Friends With Benefits

Over the weekend, Forward Madison of USL League One debuted their ‘Friends with Benefits’ Kit at a simultaneous event in London and Madison, WI. This innovative jersey is just the latest example of Forward Madison pushing the envelope in terms of what a kit can be. Integrating innovative technology, this kit aims to connect fans across the glove through beer and soccer. 

We had the chance to catch up with Forward Madison’s Art Director and longtime kit designer Cassidy Sepnieski to give us a look into the process of creating this kit and the story behind it. 

How did you get started as a designer in the sports world?

I’m actually employed by our parent company, Big Top Sports + Entertainment. So when I started with the company we didn’t even have a soccer team, and I actually worked for a baseball team here. I worked with the Madison Mallards doing graphic design, marketing, and social media on the baseball side of things. Then, Peter Wilt -- the American soccer legend -- was brought on to help Forward Madison get off the ground in USL League One. The big thing for that project was that we needed to have custom jerseys that fit in with the messaging we were doing. 

Is that where you came in?

At first, I was just helping where I could in terms of designs. But for the first round of jersey designs, they tried hiring from the outside. For one reason or another, it didn’t work out, and it landed on my desk as a last resort. I remember spending a whole weekend, locked in my office, blasting Red Hot Chili Peppers, trying to get some designs down and do something I'd never done before. The board loved the direction I went with, and it seemed that doing everything in-house was going to be much easier. So they brought me on board for that first year of kits, and I’ve been around ever since. 

Coming from a baseball background, what was it like transitioning to the soccer world and being tasked to design a kit for a brand new team.

The freedom of having that blank space of a brand new team, a new market, and a lower division team were very enticing. We got to have so much fun with it. That first year, people really liked what we were doing. And we weren't even designing stuff that was super out of the box in terms of apparel. It was just a repeat flamingo pattern. You can find that at any Forever 21 or H&M shirt, but bringing it into the context of a soccer kit design was something that people hadn't seen. It was just taking simple concepts, having fun with it, putting them on kits, and people thought it was cool. I think we filled a void with that. 

Where did flamingo design come from for that first-ever Forward Madison kit?

It sounds dumb, but the flamingo is the plastic pink flamingo that’s actually the official bird of Madison. Some university students in the seventies played this political prank where they filled one of the big student union hills with thousands of plastic pink flamingos. The story is very intertwined with that, so we knew we had to be the flamingos. There was no other option.

One thing you guys are known for is pushing the envelope with your kits. How did you push to innovate after that first flamingo kit?

Each year, I feel like I’m coming in with a chip on my shoulder. Our entire front office staff is always just set on being ourselves. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we just want to be as creative as we can. We recognize that this is a space to do something weird and fun. We’re always trying to just be ourselves. And there always seems to be a pressure of ‘Oh, you can’t top what you did last year,’ so we want to outdo ourselves every year. There’s this kind of pressure to perform, but not pressure to please. We're not going to do it for you. We're going to do it to prove to us that we can do it. 

I remember that 2019 alternate one was voted by fans as the best kit in the world in a poll by SiriusXM. 

Yeah, and everyone's like, ‘Oh, you're never going to beat it.’ And then the next year we did the Drip Kit and it blew that one out of the water. Then they said we couldn’t beat that one. So then we did the reversible kit, which had never been done in American soccer. We’re just having fun with it and keep going. It’s just pushing the limits on ourselves and on what kits can do. I think that’s why we wanted to tie in the technology aspect on this next one.

Right, so this new kit has a QR code hidden within the pattern. How did the inspiration come for that?

Pre-pandemic, we had this idea to do a meme kit because we love memes. But we didn’t want it to be super obvious, so we thought, ‘what if we just integrated QR codes into the kit and each one you scanned took you to a different meme?’ That never actually made it to production. It was our own little inside joke, but it never happened because nobody in our front office thought people would really get this technology. 

But then the pandemic hit and QR codes were suddenly everywhere. It felt like the perfect opportunity to now use this because people are more accustomed and conditioned to that technology. It was a weird outcome of the pandemic that this technology kind of surged back into popularity and became a part of common life. And while we didn't turn it into the meme kit, we were able to do something that helps people reconnect post-pandemic. 

So how does the QR code on the kit actually work? What is the goal behind it?

The QR code will take the owner of the jersey to a landing page where you can buy a beer for anyone who's at a Forward Madison match.

If you're in Germany and you buy the kit, you scan the QR code and buy a beer for someone at our stadium. The hope is that the recipient of the beer can reach back out and create a pen-pal across the globe. We’re putting up beer boards at our bar that will have slips with people’s names and their twitter handles so that those who claim a beer can reach out. 

If you’re at a Forward Madison match, you just go to the bar, buy a beer, and then you can claim a second one for free with one of the slips. 

The goal is to connect people through beer and soccer. We want to connect fans from across the world to Madison and vice versa. Then, hopefully, the people who bought beers through the QR code can make it to a game and see how it all works too.

Bonding over soccer and a beer is one of the simplest forms of connection. It’s awesome how you’ve pushed that to an extreme with this kit. 

Yeah, and we barely got to have fans last year. You couldn't go to bars, you couldn't really do anything. So it was all about, ‘how do we create those feel good moments moving forward?’

So how did the whole concept of the beers come together exactly?

This is where our captain Connor Tobin really stepped in. We had the jersey, and we had the QR code on it. I initially wanted to link it to a page called Flamingos After Dark where we were going to do off-the-cuff, off-the-record, flamingos content that was a little risque and password-protected

But Connor just kept saying that it wasn’t inclusive enough. And his big thing is that after every time we win he goes to the Flock End and chugs a 32 oz beer on the field. Slams it. It’s been his trademark for years, and it’s turned into quite a tradition here. And after the game we all go to the bars together. So then he just suggested, ‘what if we did beer?’

And it’s so his thing, but he's also highly cognizant of the soccer community, so he knew we could find an angle where this could help us connect to soccer fans across the globe. He knew this was the way to do it. 

He also knew that our easiest conversation starter as a club right now is jerseys. So it's like, how do we tie the kit, beer, and fans all together and make it work so that we're speaking a language that anybody can understand. 

Beyond the QR code, what else can you tell us about the design of this kit?

The design really came from an offhand comment from our director of marketing, who was like, ‘plaid is super in right now.’

But I didn't want to do plaid. I was adamant about not doing plaid. But eventually I just I tried to make a Forward Madison plaid. The original one was disgusting. It had these terrible gradients, and it wasn't good. Then, I accidentally clicked a setting and it turned into this neon, disco, washed-out, erratic pattern. And I thought it was kind of neat, so it just went from there. It was sort of an accident, but it stemmed from us trying to do something very different. One wrong click and it turned into something high-energy and fun.

You guys already have a home and away kit for the season. When will you guys be wearing this one? 

It will be for friendly matches only. We were gonna make it a goalkeeper kit because it feels like its colorful enough to be one. But the league actually said no because they want goalkeeper kits to be more solid. So we just thought we’d carve our own space for it

Friendlies are gonna be huge for us, especially going into next season. Hopefully, we'll have more international friendlies, and this kis is all about making friends across the globe. So it all ties together. 

When will this kit make its debut?

We’ll have a friendly match against Minneapolis on September 7th. That will be the debut of the free beers and the boards with the slips from across the world. After our launch this past weekend, we can’t wait to see how everything will go. 

Special thank you to Cassidy for talking us through the process behind the kits, and make sure to check out more of her work here.