Frankie Thorogood

During one of the coldest winters on record in the UK, professional footballers began wearing snoods. Thorogood wanted one to wear in his amateur Sunday league, found that neither JD Sports nor Sports Direct stocked them, and started selling them himself; he has said he was the first person in the country to sell them. He expected snoods to be a passing craze, and after the Football Association later banned players from wearing them he turned to the compression tops players wore under their shirts, which became one of TCA’s core product lines. He has also said that before starting TCA he wanted to go into advertising, and that his background is in marketing.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1]

On April 30, 2012, Thorogood Sports Ltd, an online retailer, was incorporated, with Thorogood as a director from that day; the company is the operator of the sportswear brand TCA. TCA says the brand began in 2012 in Hackney, East London, took off with a collection of technical compression sportswear, and sold 11,000 pairs of its Supreme Legging, launched in 2014, in the first 12 months.⁠[2][2][3][3][4][5][5][5]

TCA originally stood for Total Compression Advanced and was later changed to Thorogood Competitive Apparel to cover products beyond compression wear. Thorogood has said that TCA sold mainly on Amazon and that his mission was to create a world-class sportswear brand that “just happened to be selling on Amazon” rather than to find something to sell; he wrote the product copy himself, and he met the company’s suppliers in China in 2012 and kept working with them afterwards.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

Thorogood has said that after TCA reached millions of pounds in revenue he decided to launch about 30 new styles in a single year, due for the fourth quarter of 2017, without any financing in place and relying only on sales cash flow; suppliers had to be paid before the stock could be sold, leaving the company in a hole of about £300,000. He borrowed from banks and from his parents and even took out a loan nominally to buy a car to pay overdue invoices, and in the end sold about £600,000 worth of stock to wholesale buyers for about £100,000; it took three years to get out of the mess.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

He has said that discounting during the crisis did not work well because price is an indicator of quality; by the time the company was sold, TCA was raising prices every three or four months, and prices had risen by 50% in total without sales dropping.⁠[1][1][1]

During the Covid lockdowns, Thorogood and his girlfriend found themselves scrolling their phones every evening, so they began trying different crafts and liked air-drying clay best; worried about having nothing to do after selling TCA, he turned it into a side hustle, starting with just 50 units and cutting up clay on the kitchen table and posting out orders. Pott’d dates its story to the summer of 2020, and it grew into a brand selling pottery kits that need no kiln.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][6][7][8]

Thorogood has said that TCA was sold in the middle of the Covid pandemic; 18 months earlier a business broker had valued TCA at less than a thousand pounds, but it ended in a multimillion-pound exit. The team stayed on after the sale and, under new leadership, launched new products such as kids’ sportswear. He said letting go of TCA came as a relief.⁠[1][1][1][1][1]

On May 28, 2021, Thorogood resigned as a director of Thorogood Sports Ltd and ceased to be a person with significant control of the company on the same day, when the German company Mxp Prime Platform GmbH became the controlling owner of 75% or more of the shares; from October 25, 2021, the controlling owner has been SellerX Germany GmbH.⁠[3][9][9][9][9][9]

On July 27, 2021, Pott’d Creations Limited was incorporated, with Thorogood as a director from that day. He has said that about six months after TCA was sold he realised Pott’d had become a serious business and began investing his time in it.⁠[10][11][11][1]

In July 2023, Sage’s small-business podcast Sound Advice published an interview with Thorogood in which he looked back on TCA’s crisis and sale. Discussing Pott’d, he said he had learned from TCA’s sheer number of products and did not want to pin all his hopes on a single product, and planned to launch three or four more similar creative products that year; he also described Pott’d’s work with the charity North London Cares, running clay sessions for older people struggling for social connection, and said Pott’d would not be his last business.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

On February 22, 2026, The Venture RoomThe Venture RoomThe Venture Room is a UK entrepreneurial media brand centered on the YouTube channel @theventureroom. Through long-form interviews with founders and street interviews such as “Asking Millionaires How They Got Rich?”, it presents entrepreneurs’ stories and advice to aspiring business owners, and runs an entrepreneur community and brand partnerships.Open the full entry published a compilation of street interviews filmed in Marylebone, London, that included a segment with Thorogood. He said on the show that he was the first person in the country to sell football snoods, selling them to Premier League footballers, and that the business later became a sportswear brand that he eventually sold; he started with £100 of his own savings, and his original goal was to make £300 to buy a new phone.⁠[12][12][12][12][12][12]

On July 21, 2026, The Venture Room published a full episode starring Thorogood, challenging him to build a business worth £100,000 from nothing in 24 hours; the episode opened by recalling the channel’s earlier street interview with him. He said on the show that he had built two multimillion-pound businesses, that TCA reached several million pounds in revenue and was sold about five years earlier, and that Pott’d makes creative arts and crafts products for adults.⁠[13][13][13][13]

In the episode he followed a sequence of ideation, validation, refinement, execution and fundraising, building on HYROX fitness racing, a field he knows well: he first asked gym members for feedback, dropped a cooling-patch idea that would take six to twelve weeks to develop, switched to HYROX-themed T-shirts with tongue-in-cheek slogans, used AI tools to design the graphics and build a website, and collected purchase intentions on the spot at a training gym; finally, on a video call, he offered an investor 10% of the business for £10,000, valuing it at £100,000, and the investor verbally said he was interested in investing.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13][13][13]

Pott’d started with air-drying clay pottery kits; its best seller is the Home Pottery Kit, which includes clay, tools and paints, and it later added ranges such as ceramic and glass items to paint yourself. The brand positions itself around creativity as a path to positive mental health, launched the video podcast Pott’dCast, and works with the London charity Open Art Spaces to host affordable creative events. As of October 2026, Pott’d says it has helped more than 500,000 people get creative; its products are sold in 20 countries, and it has collaborated with brands including Barbie and Hello Kitty. Kris Linton is a co-founder of Pott’d.⁠[7][7][6][6][6][6][8][8][8]

“Your ideas are absolutely worthless. Your execution is everything.” He recalled that in 2010 he and a friend came up with the idea of a selfie stick and did nothing about it, only for selfie sticks to become a global hit a few years later; whenever you have a great idea, someone else has almost certainly thought of it already (at 04:17 in the February 2026 video).⁠[12][12][12]

“The product is king.” He said that if he were starting again he would research the market and what others had tried, then keep testing and prototyping until he had a product he thought was amazing; with a great product, everything after that becomes easy (at 02:52 in the February 2026 video).⁠[12][12]

“It’s about working out what you can bring to the table.” When choosing a direction, he dropped ideas he was not passionate about and chose HYROX, the field he knows best and where he has connections (at 04:07 in the July 2026 video).⁠[13][13][13]

“If you want to know what people are going to buy, just go and ask them.” He said that only by asking for feedback in person at the gym did he learn that women customers wanted lighter, more cropped styles, something he had not thought of (at 27:39 in the July 2026 video).⁠[13][13]

“Do it this way with lower margins, but prove the concept.” He admitted that one of his past weaknesses was wanting everything to be perfect from day one, and this time chose print on demand, building up customers and an email list first and changing the operation once demand was clear (at 32:00 in the July 2026 video).⁠[13][13][13]

Pott’d: Official website: https://getpottd.co.uk/ (opens in a new window).⁠[6]

TCA: Official website: https://tca.fit/ (opens in a new window).⁠[14]