Jordan Wise is the founder of Caos, a creative agency providing strategy and production services for some of the world’s leading brands, including Nike, Adidas, and Beats by Dre. Alongside this, he runs Gaffer, a media platform that fuses sports, music, fashion, and culture, building a community of millions with a strong Gen Z focus.
For over a decade, Jordan has been deeply embedded in the football world, completing more than 100 contracts for
players – covering both on-field agreements and off-field commercial deals – while also advising football clubs on commercial strategy and player trading.
Following his appearance at our Europ Family Office Investment Summit, we sat down to talk to him about his work, which reflects a career fully immersed in the intersections of sport and culture.
Could you give some examples of projects you’ve worked on that our readers might have seen?
From a very linear football perspective, last year I brokered a record-breaking transfer for Arsenal Football Club – it was their largest ever sale of one of their players to another team. One that I remember fondly was for the England team and for Nike’s first ever relaunch of the England gear. We shot the whole campaign on film, which was unheard of and a very big risk, because you only have a limited amount of time with football players, and it was a super successful campaign. Something more leftfield outside of the sports lens is Virgin Galactic, one of the first companies to send people to space for a million dollars a ticket.
When they officially launched, we produced all of the global contents of the launch campaign – video, photography assets that went absolutely viral across the the world when they announced that they were now live to fly you to space, and that was really cool meeting Richard Branson, working with some real life astronauts, and bringing together all that content in a really compelling way to land with, you know, the space enthusiast, but also the high net worth individual who’s interested in taking themselves to space.
What does a typical day look like for you?
It’s a thriving office environment with lots of creative people, lots of creative energy. A typical day could be lots of interesting conversations on exciting projects that we’re working on. I could see some famous people turn up at our office from the music industry, from the sports world, from the business world, and there’s a constant flow of lots of interesting faces and interesting conversations. And I think that culture and that environment breeds some of our best work and puts us on the front end of progressive conversations or innovative ideas that can disrupt the cultural space.
Could you give an overview of your career to date and how you ended up in this position?
The short story is I worked in the City as a trader for many years, very successfully, but had always had a strong passion for sports and I had this feeling that I wanted to explore something else. I left the job, I built a business plan in football and to become an agent. I looked at the industry taking that sort of analytical trend predicting expertise into the football space. I identified
certain areas that I felt were inefficient or undermonetized, or utilized, and effectively launched a career as a football agent in the sports space. And after a few years of working in the industry, I noticed that there were some other interesting gaps still, especially around the athletes themselves and how they tapped into their audiences and monetised their audiences and their intellectual property. And that was the catalyst for me creating Gaffer, that would become this sort of culture leading and defining platform that views these different worlds of sports and music and fashion. Then off the back of that, brands started to identify and connect with us, really appreciating the premium aesthetic that we were creating and how we were fusing these worlds.
And that’s what led us into working with the brands directly, helping them, advising them, producing work for them ultimately and onboarding them as clients. And then we’ve sat in this really interesting space for the last five and a half to six years where we’re working with athletes, we’re working with musicians, we’re working with the brands themselves. All these worlds are very cohesive, because ultimately, we’re just trying to help all of them connect with the specific audiences that they are looking to create authentic stories for and connections with.
What’s next? What should we be looking for from you in the future?
If you look at the last six years of where we’ve been leading – from creative work, production to sports and music and ultimately culture – I know the next landscape that is going to see tremendous growth is around IP, intellectual property, across the landscape of culture, whether it’s musicians, whether it’s film, whether it’s sports, that’s ultimately a frontier that is going to become even hotter. And that’s a space that we’re very much immersed in now, especially with the development and progression with regards to new technologies, obviously AI.
It’s going to be very interesting to see how in the future our own images are being used without our physical presence, and or how our own voices or sounds or similar things of such nature are going to be monetised, across the globe. And so those intersections and that front line is where we’re really immersing ourselves right now and something we’re super excited about, but very much underlining the importance of intellectual property, only and monetising it in the right way.