The Australian-based WRS Group has signed a five-year licensing and distribution agreement with Uhlsport for its BLK Sport teamwear, focusing on rugby. Starting on July 1, the German supplier of team sports clothing, which specializes in football, basketball and handball, will offer BLK's core and performance ranges for rugby in France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, where it has its own subsidiaries. Uhlsport has also a subsidiary in Spain, but BLK already has a distributor there.

In France, Uhlsport will start selling BLK's entire range only next January, waiting for the end of a five-year French distribution contract with Canterbury, the rugby brand owned by Pentland Group. Uhlsport France will already start taking orders in July for the rugby collection of the Stade Toulousain rugby team. It was previously sold by OFA Solutions, a former French distributor and licensee of the brand that is closely connected with this important team, which has been sponsored by BLK from the 2014/15 season, taking the place of Nike after 23 years.

Specializing in the development of team sports uniforms for rugby, netball and other sports, WRS has undergone significant international expansion during the past couple of years through BLK Sport. This brand, which stands for Beyond Limits Known, replaced the better known KooGa label, which had been its property since 1999.

WRS decided to do away with the KooGa brand name for any products shipped after Nov. 11, 2013 to avoid any confusion with a similar British label that had been acquired by JD Sports Fashion a few years earlier, although it retained the rights for Australia and Fiji.

Recently, WRS established a new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Fiji, adding to production operations in Australia, South Africa and China.

Based on Australia's Gold Coast, WRS expanded into other countries in the past few years, under the management of Tyron Brant. It established offices in the U.K., the U.S., the United Arab Emirates, Ireland and New Zealand. WRS also signed up licensees in France and Italy, but Uhlsport is taking over the French license. It opened an office in South Africa but then licensed Climaplan for all operations in the country including the supply of rugby merchandise for the local sponsored Sharks team.

An official of WRS says that BLK will be the most heavily represented brand at this year's Rugby World Cup in England. In addition to South Africa's Sharks and others, BLK sponsors super rugby teams such as the Queensland Reds and the Melbourne Rebels. It also sponsors many other Australian rugby teams, the New Zealand Rugby League, the England Rugby Leisure and the Rugby Unions of Fiji, Samoa, Romania and the U.S. Recent signatories are rugby teams such as Connacht in Ireland, Osprey from Wales and the Cornish Pirates.

The brand has added teams involved in other sports such as touch football, cricket, netball, BMX cycling, V8 Supercards and wheelchair rugby. In the area of football, BLK became a year ago the official apparel supplier of the A-League All Stars in Australia and the Newcastle Jets in the U.K. More recently, BLK announced sponsorship deals with Netball Australia, Netball Northern Ireland (NNI) and Netball New Zealand (NNZ).

BLK uniforms are worn by over 5,000 teams in Australia and around the world  WRS says it has enjoyed solid growth in the U.K. and the rest of Europe during the past 18 months, as many professional sports organizations, universities and grassroots teams have chosen to wear BLK clothing on and off their grounds.

For Uhlsport, the deal with BLK gives it one more leg in the team sports market. In addition to the Uhlsport brand, which stands for goalkeeper gear and other football products, the German company markets handball products under the Kempa brand. It is also the licensee of Spalding basketball gear for Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Uhlsport recently announced that its sales went up by 12.7 percent in the first quarter of this year, with particularly strong increases of 11 percent in Germany and 19 percent in France, and with positive results for all its brands. In the past year, Uhlsport grew by about 5 percent to a level close to €65 million, according to an executive of the company, with an 8 percent increase in France.