… sold out in 14 hrs
By Adebayo Olodan
Seni Saraki, son of the Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki has designed special jersey jersey for ace sports kits manufacturer, Nike with the product selling out in 14 hours.
After its blistering success with the Nigerian World Cup football jersey, Nike ventured into another collaboration, this time with a youth culture publication.
The latest partnership with influential ‘The Native’ magazine, headed by the younger Saraki, pays homage to the football-mad West African nation with a ‘Nike by the Native’ special edition jersey, which has a distinct tire mark and takes inspiration from adire, a traditional Nigerian fabric.
In a report published by edition.cnn.com, the 23-year-old Saraki, was quoted to have said, “the jersey has ‘+234’ on the sleeve, a reference to Nigeria’s international dialing code and tribute to the thousands of Nigerians living in the diaspora but who retain close ties to home.”
The tire marks are a nod to a style of football known as ‘Monkey Post’ in the country where car tires are often used as goal posts during street games.
Speaking on the partnership, Saraki informed CNN that, “For us to do a collaboration with Nike, the main thing was to make the jersey representative of Nigeria, the people in Nigeria and the Nigerians in diaspora so they can feel proud to wear it.”
Written boldly on the back of the jersey is “Ilé,” a word which means home in Saraki’s native Yoruba language.
“We thought it would be cool to have an actual Nike jersey having a local Nigerian language on it. That’s unheard of, that’s never happened before,” he said. The design team included his co-founders Suleiman Shittu, Teniola ‘TeeZee’ Zaccheaus, Olushola Fagbemi and Ademide Edgal.
The release of the jersey is the culmination of a working relationship between both companies that took form during the promotion of Nigeria’s football kit during the World Cup.
At 23, Saraki is the typical multi-hyphenate millennial; as well as the magazine, he runs a football academy in Kwara State.
‘The Native,’ he said, is a digital platform that started as a print magazine which has now morphed into an agency and an annual music festival.
“We focus on music and the lifestyle that surrounds music and the culture in Nigeria and the surrounding countries in Africa in general.”
The jerseys were available for sale on the Nike website on Friday and sold out within 14 hours of their release. They also sold out within hours in December at a Lagos pop-up shop that gave Nigerians an early taste of the product, Saraki stated.
The collaboration between Nike and ‘The Native’ marks yet another high point in the relationship between brand and country.
Last year, Nigeria’s Nike-designed kits at the 2018 World Cup in Russia sold out in minutes and turned heads around the world for its distinctive style.
It received recognition from various media outlets as the best kit at the tournament, with international men’s magazine GQ voting it the top-ranked of the 32 nations in Russia.
Similarly last year, Nike created an exclusive football jersey for Nigerian Afrobeats superstar Wizkid named ‘Starboy’– the musician’s nickname.
