Inside renowned sportswear manufacturer making bespoke shorts for fighters including Leeds’ Josh Warrington

Sportswear manufacturer Suzi Wong creates boxing shorts for professional fighters and amateur fighters all over the world.

The company which is based in Adlington, Chorley has made bespoke boxing shorts for Tyson Fury, Dillian Whyte, Josh Warrington and more.

Suzi Wong creative director Melissa Anglesea says “we're complete masters at what we do now”

Melissa Anglesea, creative director at Suzi Wong, said: “It's a family affair. My mum and dad always worked in sportswear and my dad was working for a company at the time that was sponsoring a boxer, went to look for a pair of boxing shorts, put the branding on and couldn't find anything so him and my mum went to a fabric shop, bought a bit of fabric, made a pair of shorts and the rest is history as they say.

“We started with a professional fighter and at the time, professional fighting in Manchester was huge because you had the upcoming of Ricky Hatton, Anthony Farnell, Stephen Foster Jr, Michael Gomez, huge fighters, Jamie Moore. They were all on this scene with Frank Warren and they were filling out what's now the AO Arena, we used to call it the MEN and that was basically where we started.

“That has an influence on amateur boxers because they start to see, ‘oh, where are they starting to get these fancy shorts?’ and obviously with the boom of the internet that really helps because that enabled us to show our product to people all over the world.

“We were using special fabrics, trims, embroideries, Swarovski crystals, things like that, things that people had never seen before, so we were taking what was traditionally just a black pair of shorts, which everybody thinks Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali, a black and white short, we were taking that and making it something fancy. Boxing is a show that people pay, they want to be entertained, and if you go to the theatre, you want to see fancy costumes and that costume has become as important to the fighter as the gloves that they wear and the boots that they wear. They want to feel special.

“Boxers in themselves are performers, they're full of confidence, they have certain traits that they have and that's what makes them entertaining. People watch the press conferences because you want to see what they turn up in or what they're doing or what they're going to say and we have to think of fighters like ‘Prince’ Naseem, he was a real showman.

“Some fighters are very different now, like they trust us because we're so experienced and we know what fabrics we've got in so a lot of them will just say, ‘listen, I'm going to wear blue boots, I want a kit to go with it, here's my budget, you just come up with something’ and actually some very, very high profile fighters never know what they're wearing until it's delivered.

“We've been making Tyson's [Fury] kit since he was an amateur, so everybody had great hopes for him. He's gone on to surpass all expectation really.

“We recently did a piece for Lewis Richardson that had been bronze medalist at the Olympics and he wanted his kit to enable himself to show the Olympic rings and have this bronze undertone to it.

“Josh Warrington, huge Leeds fan and virtually every kit I've ever designed for him has been inspired by a Leeds kit at some point.

“A piece that we created for Dillian Whyte, that was a real testing piece shall we say. I think we used over 40, 50,000 Swarovski crystals on the item, all these things are hand placed, it's handwork. He had all spikes on his shoulders of his jacket and, a big luxury piece, it was embroidered, I mean, it spent days on the machine.

“Probably Michael Conlon as well. We do huge gowns, huge luxury pieces for him which are embroidered, they could take over a week on the embroidery machines just to embroider and then to make, maybe three days just to make the robe.

“We're using all sorts of methods now. We use a lot of embroidery, print, Swarovski crystals, we're using studs, velvets, faux leathers, faux furs, boxers like glitzy things so anything sparkly, the fabric suppliers will come to us and I'm like, ‘anything sparkly, we'll take it.’

“There's only so many things you can do, but it's the way that we execute, fabric choices and trims and things like that and, I mean, we're complete masters at what we do now, we've been in this game over 25 years.”