Puma Bows to the Power of the People

Have you ever seen your team’s new kit and felt the inexplicable sudden urge to go shopping at Abercrombie & Fitch, or some other less-than-stylish retail outlet? Chances are you have, and despite you being the one who’ll shell out the big bucks for the kit and will be staring at it for the next 8-9 months, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

Luckily for Feyenoord, that wasn’t the case. Puma initially changed their traditional kits substantially for the upcoming season and Rotterdammers were none too happy. Easy fix: Puma just changed it.

The picture above is the original 09-10 Feyenoord jersey, a take on the classic two-tone white & red with two alien tentacles reaching down the clavicles – ditto for the green and black away. It’s not quite pretty, is it? (Though it’s certainly better than last year’s collars from the centenary if you ask me.) And with this being Puma’s first year of the kit-making contract, they wanted to make a good impression. So when the fans were unhappy with the kit they’d be wearing to games, and particularly this kid…

…they went back to the drawing board. Well, more the “coloring board”, as the design is still similar but they’ve been colored in – presumably they hired the kid above for this daunting task – so that the tentacles are unidentifiable from afar.

And in the process they did a little PR damage control, sitting the jersey on a dock in front of a crane and a cargo bin, an obvious ode to the culture of Rotterdam’s working-class ports and subsequently Feyenoord’s traditions. A picture says a thousand words, and in this case it says…“we @#$%ed up”.

So if you dislike your team’s kit and it’s made by Puma, just write them. They just might change it.

Some Related Stories:

Category: Dutch Eredivisie