Story Behind the Sunshine

“It all started with the first premise: we didn’t want this to be another white kit.”

Orlando City’s new 2022 Sunshine Kit is a little bit different than the away jerseys you’ve seen before. Emblazoned with purple, orange, and gold streaks of sunlight, the kit is a far bolder and more colorful addition to the Club’s kit roster than has been previously dared.

Orlando City Senior Vice President of Marketing and Brand Pedro Araujo says he knew the team had to go out on a limb with this jersey.

“We heard our fans. We know [another white kit is] not what they’re looking for, we weren’t looking for that either,” Araujo told us in an interview ahead of Friday’s jersey launch. “We wanted to make sure that we were doing something different with the combination of jersey, shorts, and socks. ‘Let’s do something we’ve never done.’”

The kit still retains a white base due to MLS competition guidelines that specify each team must have a light-colored Community kit if their Club kit is dark, as Orlando’s Thick N’ Thin home jersey is. But the design team intentionally brought as much color to the table as possible.

“We asked, ‘what’s the color palette that we wanted for this jersey?’” Araujo recalled. “We want our Orlando City purple to be visible, that’s our identity. We want our secondary color gold to be in it, to represent the sun. But we also wanted to introduce a new color, so we thought about orange. It’s citrus, it’s orange groves, it’s part of our golden hour skies.”

Orlando City players will also wear purple shorts with the Community kit for the first time, a decision Araujo says was designed to inject as much color and life into the design as possible.

“We always take inspiration from our fans,” said Araujo. “They live and breathe the Club. A group of thousands of passionate people is always gonna have great ideas. It’s our job to listen and filter, see what’s possible, what makes sense for our story in that given moment.”

The bold nature of the Sunshine Kit was designed, Araujo said, for the kit to be fashionable even outside of the soccer realm.

“We joke about it being a uniform for Floridians who don’t wear uniforms,” he said with a smile. “We want people to wear it to the beach. We’re the wakeboarding capital of the world, why can’t the wakeboarders rock that when they’re doing flips and going on the boat? Why can’t you just wear it day-to-day with jeans? We wanted it to embody that Sunshine State vibe.”

The Sunshine Kit is now available for purchase on OCMobileShop.com or in person at The Den at Exploria Stadium starting at 11 a.m. ET on Saturday, February 19th. The first 200 fans to purchase the Sunshine Kit on OCMobileShop.com, at The Den or onsite at the Club’s City Art Jam kit launch will receive an exclusive CITYiD patch.