and what’s next. Inside Retail: How did Queensland Football Club come to be? Ken Sakata: I started the business about 18 months ago. I’m a doctor and I work in elective surgery. At the time, I was working on pandemic-related duties, and I was losing my mind due to stress. At the time, I was working through this through a character I made up online – which had my name and face. It was about how I was going to quit my job and become a professional footballer because they were allowed to travel interstate. Football players were seen as essential workers who had access to tests and masks that I, as a frontline worker, didn’t have. It was born out of frustration, but it was mainly humorous and had a bit of a following on Twitter.  The opportunity then came up to make merchandise for this player that I created, which sold really well. But the company that made the shirts was served a cease and desist [from the AFL], so my response was to create the Queensland Football Club. Inadvertently, I developed this intellectual property that I now own, and I thought it would be fun to start making merchandise for this club I created. It’s a rambling story, but now I basically create merchandise for this club I made up. IR: Can you provide a sense of the scale of the business, and how quickly it’s expanded over those 18 months? KS: The last drop was in the six-figure range. Despite those numbers, it’s still a one-person company. I’ve probably taken it as far as I can by myself, but I’ve developed it to the point where it needs more than just me. So I’m looking at the next big steps in terms of growing it. IR: Why do you think it has resonated in the way that it has? KS: There’s a general interest in sports merchandise that’s happened. A lot of this has to do with 90s retro vintage interest, colliding with a lot of nostalgic sports documentaries. I also think after the Covid-19 pandemic, men in particular are more interested in presenting themselves more nicely compared to the previous two years. All these forces have come together, and I’ve benefited from that. IR: There’s a significant focus on local production and manufacturing and investing in quality materials and sustainability. Have you found this to be an economically viable business model? KS: It is viable. The company is profitable and doesn’t have debt. I can pay for the next production line and then some. That’s true. However, would I be making way more money by investing in other countries with cheaper labour, and using [cheaper] fabric? I think there’s no doubt in my mind that I’m making less money than I could by making these decisions. But, I have the luxury of being financially secure in my other job as a doctor, and I can create and make decisions from a point of abundance. So, I don’t need the next drop to do X amount, so I can pay the mortgage. I can make these decisions, and they have proven to be more intellectually and creatively rewarding, while also sustaining local industry which – depending on who you ask – is either dying or dead. I get a lot of satisfaction out of that, but it depends on how you ask the question. Is this the best economic model? No. But is it viable? So far, so good. IR: Do you think other businesses will take your lead, and invest in local production and manufacturing? KS: I can see the reasons why they don’t choose to do it. It’s way more chaotic, the supply chain of fabric, garment dying, manufacturing, and finishing decoration is constantly being broken by businesses going out of business, or not being able to keep up with demand. Every few months, you need to go back to the drawing board and redo it. It’s not for the faint-hearted, and is tricky to build a business out of. But medicine has trained me to work well under pressure, and make plans on the fly. It’s basically what I’ve been doing for my whole professional life. But, I can see why someone who isn’t used to that would say it’s too hard. I think that’s reasonable. IR: Do you think your investment in local production resonates with costumers? KS: I think it’s a nice idea. But the reality is that it’s hard to truly appreciate how hard the work is. To say that something is completely Australian-made requires so much work that people don’t realise. Similar to the idea of greenwashing, so many brands have an Australian flavour of marketing to advertise their stuff and create that local feel. That’s more obvious to the customer – but the reality of making something completely Australian is unglamorous, requires a lot of work, and is maybe not as financially viable. That’s the reality of doing things here. IR: How do you balance working as a doctor and elective surgeon, and running Queensland Football Club? KS: I’m an assistant surgeon, which enables me to have far greater control over my career, and has helped me with this second career. Whether I have work-life balance is always a discussion worth having. I work seven days a week – three and a half days for each job – and there’s very little time for pure relaxation. It requires a bit of psychological trickery to [tell myself] that I have work-life balance. I derive a lot of pleasure from my work in both fields, which has given me a lot of joy and satisfaction. Working in medicine prepares you for a life that’s unpredictable and stressful, and it can [equip you with stronger] teamwork and communication skills, so there are a lot of things you can bring across to different fields. [Even though] I didn’t come from a fashion background, I don’t feel like I was necessarily starting from scratch. IR: Can you discuss your social media strategy? How much are you deliberately playing into the nostalgia element with the 1980s-style look and feel? KS: In my own life, I’m not a social media-active person. I’m not on Facebook, and my Instagram account has six pictures of my dog. But running a business is completely different. I think a modern business necessitates you to have a social media presence because that’s how people discover you and find out what’s happening. I don’t have a clearly defined strategy, because my thoughts on the best thing to do are continuously changing. I generally do a new video every week and on a Saturday or Sunday, because that’s when the space I work in, the factory, is quiet.  The only time I have the space to myself is on the weekend. But you can directly link the videos to sales. You can upload a video, and get orders shortly after. There’s a very direct correlation between those two things. The future of the business requires me to make more videos, as much as humanly possible. I feel like what a modern business looks like isn’t so much a clothing brand that does videos to promote itself, but a video channel with a merchandise store. That’s realistically what it is. Regarding 90s nostalgia, I landed on that out of necessity. When I started making clothes in Australia, all of our machines were from the decades that our manufacturing peak was at before it left. All the machines that are left are from the 1980s and 1990s. I can’t make complex garments made out of new fabric blends. It’s out of necessity that I make things from the 90s. It also happens to be what’s in vogue now. But, the anxiety is – what happens when that trend eventually changes? There will always be a line of pretty timeless things. I would say that sportswear in the broad 1950s definition of, say, Polo Ralph Lauren, will always be in vogue in some capacity. So it will always be a baseline of the brand. IR: Why do you think this has connected with your audience? KS: I suppose it seems quite idyllic, the 1980s and 1990s. There was a lot of optimism for the future. But, right now, what do young people have to look forward to? Environmental disasters and big corporations without their interests in mind. It’s quite pessimistic looking into the future. I think the 80s and 90s are quite romantic by comparison. IR: What does the future of Queensland Football Club look like? KS: How I can increase the scale and complexity of the business without overloading [myself] is the big question for the next 12 months. My feeling around it is to always keep the manufacturing local, but start to look at fabric that we cannot make here, and bring it in from overseas. Let’s say I want to make a jacket – what about making a Japanese capsule with fabrics from Japan over the next four months? Then, rotating that so fabrics come from Europe for four months. Keeping things interesting and varied, but also sustaining the local manufacturing industry with these overseas fabrics is the solution I’ve come up with really. Whether that’s compelling for my customer base is the thing that keeps me up at night. I’ve also got an ongoing curiosity and feeling that having an actual bricks-and-mortar shop will be very interesting for the brand. So much information is hard to communicate over videos and photos. Particularly when clothes are such a tactile product. You can communicate so much information in two seconds, by feeling something or putting something on, which is completely lost online. Whether it’s economically viable to go into physical retail is the big question. I don’t know. While the business has changed, my feelings about it haven’t. I still feel it’s two bad drops away from death. That hasn’t changed in a year and a half. There’s always that fear, but the business has grown.