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A couple of days before the Cleveland Browns’ season-ending playoff loss to the Houston Texans in January, Amari Cooper walked into the team locker room to greet his teammates. And he didn’t come empty-handed—Cooper brought dozens of pairs of his shoes from his apparel business Route Runners, a fitting name for one of the NFL’s top receivers, and gifted each of his teammates with a pair of his signature sneakers, the 001s, modeled after the Air Jordan 18s.
“They enjoyed them because they never had anything like it before,” he said in an interview. “It felt more personalized for them, which was the true intention. As an athlete growing up, everyone one day wants to have their own shoe like Jordan did. But that’s more probable for basketball players than football players.”
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Cooper looks to flip that narrative on its head by refusing to wait for one of the sneaker powerhouses to offer him a signature shoe. Instead, he wants to challenge them.
The former Nike athlete runs routes for a living, but he daydreams about the day he’s running a successful apparel business. The five-time Pro Bowl wide receiver isn’t wasting time turning those daydreams into a reality either. While his upstart venture is still in its startup mode, launching just three years ago, he’s hellbent on building not just a profitable company but one he hopes can rival some of the biggest giants in sportswear such as Puma, Nike and Under Armour.
“That’s definitely my main goal after football,” he said. “We want to be the sports apparel brand, making shoes and gloves, and things of that nature. That’s what I look forward to doing.”
Cooper’s fashion business ambitions aren’t just driven by his eagerness to exercise his creative sense and business acumen on a deeper level. He wants to create generational wealth that even some of highest earning athletes never achieve. He’s not relying on his pass-catching abilities to make that happen.
“It’s a…
Source link : https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nfl-star-amari-cooper-apparel-140000247.html
Author : Sportico
Publish date : 2024-07-31 14:00:00
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