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Karl Fowler’s boardroom near London’s St Paul’s is a treasure trove of sporting memorabilia. Amid the clutter lie footballs, helmets, photographs and various parts of Formula 1 cars, all signed by the top sporting names. The walls are lined with international shirts adorned with the signatures of sporting luminaries such as Argentinean soccer legend Diego Maradona.

Fowler, a former investment banker, counts a number of sporting legends as clients of his Kraken Financial Group – a business that works along similar lines to a hedge fund – and many of them are also subjects of luxury books printed by Kraken Sport & Media, a subsidiary of which Fowler is chief executive.

Books? These weighty tomes, which are delivered in a specially constructed clamshell box, measure half a metre square, top the scales at around 35kg, boast a minimum of 850 pages and have print runs ranging from just under 1,000 up to around 10,000. The starting price is a whopping £3,000 for a normal edition and £20,000 and upwards for a special limited edition. Fowler has christened these heavyweight titles ‘Opus’, and in doing so he has reinvented the traditional book publishing model.

Process improvement
A blossoming publishing business wasn’t part of the plan when he first set out to look after the finances of sports stars and brands. But a number of clients approached him to see if there was anything he could do for them in the area of TV, merchandising and publishing. The first thing Fowler and his team did on establishing the division was to investigate how they could creatively make the process better and smarter.

A key issue to address was the traditional book publishing model. “The business model is flawed both from a risk point of view and from a revenue and profitability point of view,” says Fowler. “We wanted to rip up the rule book, go against the tide of the ‘stack ’em high, price ’em cheap’ business model and do something completely different.”

Out of these early discussions an idea emerged to produce a prestigious publication with outstanding content and production values. Each would contain a minimum of 50% of exclusive or original content and bear at least one or two signature pages filled with the autographs of characters central to the book’s story.

“To justify the price that we intended to charge, we had to be offering a certain level of integrity and exclusivity,” explains Fowler.

Another justification for the high price tag attached is the minimum £3m spent on content creation – and that’s not including print, finishing and delivery.

“Some of the technology that we use on the printing, binding and photographic reproduction is too costly and time consuming for traditional publishers,” adds Fowler. “We go to lengths that others cannot and would not go.”

Much of this colossal budget is spent on commissioning well-known writers to pen editorial for the books and also on the research and generation of the 2,000 or so photos that go into each.

Once the format and the brand values had been established, the next task was to find subject matter worthy of the Opus treatment. Fowler thought a sporting subject would be an ideal starting point as “sport is the ultimate leveller”. The next criterion was to find a story that was both epic and iconic. The answer was perhaps the world’s most famous football club: Manchester United.

“We wanted to work with a story that transcends the sport,” explains Fowler. He managed to get former World Cup winner and longtime Manchester United player Sir Bobby Charlton and club manager Sir Alex Ferguson on board, which gave the imprint unprecedented access to Old Trafford and its training facilities and achieved some unique photo shoots.

With the first subject matter in the bag, the issue became where Kraken could print and bind such huge volumes. “When we were looking around for printers, we found companies could not print and bind books on the size and scale that we were after, as the binding all had to be done by hand,” says Fowler.

Following a six-month global search, Fowler managed to find a printer in China called Artorm that could handle the task and was prepared to allocate an area of its factory solely for the production of Kraken titles. It was even willing to invest in three brand new Heidelberg presses to print them. Fowler speaks glowingly about the printer, which he describes as “incredible” and uses extremely sophisticated traditional binding techniques.

All of the print is press-passed by three members of the Kraken team, while one member of its repro team spends the last three months of the production schedule in China seeing the Opus title through to delivery. The firm’s repro team, which is headed up by Colin Campbell and is based in Scotland, helps to make life easier for its print partner and its designers thanks to innovative technology called ‘The Hub’.

Designed to enhance satellite photography in conflict zones, the technology is applied to all images used by Opus publications. Fowler also claims to have an excellent team of designers and an inspirational creative adviser in the form of Edward Booth-Clibborn. “Whether it’s the creative, the editorial, the repro or the print and the bindery, we use the very best people, techniques and processes,” he says.

