Let me welcome you all to our new cricket brands blog, we’re very excited to finally launch PRYZM Cricket after a good 2 years of planning. Here we’ll be writing blogs about this and that, but mainly about amateur cricket and cricket products – not only about PRYZM Cricket but cricket as a whole and much more. We are aware that parting with your hard earned money to a new business is worrying, so we want to bridge that gap and show that our products are superb, we are honest guys, running a credible cricket brand that one day we hope to have England players using our kit to beat the aussies(again).

I know I’ve mentioned ‘we’ a few times, so I’ll introduce us - we’re both twenty-something year olds that are based in Worcestershire who have thought that the cricket industry is stuck in the past and we want to bring it up-to-date with the modern world, not only with the products themselves – but how the industry connects with players all around the word. 

I’ll start off, I’m Matt Watkins and I’ll be writing the majority of blog posts here – I studied at the University of Leeds and I loved living in the capital of the north – which also I moved to London for a short while but have ended up back in Worcestershire. I’ve been a freelance social media expert for a couple of years however my main passion let me to running a cricket brand for a while called Vantage Cricket, which I did so a few years ago which is where I got to learn the industry from the inside after studying it from the outside as a player looking for kit for many years.

I’ve been a keen cricketer from as long as I can remember and always had an interest in what kit my favourite players were using. When I was growing up, I loved watching Graeme Hick bat at New Road and Chester Road (on the odd occasion), he’d smash it all around the ground with this Duncan Fearnley and Slazenger bats.

However there came a time when I was looking to part with my own money on cricket equipment and it was a tough decision as there was lots of choice, however I found the Custom Bats Cricket Forum, which was excellent as there are many knowledgeable people on there. Through that I became slightly obsessed with cricket equipment and eventually I spotted an opportunity to run Vantage Cricket and met many great people within the industry such as Tom Evans(Mongoose), Roger Weston(Solitaire), Paul Cole(It’s Just Cricket), Marcus Charman(Affinity Cricket) and many others who have helped along the way.

I had a great time doing that, but it wasn’t right for me to take it over completely for one reason or another, however since then I’ve been itching to start my own brand from scratch. Another opportunity arose with Liam (the other chap in the business) as we met whilst I was designing the stickers for Vantage and he was the one that put my ideas into action and we’ve been talking about PRYZM since then really – I’ll let him introduce himself.

Hi, I’m Liam and I’m a Graphic Designer by trade. In 2012 Matt got in contact about some work he needed doing for his old cricket company. He wanted to update the look and feel of the range he was working on and as a designer; I approached the task by looking at the entire market and Cricket industry as a whole.

After a few weeks work, I was amazed by the lack of strategy and process the majority of cricket companies had and how they have almost forgotten about their consumers. “Is it all about the money for them?” (I will write a blog post about this soon)

Myself and Matt worked on a direction that suited his brand well, and we got some great feedback. After the job was completed, a few months later I found myself drawn in by the research I had collected, and really thought we can make a difference to the Industry in some way.

I came to learn that Matt had moved on to bigger and better opportunities and decided to see if he wanted a beer to discuss a potential new business. We sat together and over a few months we focussed on the niche in the market that we felt no-one had capitalised on effectively. So decided to pursue the idea and generate concepts. To cut a long story short, after 2 years of hard work, we unveiled PRYZM Cricket.

I am really looking forward to the opportunities ahead and I’m positive that with our skills and experience, we can make a difference and really give the cricket industry what it needs! Great quality products, with great customer service and a focus on grass roots, all the up to the top!

We hope you follow us on our journey, by following us on Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram!