Do you remember what was happening 4 years ago, what were you doing?

For us, it was working away from home between Reading and London and heading back home at weekends. As you may know, our Bostin idea and clothing range started 9 years ago and many people had bought our shirts over the years, but we hadn’t exactly set the world alight. Hence having to carry on with the day job!

The ethos for Bostin was to have something local we could be proud about and rather than start our own shirt producing company and compete with existing businesses, we wanted to collaborate with local businesses that would be of benefit to all of us. So far, we have collaborations with people based in Kidderminster, Halesowen, Walsall, Sutton Coldfield and Northfield.

So what happened 4 years ago?

Well, apart from Italy winning the World Cup in Germany, Bostin became a sensation thanks to Adrian Chiles.

At the time, Adrian was reporting for BBC from Germany and one of the broadcasts he was wearing one of our T-shirts which resulted with a surge of demand for our shirts.

Up to then, our sales were not enough to justify an online shop with credit card payments, so it was the good old fashioned way of emailing the shirt details you wanted and posting a cheque.

From then, we quickly moved to eBay, then Spreadshirt, BigCartel and as of today we now have our very own fully customisable shirts website at www.bostin.net

It has been quite a journey for us over the past four years, appearing on many radio shows and having extensive Press coverage as we have developed quite a cult following. As our idea has become more well known, it has gone onto inspire other people to start their own local regional shirts, including Brummie, Black Country and many more area shirt slogans.

Over the past 4 years many thousands of people, like you and me, have bought the shirts from all over the world with many people sending us pictures of them wearing their shirts.

Aswell as top celebrities like Adrian Chiles wearing our shirts, we also had top soul singer Beverley Knight wearing our shirts, who won most stylish celebrity award in 2009!

It has also been quite a journey for Adrian Chiles over the past four years. Following the World Cup in Germany, a pilot show for the One Show started in Birmingham that August and proved to be a great success and went onto present Match of The Day 2 on Sunday nights too. Having met Adrian on a number of occasions, he is truly a Bostin Bloke and is now the main man for the ITV World Cup coverage in South Africa.

What will the next four years bring?

Whatever happens, we hope to continue to support local people and businesses and also spread smiles around the world with our Bostin shirts!