After Tom Behon’s soccer career suddenly ended in his early 20s, he began to lead his energy to build his own company. Together with his brother Phil, he co-founded the premium sportswear brand Castle in 2016 from his parents’ kitchen table in Liverpool.
Nine years later, Castore produces 10 million units each year, making kits for now retired British tennis stars Andy Murray and Newcastle United. The brothers still manage the three boards but do not own a majority stake.
Despite the company’s growing to 500 employees and rumored to be valued at £1 billion in 2023, Behon has been careful about how he spends money and is still flying the economy.
How well did your sports background prepare you for business?
For me, the biggest thing was learning to lose.
In sports, it doesn’t matter how good you are, you’ll lose a lot. And as an entrepreneur, you need to be used to losing as well. The big distinction I noticed among entrepreneurs is not necessarily intellectual. That means you can continue when things go wrong. It is merciless patience.
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Born: Merseyside, September 1989
Education: Wyral Grammar School for Boys
Career:
September 2012 – July 2015: Lloyd’s Bank – Manager Strategic Finance Associate
2016 – Started Castle with his brother Phil
2017 – 2018 – Business won first million
2018 – £3.2 million donation from private investors
2019 – Signed Andy Murray, who joined as an investor
2020 – Move to Team Sports Partnership
2021 – Signed international teams including England Cricket and McLaren Formula 1 team
2023 – £150 million funding round from Raine Groupe, Hanaco Ventures and Felix Capital – Valuing the business at £1 billion
2024 – Umbro License Transaction
Life: Cheshire with fiance Francesca
In my case, when the manager at Tranmere Rovers said he wouldn’t renew my contract, I really had to welcome myself as a soccer player. You are in your late teens or early 20s and this is what you literally did your whole life. Suddenly, you leave that room and have no pay, you have no work, you have no purpose.
It’s not easy, but that meant that when building a business I could deal with losses. I definitely had chips on my shoulders and wanted to prove them wrong. Speaking of which, the most difficult “no” was when we were trying to raise money to start Castoré. Everyone said no. Ultimately, our parents offered to remute the house to give us a loan. They didn’t have a spare lying on £40,000. My mother was a teacher, my father worked in construction. They made a great sacrifice.
How has your development impacted your approach to money and risk?
I proudly raised the working class. We lived north without much money – we didn’t go on holidays and don’t think we went to a restaurant by the time we were 18. However, my mother’s family from the south was middle class. So we went to my cousin’s house and they had a big trampoline in the garden, which felt like heaven on earth as a child. You know people are better than you.
When I first started Castore, I vividly remember meeting other entrepreneurs and thinking about them. Few people like us. Everyone else had a safety net – parents had spare cash and if that doesn’t work, they did something else and it would be fine. I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t think it was okay – there was no plan B. The “Friends and Family” round was not an option for us.
I felt more secure than I wanted to make a certain amount of money. My dad was always nervous about being redundant, and that affected his family. Success in terms of having security has always been a goal. I knew I needed to build something meaningful to make all this sacrifice worthwhile.
How did you get your business out of the ground with such a small amount of capital?
We paid £1,000 a month for three years. I came back with my parents, and my brother’s wife now paid his rent. These were financially tough times.
At first, I had enough money to build a website and get the first batch of products. We went to a factory in Portugal and the owner, who somehow did not speak English, agreed to a minimum order of 400 units per product. There was a nice article about us when it was released around the 2016 (RIO) Olympics, and suddenly someone placed their first order. Having a British brand was very novel. We did about £10,000 in our first week and sold all our first batches within a few months.
It grew through word of mouth. I stand outside the Equinox and Third Space Gym and provide products to personal trainers to hand over to clients. We were chasing attorneys and bankers, the “Goldman Sachs Man,” and it worked.
Brexit didn’t make it easy, but it was able to create a supply chain. Head office was my mother and father’s kitchen. Finally, I got my first external unit 18 months later.
The 2019 Andy Murray contract really changed things. We gave his trainer a castle shirt and we managed to hold a meeting. We were unable to pay him the advance fee to wear the item, so he agreed to put his money in for discounted stocks in the business. It was really innovative at the time.
On the first day, Andy wore a castoré in court at the Australian Open, but his image was everywhere. We did something like 8 months of revenue in a day. The partnership was transformative. We were ambitious and only went for Andy. Most people of our size wouldn’t have bothered us.
Personally, for us, the real moment of financial relief was 2021. This was the (billionaires) Mohsin and Zuber Issa invested £10 million. They are the entrepreneurs themselves and they told us “take some for yourself.” It was the first time I’d taken money out of the table, but I thought about it. This was worth it. We paid off our parents’ mortgage.
You pitched yourself as a premium brand, but keeping what you started scaling at speed wasn’t always easy. What happened and where are you now?
Without a premium, there’s no reason for Castore to exist. Of course, there is some degree of validity to be a British brand. I’m thinking about Dyson, McLaren, Bentley, and Burberry. But it’s more than that. You need authentic differentiating quality and we wanted it to be about premium atmosphere and performance (which originally came from European manufacturing advantages). That’s what sets us apart from Nike and Adidas.
But the challenge when you drive millions of income is that it is physically impossible to manufacture that amount of product in Portugal. These factories are not built for it. So you look abroad and there are trade-offs. Want to reach 1 billion revenue? yes. Can you do that in Europe? Realistically, no.
The vision remained the same as being a premium British brand. But getting there required flexibility. Otherwise we would not have left Portugal or reached a billion. Scaling in that vision was one of the biggest challenges. Many brands have the same problem, and if you dilute the quality, you will dilute the community.
Still, when I raised funds 18 months ago, I bought time for reset. The brand was growing very quickly and very widely, with retailers, partners, suppliers and more. My brother and I realized that it didn’t make a huge difference to us, whether it took us 8, 10 or 12 years to get to where we wanted. Suddenly, we had this capital buffer, but at the end we could afford to endure. Even if your revenues are delayed for a certain period of time, that’s fine. I build and protect long-term brand equity. I want to make this a 100-year-old brand.
Do you have a pension?
No, I’m not an angel investor – I don’t have time. Most of my non-commercial wealth lies in public stock. He doesn’t even have a financial advisor. I want to do it myself. Even if you’re not winning the market, you’ll at least learn something along the way.
From earning £1,000 a month, he ended up running a company that is rumored to be worth £1 billion. Do you like to spend your money now?
I’m not being honest. I have never bought an expensive watch, I don’t spend a lot of money on clothes. I don’t skip business class. . . Even to Australia, I flew the economy! We have 500 staff now and I want to set the tone. The whole concept of spending doesn’t make me happy either. I bought a lovely house just outside of Manchester, but that’s not particularly luxurious.
I went through a time when I thought, “I should do something good,” but I was always saving, not Spender. I don’t know if that was because of my background or if I spent three years in which I was constantly afraid of running out of money. That fear never leaves you. It is deeply branded in my soul – that delusion focusing on that daily cash.
I spend on my parents – I buy them a nice holiday and send them business class, but they are at another stage of their life. They are in the stage where they “enjoy it” but I am on the stage in the building. I still work very long hours – I greatly believe strength is the price of excellence.