistically manage, and it became clear that if we wanted to keep growing we needed to do something different. So in December 2025, we opened a shop. It wasn’t a smooth process by any stretch. We got badly let down by our shop fitter and lost weeks and money we really couldn’t afford to lose, had to keep the shop closed for two to three weeks because of it. December, which we’d put so much into and were counting on being a strong trading period, ended up being really difficult. I went down to Durban to try and generate some income there, came back in January, and found myself sleeping on a couch because I didn’t have a place to stay. I’d had to move out of where I was living, my stuff was split between the office and the shop, and I was just trying to hold everything together while it felt like it was all coming apart at once. Calila took me in and gave me a place to sleep, which I will never forget. That kind of support, when things are genuinely hard, means more than I can really put into words.
I ended up getting a credit card just to get some cash flow moving again, knowing that if I could get money coming in I’d be able to stabilise things and get back on my feet. And that’s what happened. Slowly, things started to level out. The shop got up and running. The markets kept going. We hired more staff, people who came in and worked hard and helped us get to a place where we were doing thirty five to forty markets a month alongside running a physical store.
Throughout all of this, we had to deal with people trying to copy what we’d built. People who found our suppliers. People who tried to replicate our model almost exactly and set up in the same spaces we operate in. It’s something that comes with having a niche that works, and we have a very specific niche. We know our product, we know our customer, and we’ve spent two years building the kind of trust and presence that you can’t just copy overnight even if you copy everything else. It’s been frustrating at times, but it’s also just part of operating in a space that you’ve helped to create.
This year, in March 2026, we made the decision to expand again. Not just more markets, but more deliberately, because we know there are people trying to do what we do and we want to make sure that what we’re building is something that genuinely can’t be replicated. That’s part of why we started Champion Collective.
Champion Plug is what it is, and there’s never going to be another one exactly like it. But Champion Collective is the next layer, the broader community, the graphic tees, the events, the things that turn this from a football shirt business into something bigger and more lasting. Something that people are part of, not just shopping from.
I’ll be graduating in May 2026 with my business management degree, the same degree I was working toward through all of this, through the markets and the late nights and the early mornings and everything in between. I started this with R700 and a backpack. We have a shop now. We have a team. We do roughly 35 markets a month. And we’re just getting started. That’s our story, and we want you to be part of what comes next.
- Callum Thompson (25/03/2026)
Founder