AB1GK (AB1 Sports) · Mar 2019 - ongoing
Building AB1GK's brand and ecommerce business from zero, solo
Since 2019, I've been the entire product team for AB1GK, the goalkeeper gear brand founded by Premier League goalkeeper Asmir Begovic - designing the brand identity and logo from a blank page, then building and still running the ecommerce business that sells it, alone, from discovery through devops.
Team
Just me, working directly with founder Asmir Begovic
Scope
Brand identity, logo, ecommerce platform, ongoing product and maintenance
Constraint
One-person team covering discovery through design, development, and devops
Duration
Mar 2019 - ongoing, still an active, growing business
The problem
In March 2019, AB1 didn't exist - no brand, no logo, no website, just a professional goalkeeper's idea to build his own gear company. I designed the brand identity from scratch working directly with founder Asmir Begovic, then designed and built the ecommerce business, launched that November, that would sell it. The real challenge was never any single design problem - it was that I've been the entire product team since day one: discovery, design, development, devops, and now years of ongoing maintenance and marketing, for a real business that today processes hundreds of transactions a day.
Process
Designed the brand identity around something personal, not borrowed
Asmir and I worked through moodboards and sketches together, nearly daily, deliberately steering away from anything that looked like an existing goalkeeper or sportswear brand. The logo I pushed for overlaps the letters A and B to form the number 1 in the negative space between them - the number every goalkeeper wears, and the number Asmir wore through his own career. It's the one piece of the identity that couldn't belong to anyone else's brand.
Built the ecommerce platform on WooCommerce, then engineered around its limits
The store runs on WooCommerce, heavily customized. None of the real requirements were things it handled out of the box: dynamic pricing and shipping by country or promo code, an auction format for select drops, separate pricing tiers for retailers versus regular customers, disabling sales in specific countries for distribution and rights reasons, and custom reporting the default plugins didn't offer. Most of the real product work here was engineering around a platform's limits, not styling its defaults.
Stayed the sole product owner through years of scale and turnover
From the first sketch to today, I've owned discovery, design, development, devops, and ongoing maintenance myself, including through periods when the company brought in other leadership. Keeping that end-to-end ownership consistent - instead of letting the product fragment across whoever joined next - is most of why the site still works the way it was designed to.
Selected screens
Key decisions
Pushed back on a COO and CFO who wanted to move the site backward
In 2020 and 2021, once a COO and CFO joined to grow retailer and UK presence, they pushed for site changes that ran against where the industry - and the underlying technology - was actually heading. I stood my ground, laid out specifically why their proposed direction was outdated and what the forward-looking alternative was, and won that argument. It's the clearest case of my product judgment actually being tested by people with real authority to overrule it, and it held up.
Defended a personal, ownable logo over the safer option
The easy version of this logo borrows visual language from established goalkeeper or sportswear brands - it reads as credible immediately, with less risk. I pushed instead for the A/B/1 mark specifically because it couldn't be mistaken for anyone else's, even though that meant more rounds of exploration before it clicked. It's become the one piece of the brand nobody has ever second-guessed since.
Outcome
Zero to full brand
identity, logo, and ecommerce business built from nothing, solo, starting in 2019
Hundreds of orders/day
the store now processes hundreds of transactions daily
One owner, years running
discovery through devops and maintenance, held by one person the entire time
Described qualitatively for now - more specific figures on traffic and growth to follow once available.
What I’d do differently
“Most product advice assumes you're navigating a team - stakeholders to align, specs to negotiate. Almost none of that applied here; it was just me and a founder who trusted the product side to me completely. That made the one real leadership clash - standing firm against a COO and CFO pushing an outdated direction - more clarifying than any team disagreement could have been. When it's just your judgment against theirs, with no committee to hide behind, you find out quickly whether you actually believe what you're arguing for.”