This week we chatted with Josh Warwick, co-founder of Cult Kits. Founded in 2015, Cult Kits is a vintage football retailer that sells shirts, prints and other merchandise. Read about Josh’s journey to starting his own business with a couple of his closest friends.
DB: Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us this week, Josh. Can you start by telling us what your current position is?
JW: I am a co-founder, Partner and Head of Content of Cult Kits.
DB: Wow! A co-founder, Partner and Head of Content… how did you end up here?
JW: My background is in journalism. After leaving university, I was taken on by my local paper in Suffolk, where I worked my way up to News Editor, before moving to the Daily Telegraph as Digital Projects Editor.
Both me and my brother-in-law, David Jones, are big football fans and every Christmas we’d buy each other a classic shirt – usually from the 90s, an era when we were both kids and completely obsessed with the game. After a few years of this, we had the idea for the website. He’s a graphic designer, and his skills with my journalistic background was a good combination to pursue the project.
Initially, Cult Kits was just a blog dedicated to shirts and fan culture. Then, we met Rob Kocur, the business’s third partner, who was buying and selling shirts in his spare time. We invited him to join us and Cult Kits was born!
At the start, we probably had around 100-200 shirts on the site and sold one or two items a day – today we stock close to 10,000 jerseys and sell hundreds of items to buyers from across the world every week.
We now have a small team working for us to ensure we can keep up with increasing demand.
DB: That’s amazing that you’ve come so far in such a short time frame. What do you value most about your current role?
JW: How many people get to work in an industry they love and run their own business with two friends? Doing something we are passionate about means every day we try to provide customers or our social media followers with products or content that we like ourselves. And that makes everything more fun and so much easier.
DB: What would you say has been the biggest learning to date from your career path?
JW: I keep coming back to it, and I know it’s hardly original, but doing something you are genuinely passionate about means you’ll do a better job and you’ll enjoy yourself doing it. I’m lucky because I loved being a journalist too. But, I had plenty of jobs when I was a student that I hated and it helped me resolve that I’d always try to pursue the things that made me happy. It’s proved to be a wise career path.
DB: Lastly, what is your favorite question to ask candidates during an interview?
JW: “What could we do better?” If the candidate knows our business well enough to offer constructive critique, they’ll improve what we do. And secondly, “who do you support?” I can’t employ a Norwich fan.
