Retailer Classic Football Shirts (CFS) has recorded the busiest-ever period in its 20-year history as World Cup fever drove unprecedented demand from supporters around the globe.
Across June and July, orders dispatched by the Hyde-based company rose 101 per cent compared with the same period in 2025.
Central to helping CFS handle the surge has been its five-year technology partnership with Shipster, the Manchester-based multi-carrier shipping software provider for ecommerce retailers, warehouses and distributors, specialising in custom integrations.
This year, Shipster worked with CFS to integrate a Logopak/Adpak Ecommerce Auto Bagger into its ecommerce fulfilment operation, adding automated packing and label application for carrier collection. Shipster sends the relevant shipment and label data to the Logopak system, which prints and applies the shipping label as part of the automated packing process. For eligible orders, packing time was reduced from minutes to seconds.
During the FIFA World Cup, the combined setup helped CFS manage record order volumes, with the packing machine automatically packing almost two-thirds (64%) of all orders during the tournament.
The new record surpassed a previous high, set during the most recent Black Friday and Christmas trading periods. Demand during the World Cup was fuelled by supporters reliving iconic football moments and reconnecting with the teams, players and shirts that defined previous tournaments.
The biggest sales success of the World Cup was CFS’ new Away Days Mystery Box range. As demand began building ahead of the tournament, 23,830 Mystery Box products were ordered between May and August, including almost 10,000 England Mystery Boxes. Argentina shirts were among the strongest national team sellers, while Cape Verde also enjoyed an unexpected boost in demand following its performance against Spain.
Founded by friends Matt Dale and Douglas Bierton in 2006, CFS has grown from a student-house startup into a global ecommerce business serving customers in more than 130 countries and generating annual revenues of more than £30 million.
The company houses a collection of more than one million authenticated football shirts and memorabilia items, including rare and historic shirts associated with icons such as Pelé, Diego Maradona, Johan Cruyff and David Beckham.
Over the five-year partnership with Shipster, CFS has more than tripled warehouse productivity, enabling staff to process hundreds more orders every day.
Brandon Evans, outbound operations manager at Classic Football Shirts, said: “The World Cup has always been one of the biggest moments in the football calendar for us. Every tournament creates a new wave of nostalgia as supporters reconnect with the teams, players and shirts that defined previous World Cups. Whether it’s a classic Brazil shirt, a memorable England kit or a shirt worn by one of football’s biggest icons, fans want to own a piece of those memories.
“This World Cup put our fulfilment operation under sustained pressure and Shipster made a massive difference. Without the automation and flexibility we’ve built into the operation with Shipster, we simply wouldn’t have been able to dispatch anywhere near the volume of orders we achieved and still maintain the speed and service our customers expect.”
Tony Cheetham, founder and CEO of Shipster, said: “Major sporting events can create huge spikes in demand almost overnight, so retailers need systems that are fast, flexible and capable of scaling quickly.
“Classic Football Shirts has some unique operational challenges. It manages more than one million individual products, ships to customers around the world and regularly experiences sudden peaks in demand driven by tournaments, product launches and viral moments.
“Over the last five years, we’ve worked closely with the team to build a highly automated and increasingly sophisticated fulfilment operation that gives CFS the speed and flexibility to adapt as demand changes. That has ranged from routing and labelling to bespoke processes supporting products such as the hugely popular CFS Away Days Mystery Boxes, as well as international shipping infrastructure supporting its growing US retail presence.
“The World Cup provided the ultimate real-world test of that investment, and it delivered.”
