With just days remaining for the start of the Indian Premier League (IPL 2025) season, defending champions Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) are all set to defend their crown. Led by Ajinkya Rahane KKR will open its campaign against Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) as they host them at the Eden Gardens. However, the new-looking design of the franchise’s kit has attracted its fan base as we decode the fascinating story behind it.

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WION Exclusive on IPL 2025

Speaking exclusively to WION’s Aditya Pimpale was Avni Aneja, co-founder of SIX5SIX who are the official kits manufacturers of KKR in IPL 2025. SIX5SIX is a leading brand in the Indian sports market giving tough fights to international kit manufacturers Nike, Adidas and others.

Question: How did the collaboration with Kolkata Knight Riders start?

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So, SIX5SIX has been around for about say six years. We've done quite a few sports till now and it's been football primarily. Then we've done table tennis, we've manufactured kits for a bunch of other teams and sports as well.

Cricket is something that we got into fairly recently when we stepped foot in it a couple of years ago. There's not a bigger property than IPL in this country at all. So that was always our target. We started with another IPL team last year when we collaborated with Lucknow Super Giants. So I would say that’s where the base was for our recent collaboration with KKR as we built a brand in the last couple of years.

Question: How did your adventure with SIX5SIX start?

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Primarily, SIX5SIX is a sportswear and streetwear brand and the primary focus at this point is obviously sports. I and my co-founder who is also my brother Ambar, have been sports people all our lives. So this was a culture inculcated by my parents. We played a bunch of sports I played state-level basketball. My brother actually played state-level U-16 cricket when he was in school and college so we were always connected to sports.

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Question: How was your experience working with KKR while designing the new kit?

I feel like what we as a brand have done in the last few years with all of the sports and now that we moved into cricket is that our philosophy is design first. What we do is put our heart and soul into making a jersey come alive not just for the players but also for the fans because I feel like that connection is very important as someone who's also wearing the jersey or someone who's supporting the person wearing the jersey.

So our philosophy has always been very of course, associating ourselves with a legacy like KKR, made the design process so much easier because we had quite a bit of freedom in terms of what we wanted to design and two. After all, they had such a rich history and heritage and obviously, the most obvious one at this point was because like you said they were defending champions last year.