Poppy Appeal
MatchWornShirt
MatchWornShirt (MWS) once again partnered with The Royal British Legion for the 2025 Poppy Appeal, auctioning match-worn shirts featuring commemorative poppy emblems from fixtures across the UK, with net proceeds supporting the Legion’s work.
Our task: Create a campaign driven by press office and compelling social-first content, to put MWS front and centre of the football conversation and spotlight the impactful partnership with The Royal British Legion.
We kicked off with a bang by creating an emotive hero film with Arsenal and England legend, Tony Adams, in which he spoke about the lived experience of having a family member in the armed services.
Supplemented by media interviews and a proactive press office, the content dominated social media to launch the campaign.
To extend the campaign across new channels and audiences, we then built an invite-only creator experience at the MWS warehouse, placing the shirts at the centre of the story. A curated group of content creators in the football sphere attended the experience, with behind-the-scenes access to the MWS vault.
The event involved:
- A tour of the warehouse, giving attendees a glimpse into the processing of the famous match-worn shirts.
- Spotlighting of shirts in the MWS warehouse; for creators to see iconic match-worn pieces first hand.
- Studio space within the warehouse for additional content capture and bespoke social formats
The Tony Adams content has been viewed 60k times to date on Instagram, while we secured 256 pieces of earned media coverage through the announcement and supplementary interviews.
The creator experience resulted in a surge of natural creator content out across socials, showcasing the MWS brand to fans and collectors alike, and what the platform offers to consumers. 23 creator posts across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, with a 595K+ combined reach.
The event allowed us to:
- Position MWS as the leading brand in the shirt collectibles industry.
- Raise awareness of MWS’ partnership with The Royal British Legion campaign
- Deliver authentic visual content of the shirts to football first audiences.
