When he’s not busy scoring penalties in the Grand Final or dictating play in midfield for the Sky Blues, Sydney FC star Brandon O’Neill is busy running his online business.
We caught up with Brandon to find out a little bit more about his online site Sweetllamb where all 50% of proceeds from their professional athlete boot auctions go to Sydney FC Charity Partner Sydney Childrens Hospital Foundation.
What is Sweetllamb?
It’s your one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Sweetllamb is an online portal for people to jump on and sell their used or unwanted football boots that they’ve got lying around. You can jump on the website and have a look at what people are selling and buy good boots at a good price. The other end of the site is the charity work, we have that component built in to the website where once a month a professional athlete’s boots are put up for auction. This month is Brosquey’s boots and 50% of the proceeds from that auction go to the Sydney Childrens Hospital at Randwick.
What was the idea behind the company?
Literally it was as easy as cleaning out a cupboard. I was getting ready to move from one place to another and I found eight or nine pairs of boots in my cupboard that I didn’t have any use for. I sat back and thought there’s platforms available like Faceobok and Gumtree where you can jump on and sell what you want but there’s no specific place where you can go specifically for sportswear so I thought I’d give it a go and that’s how it was born.
What are your goals and targets for Sweetllamb?
I’d love it to be Australia’s way of selling their boots or runners they no longer need anymore, you have to set yourself high targets. Looking at the market these days at online businesses, it’s the way of the future and I can mix that side of the business with my charity side which I’m very passionate about, I think there’s no other kind of website that’s doing anything like this in Australia. It’s early days yet but so far so good. I’ve visited the Sydney Childrens Hospital, Randwick on numerous times with the team and it’s always a highlight of my day being able to put smiles on the kids faces through our visit. It puts things into perspective as a professional athlete and I hope through Sweetllamb that I’m able to make even more of a contribution to the Foundation.
Finally, how is it running in these early days?
It’s going good. It’s been about three weeks that it’s been up and running and we already have 60 users signed up and 40 adverts on the website. Over social media we have 1100 to 1200 on Instagram and 600 on Facebook, so people know about Sweetllamb and are slowly getting on board. There’s a lot of positive signs but there’s still a bit of work to be done on it.
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