After fumbling around with infamous misspellings, uninspired designs, and geographically questionable appeals to national pride, Reebok seems to be trying something new with fighter-specific clothing offerings – and it’s so crazy it just might work.

In two new designs featured on the respective athletes’ Instagram pages, we see shirts for Yoel Romero and Tai Tuivasa that have a little something in common.

Namely, they seem to be working with actual, memorable moments from the fighters’ careers, which is a bit of a departure for the clothing company that has usually contented itself with slapping some guy’s name on the front and calling it a day.

Take Tuivasa’s shirt, for instance. What’s the main thing fight fans remember about the hard-hitting heavyweight? Probably that time he knocked someone out and then drank a beer out of a shoe on his way out of the cage.

Credit to Reebok, then, for turning the silhouette of Tuivasa’s “shooey” into the central focal point of the design.

Then there’s Romero, who posted an image to his Instagram of a shirt featuring an image of him doing his usual “Soldier of God” salute, along with the words “I Luh Ju” underneath.

This one is a little trickier, since you could easily read it as mockery of Romero’s English, which isn’t so cool. Then again, anyone who saw his televised confrontation with Michael Bisping gets the reference immediately, and (at least outwardly) Romero doesn’t seem to mind.

The most encouraging thing here? For maybe the first time since the UFC signed a deal with Reebok in December 2014, these feel like designs that are actually intended to capture the MMA world as fans experience it. It almost feels like Reebok designers have finally decided to work with what fighters give them – and what fans have already picked up on.

Sure, you can still find some fault here. (Just couldn’t resist those intrusive UFC and Reebok logos on the Tuivasa silhouette, could you? And the spelling on Romero’s shirt feels a little too much of a “Saturday Night Live”-quality stereotype.)

But at least it finally looks like Reebok is trying. And if you want to make stuff that fight fans will actually buy, you could do a lot worse than these insider nods to moments that fight fans still talk about and remember fondly.

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.

The Blue Corner is MMAjunkie’s blog space. We don’t take it overly seriously, and neither should you. If you come complaining to us that something you read here is not hard-hitting news, expect to have the previous sentence repeated in ALL CAPS.