Hi guys,
Some of you may have seen at the forum event or thanks to our recent social media activity, that we are now the UK licensee for the Perth based brand; Focus Cricket.
What this means is we essentially run the brand as we see fit in the UK, as well as having exclusive distribution rights of course. We took this decision partly due to the outstanding quality of the gear that is on offer, but also because we have wanted to have our own brand for a while. Our own Lion bats are OK, but we don't have the time or patience required to get the name out there enough, or slog through the back and forth in terms of getting samples right with stickers, pads, gloves, bags etc. Instead, we have essentially started up with a brand that already has a following (hopefully some in the UK are aware of the brand) and also extremely high quality stickers and softs. The stickers with their mirror effect chrome are some of the best I've seen, and the softs come from a superb manufacturer with a great reputation.
All bats are UK made barring the performance which comes from SA, with the top grades being genuinely limited in number. We have complete control over bat shapes (which we have already tweaked slightly from the Aus profiles) and we are also able to make custom shapes for customers. Please note we probably won't reply to messages asking for 45mm edges, no concaving at 2'8
The bat grading is as follows
Butterfly - Made to order, we won't hold these in stock
Performance - Not a fan of the name, and will change longer term, but for now its the best fit on out sticker sets. Good quality willow and all nice light weights
G2 - Very high quality, please don't look down on it because it is labelled as 'grade 2'
G1 - Lovely bats and likely to be the best sellers alongside G2
G1+ - Premium willow genuinely limited in number by availability of suitable clefts
Black Label - The best of the best, available if (not when) we can get our hands on it. We have 4 currently
As I said we are operating the brand in this country, rather than simply re-selling other peoples products like we do with other brands we stock. In the longer term this means we can make decisions to introduce certain things to the range (a proper sausage finger glove is a high priority for example) but for the short term we are offering the range pretty much as it looks in Australia, save for the addition of a top quality duffle bag which we have managed to get in stock already despite only being signed off for manufacture in November.
We have made our first move into sponsorship by providing gear to Leics CCC and former Eng U19 player Rob Sayer. We have provided him with cricket shoes since he signed as a professional at Leics as he's a Peterborough lad that we have known for a while. Now we have our own brand it's been fantastic to fully kit him out. Being a retailer running a brand rather than just running a brand, our sponsored players have quite a few advantages when it comes to bat choice. Rob is currently trialling bats from a number of the best batmakers in the world, sourced through our retail accounts and various connections in the industry.
Here is a quick teaser photo of the gear we have. Some of the imagery I have nabbed from Focus Australias social media, but the gear is identical to the stuff we have.
Thanks for having a look, all the gear is now listed on our website if you would like to make a purchase. Please also follow us on twitter if you have a spare moment. I've hyperlinked the text below, so all you have to do is click on our twitter handle to take you straight to our profile.
@FocusCricketUK
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Topic: Focus Cricket UK (Read 132219 times)