Transcendent figure
Fowler’s team has been put to the test since the Manchester United edition came off the press, working on the production of a series of other Opus titles. The second title focused on the highlight of the American football season, the Superbowl. After that, however, Fowler wanted to focus on an individual who transcends the sport they are in. This search eventually boiled down to two legendary footballers –Pele or Maradona. But, as Fowler says: “You have to tell a story and one of these stories was sedate whereas the other was pretty rock and roll, so it was a no-brainer really.”

The first 100 copies of Maradona are called the ‘blood edition’, as they will contain a small sample of the football legend’s blood, in addition to a colour gatefold of his DNA. Kraken is also creating an Opus title based on Indian cricket star Sachin Tendulkar, who holds the record for the most Test centuries.

Tendulkar has kept all of his century bats and given Kraken eight of them. These will be stripped down and pieces of the wood will be inlaid between two pieces of leather to be used as a page marker.
The creativity doesn’t end there. The first 400 copies of the Ferrari Opus will be presented in a carbon fibre clamshell case made from raced Ferrari Formula One cars. “So if you buy copy 63, we will tell you what car it came from, who drove it and what race they were in at the time,” claims Fowler.

There’s now more to Kraken and Opus than sport. To diversify, Fowler has explored the wider world of entertainment, and the result is an Opus title on Walt Disney. Like the Tendulkar title, it includes unique page markers, only this time they features strips of film outtakes from Fantasia and Snow White inlaid in leather. The firm is also collaborating with the Vatican to create a book of entirely new content from the Vatican’s own library, as well as an Oscars edition with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and titles based on fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, art collector Charles Saatchi and space agency NASA.

Eight-month print job
“We’ve got 20 deals in the pipeline, and at three or four a year that’s enough to see us through until 2012,” says Fowler. The production schedule alone limits the number that the firm can produce. “We allocate two years from the minute that we agree the deal to it arriving here as a finished Opus,” he says. “About 12-16 months of that is spent on content creation and the final six to eight months is on the print and binding.”

Despite this, Fowler is always on the lookout for more stories and mentions off the record a selection of potential future partners that fit the Opus criteria. But the important thing for him is developing and protecting the Opus brand. There’s been strong demand for reprints and Fowler has fielded lots of offers to license the rights to others, but he has turned them all down, as well as rejecting offers from potential partners on future Opus titles.

“For every Opus we sign up for, we probably say no to six,” he says. “We’re saying no to the short-term money because protecting the brand is everything.”

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CASE STUDY: MANCHESTER UNITED
When Kraken founder Karl Fowler was looking for a story that ran the whole gamut of emotions and spanned tragedy through to triumph, the natural fit was Manchester United – probably the world’s most famous football club. It had a trophy cabinet packed to the rafters, but had also endured an air crash in the 1950s that virtually wiped out the entire team.

Fowler managed to get two of the club’s most influential members on board early on, in the form of current manager Sir Alex Ferguson and United legend Sir Bobby Charlton, and this seal of approval gave the Opus team access to the club that has never been enjoyed before. The volume included stunning exclusive images, three special, 2m-long gatefolds and never-before-seen documents, such as the air traffic control log of the night of the 1958 Munich air disaster.

The 850pp book, which weighed in at 37kg making it the biggest football book ever produced, was printed in sections on Heidelberg machines at Artorm’s Chinese printing plant and then bound by hand. Each of the 9,500 copies was signed by Charlton and Ferguson and there were also three special editions: United Opus Icons (500 copies) was signed by United icons such as Eric Cantona, Denis Law and Bryan Robson; Class of ’92 (250 copies) was signed by David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Ryan Giggs, Gary Neville, Phil Neville and Paul Scholes; while United Opus Star Series (300 copies) was a Korean language edition containing the signature of Korea’s top footballing star, Park Ji-Sung.