FORMER amateur boxer and founder of clothing and equipment brand BoxRaw, Ben Amanna recently appeared on the Forbes 30 under 30 list in the retail category. He however is taking it all in his stride. “I know what I’m doing. I know where we’re taking this. If you think that was cool, wait till you see what we’re about to do,” he says.
It was Amanna’s own involvement in amateur boxing that inspired him. “I see what it’s done for me. It put in me the values of discipline, mindfulness, love. I saw how it changed kids in the street,” Ben says.
Like Nike got people into running, he wants BoxRaw to get people into boxing. “Being bullied as a kid, I didn’t have any nice clothes. When I did start to make money from selling sweets, I remember when I bought nice clothes and how I felt. I was so empowered. I’m confident. I want to go out, I want to take on the world and I wasn’t getting that with anything I was wearing in the boxing gym. Even outside I wanted people to know I was a boxer,” he continued. “When you buy a BoxRaw product you should own that for life. If you take care of it you’ll own it for life. It’s just the attitude that we try to do everything with. We’re here to innovate, we’re here to create, we’re not here to copy.
“We want BoxRaw to represent an attitude towards life. It’s about that ‘go getter’ mentality: we’re not where we need to be and we need to work to go after it. Very much transferring more into a lifestyle brand and representing something there and not just being boxed into this elitist boxing brand. Instead being something for everybody, aligning with our vision, to be the reason why the world got into boxing.”
He is taking an innovative approach. “The fashion or stylistic element is always last. It’s function over form always. Whenever we create a product we try to be the best out there,” Amanna said. “We’ve been working on our boxing gloves for four years now. I could have launched boxing gloves two or three years ago and just sold out.”
That is something of a personal mission. Amanna had to stop boxing at 21 because of a hand problem. “It shocked me that boxing gloves were made the same way for hundreds of years, little to no innovation. It was simple. We took the hand and we built something around the hand,” he said. “It was about how can we create a glove that can enhance a boxer’s ability. So we’ve got six patent points on the glove that we’re launching.
“We partnered with a very famous F1 team, using their wind tunnel to improve the aerodynamics of a glove.
“Small changes but no one’s thought to bring the innovation that people do on a rocket ship or an F1 car into the boxing realm.
“Why has no one tried to innovate?”
They have also set up a charity wing, ‘Boxing is Love,’ and are building a gym in Liberia through that. “It comes back to this overarching vision. If I say I want to be the reason why the world got into boxing, I cannot disregard a third of the world’s population because they don’t have access to this sport. Because I’m from an Indian background and I’ve gone to visit places you notice instantaneously the lack of opportunity. It makes you very appreciative of what we’ve got here and also recognising that there’s people in other places in the world that don’t have these opportunities. So Boxing is Love is an extension of BoxRaw; how do we bring the world into boxing who don’t have access to the sport? We’re building a boxing gym in Liberia, it’s built out of recycled shipping containers. So it’s scalable, sustainable. We provide value to the local economy as we’re building them. We staff these gyms. They double up as education centres. Once the first one’s built, we’ll scale this,” he said. “We also do offline events with emerging communities, we’re doing something in Coventry soon with disadvantaged kids
“You see a change in the dynamic. Their whole being and their attitude toward life, it shifts. So if we can do that for kids, I can be happy. It’s really exciting stuff what we’re doing there. It brings a lot of energy to me, the idea of taking this sport to a wider market.”