How hundreds of Excel Esports shirts and hoodies ended up in African ‘Born Free’ national parks which protect endangered animals

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When UK esports organisation Excel Esports merged with Spain’s Giants Gaming to form GiantX a year ago, hundreds of old pieces of Excel merch were headed for landfill. Rather than see them go to waste, GiantX Partnership Development Lead Jordan Bedford had a plan to put them to good use. We ask him and his mother, Born Free MD Karen Botha, how they ended up in African conservation areas that protect endangered animals.

While mergers can provide some much-needed survivability in a relatively unsustainable industry like esports, they can also result in unwanted inventory.

For GiantX, it meant they were left with hundreds of old pieces of Giants Gaming and Excel Esports merchandise.

Last month, GiantX Partnership Development Lead, Jordan Bedford, said the final pieces of unsold Excel apparel would be reaching an unlikely destination: an Ethiopian conservation area which protects endangered animals.

Wildlife charity Born Free Foundation works in the area, and pictures below also show its staff at a Kenyan national park.

Overall, some 300+ items were sent out to Africa for charity use.

GiantX’s former E-Commerce Product & Merchandise Manager, Vikesh Tosar, worked with Jordan to get the merch out to the rangers in Africa.

Jordan’s mum, Karen Botha, is the Managing Director of the Born Free Foundation, who gratefully accepted the merchandise.

“As a family, we do a fair bit for African wildlife – it’s something we all care deeply about,” Jordan Bedford told Esports News UK.

“It was a nice opportunity to do something impactful. The staff [in Africa] were super appreciative to have something high quality, without necessarily knowing anything about XL!

Ironically, the donation probably better encapsulates Excel Esports’ old mantra, ‘The Power of Better’, than the work of the organisation’s previous esports teams.

‘The Power of Better’ focused on three core values – aspiration, unity and boldness – and was anchored on two core principles: ‘the belief that improvement never stops – whether you’re part of an organisation or as an individual, you can be better tomorrow than you are today – and aimed to challenge the status quo in the world of esports’.

So, how did this all come about?

Born Free Foundation MD Karen Botha told Esports News UK: “It was Jordan’s idea. When Excel merged with Giants Gaming, it meant that really good quality merchandise would end up in landfill.

“He asked me, ‘is this something you can make use of? Would your team appreciate this?’

“Jordan really busted a gut to get all of the boxes in a little zip car to his tiny one-bedroom flat, then over to me, and then we got them across to Africa. I can’t tell you how chuffed the teams were to get the kits, it’s really nice stuff.

“We had boxes and boxes of merch. To put it into context, if we have 110 colleagues on the ground, everyone got either a T-shirt or hoody and some joggers. In my garage I still have 100 water bottles and 20 more shirts, which I’ll take the next time I go. So everybody got something. I didn’t give any to the UK team because frankly they don’t need it.”

While Born Free has a team of 43 in the UK, working on fundraising and comms, with an education programme that reaches young people in schools, the brunt of its work is on the ground in Africa.

It has a team of 60 in Ethiopia, 40 in Kenya and 10 in South Africa.

The charity – which recently turned 40 years old – rescues vulnerable wild animals from confinement, exploitation or abuse, then rehabilitates them, and releases them back into the wild, where possible.

“It’s a national park, so there are no fences,” Karen explained. “Animals pass through, and our job is to protect them while they’re there, to make sure they don’t get caught in snares, and so on.

“Out staff work in really hostile conditions. They don’t see their families for three weeks at a time, sometimes longer. So the excitement when that team in Kenya got their T-shirts was just huge. It seems a small thing for GiantX to have done, but the impact of that, keeping up team morale, knowing the team on the ground are valued and make a difference and do an awesome job. GiantX made the effort.

“We also try not to take an approach of telling Kenyans how to deal with wildlife, they’ve been doing it for thousands of years. We don’t want to be seen as a charity that tells Africans how to live in Africa. We have a highly skilled policy team that negotiates for better protection of wildlife – the real change happens at a legislation/governmental level.”

What of Karen’s background?

“I was born and bred in Zimbabwe to a family of Zimbabweans and South Africans who have been there since the 1600s/1700s,” Karen said. “I have a military background, I came over to the UK at 17 years old to join the Royal Air Force. I progressed into the safari/travel sector, and I decided to set up my own business in Kent.

“Then I worked as a director at a natural history museum which is very famous in taxidermy. It was whilst I was there, contemplating the scale of one animal collector who had killed over 5,000 animals, with 500 of them on display. I thought, this still happens, and that’s when I turned to conservation issues in 2016, and I made the leap then. Western NGOs should not be going into Africa and telling Africans how to do things. They already know.

“So I think I bring that extra dimension to Born Free, which I joined in 2020. I enjoy moving into organisations that need an overhaul. I love that challenge. That’s pretty much where my career has taken me. Born Free is a complex organisation, it’s not the same as a charity that just gives the money to a country that needs it. They actually have people on the ground. That makes it twice as challenging.”

Does Born Free follow esports? And are GiantX endangered in the LEC?

We asked Born Free MD Karen Botha if GiantX are endangered in the LEC, given their continual failure to do well in the playoffs and qualify for the League of Legends World Championship.

“No, I would never say that,” Karen responds, laughing. “Jordan updates me from time to time, and of course I can’t tell an exceptional esports player from an average player, but they look incredible. And I know it’s a really competitive industry.

“I really feel for GiantX, I’m fond of them, partly because of how they’ve looked after Jordan. I think they’re a brilliant employer.

“I’m sure esports will be very credible when esports moves into Africa [in a bigger way, in the future].”

Karen also said that she enjoys esports content, and sometimes sends it to her teams at the charity.

“When it comes to the technical side of it, the playing side of it, I come along, I watch and I like the social media content they put out,” Karen said. “Sometimes I’ll flag that content to Born Free because the content in this esports sector is just so dynamic. The correlation between that and our supporter base is one of our biggest challenges – how we attract younger generations to what we do.”

So there we have it. The Excel Esports brand might not technically exist anymore, but it is still living on, in the garments worn by park rangers helping endangered animals in Africa.

We’re not sure this is what Kieran and Joel Holmes-Darby envisaged when they founded Excel Esports a decade ago, but it’s inadvertently become a part of their legacy in the process, and is a positive story nonetheless.

Dom Sacco

Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He graduated from Bournemouth University with a 2:1 degree in Multi-Media Journalism in 2007.

As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation up until February 2021, when he stepped back to work full-time on Esports News UK and offer esports consultancy and freelance services. Note: Dom still produces the British Esports newsletter on a freelance basis, so our coverage of British Esports is always kept simple – usually just covering the occasional press release – because of this conflict of interest.