MMA clothing compantions Intimidation Clothing and UR Fight are set to merge, Intimidation CEO Luke Jernigan told BluegrassMMA.com.
“I’ve been looking for someone to take over Intimidation and handle the business and logistics for awhile,” Jernigan said. “The grind of handling all the day to day work had gotten to me after six years, and marketing is what I do very well.”
The brands are set to announce a formal deal soon, but according to Jernigan, both brands will continue to run into the future and will be sold alongside one another.
Both Intimidation and UR Fight have been a major part of the local MMA industry, sponsoring regional fighters, events and gyms from the lowest levels to the national level.
With the deal, Jernigan will take over the branding and marketing for both companies, while UR Fight owners Paul and Stacy Kaldy will handle the day-to-day business operations.
In the past, both brands have focused on sponsoring and marketing fighters just as much as those fighters market their brands.
“What this deal is going to do is take what we were weak at which is customizing and personalizing and quickly turning around shirts and change that,” Jernigan said. “We were never good at turning things around quickly because of our own standards, and we didn’t want to come down from that.
What UR Fight does incredibly well is they can customize and personalize right there on the spot.”
Jernigan continued, saying that the combined brands bring together the strengths of both brands.
“In my world, we always had this brand that we wanted to build, and then behind the scenes we weren’t able to do quite as much as we wanted to because we had limitations,” Jernigan said. “And those limitations were lack of staffing, too much on my back, etc.”
“We used to promote the fighters, we used to promote athletes on a regular basis and promote the brand, promote our dealers,” Jernigan said. “And you take that and add that to UR Fight, and you take the customization and the personalization and you add all those things together, now we’re going to promote those fighters and truly get their names out there.”