The world of MMA attire has been dominated by the likes of TapouT and Affliction for the past few years, but anyone who has paid attention to the fighters entering the Octagon has noticed another player in the game, Dethrone Royalty.
Dethrone’s biggest representative in both stature and name recognition is the current UFC heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez, who will defend his title against Junior dos Santos on Saturday, Nov. 12 on the first UFC on FOX card.
Bleacher Report MMA had the chance to speak to Nick Swinmurn, the founder of Dethrone, in the days leading up to UFC on FOX 1.
Swinmurn founded Zappos.com in 1999 and stayed with the company until 2006. While still with Zappos, he received his introduction to MMA when a friend called him and asked him if he had ever seen “The Ultimate Fighter,” which was then in its first season.
After the call, Swinmurn watched the replay of every episode of the show in the hours leading up to the final episode of Season 1, thinking while he was watching the show, “S**t, this is pretty cool.”
Swinmurn then scored tickets for the finale of Season 2 of TUF, where he watched from the balcony. “I was sitting up on the balcony and I remember that the table next to us was Leonardo DiCaprio and Jenna Jameson and I was thinking ‘Wow all these people are watching this.’
“It was Nick Diaz and Diego Sanchez (in the main event), and I remember Nick Diaz came up and was just standing there in jeans and a hoodie and I just thought he was a fan and not sitting at a table and all of a sudden 10 minutes later, he was getting ready to fight.”
From that point Swinmurn thought, “I want to start a brand for this sport and that’s what laid the early foundation…TUF 1 and going to that second fight. I think that’s when I thought hey, this is pretty cool.”
With the seed planted, it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Dethrone, “When you’re starting a brand, no one cares. There’s no one online searching for your brand because they don’t know that it exists. I remember when we started and thinking, ‘wow, this is so much harder than starting Zappos was.’”
Swinmurn also offered words of caution for those thinking that all it takes is a fighter wearing a company’s shirt into the Octagon for success, “There’s definitely a perception out there that if you put a shirt on a guy, then the next day, orders are just flooding your site and everyone in the world’s calling you, and that’s not the case.
“It takes a lot of time and a lot of money. You take a look at some of these brands that everyone thinks are so huge and so successful and then you realize that they kind of got taken over in a fire sale by ABG (Authentic Brands Group) or whatever, it makes you realize that just because everyone knows you, it doesn’t mean you’re making money or doing things the right way.”
With that being said, Swinmurn is comfortable where Dethrone is now and where they are headed as a company.
“It’s only been just over two years and we’ve done a good job of getting the name out there. Our sales have been increasing every year. We’re still primarily in fight shops and independent stores.
“With certain (larger) retailers, maybe there were some companies ahead of us that kind of left a sour taste in some people’s mouths as far as what MMA brands stand for; they’re very aggressive and angry and sometimes we have to battle that.
“We’re a lifestyle brand. We started in fights and we have a lot of fighters on our roster, but we try and use our designs and marketing to really bridge that gap. “
The idea of becoming a lifestyle brand and not strictly an MMA brand was a decision made by just looking around, “We had artists that were looking at what ‘MMA fans’ were wearing and then we realized from ourselves that we didn’t always want to wear those shirts.”
“I just think there’s a fine line, there’s definitely a negative perception in some circles of what the MMA shirts are typically going to look like. So we wanted to break away from that. This is what we do, so we don’t apologize for that, but we’re also, we don’t like the stereotypical MMA shirts any more than anyone else does, so we’re just going to do what we’re going to do.”
With that type of thinking driving them, Dethrone started to see success and hear positive feedback, “We started to notice that a lot of people that we never would see wearing the stuff, we just noticed that they were wearing the stuff and we noticed that fighters seemed to be wearing it a lot, lot more just casual and just randomly than they did in the very beginning.
“Guys that we were sponsoring, we sent them a box of stuff and they said, ‘this is the first one of my sponsors that I’ll actually be wearing the stuff when I’m not fighting.’”
In the end, the driving force for Dethrone seems to be, “It was just trying to come up with stuff that made sense to average people instead of, this must work, it’s on TV.”
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