Reebok will be worth $10bn by 2030: Joe Foster

When Joe Foster founded the tennis company Reebok did not imagine that women and the street would be the main ingredients to make their brand successful.

Although the key to its development was the conquest of the United States market, the company had to learn to survive time and mergers to achieve its resurgence, today its market is worth 3 billion dollars, but with its new boom, it will exceed triple its value at the end of the decade, he assures in an interview with MILLENNIUM the surviving founder of the brand and who just published the book Create Sneakers: How to Create a Global Brand.

How important is Mexico and Latin America for Reebok as a global brand?

I made an arrangement with Paul Fireman in the United States, because I wanted, as a British man, to enter the United States, that is a big market. That would make us great, and so it happened. But when I made this deal, he also wanted to have Canada and Mexico.

Once we managed to enter the United States, my job was easy. Everyone wanted a piece of Reebok, especially women. It became a company for women with aerobics and that was very good.

What were the three lessons you learned from Reebok?

One of the most important things is getting the right people. If you are going to run a company you have to have a lot of good people and listen to them.

Another thing is to have fun, enjoy it. If not it will be difficult. When Jeff and I started we were young, we were in our 20’s. We were invincible. We said: what can go wrong?… But it does.

Then you have to learn very quickly to handle problems and turn them into advantages.

So expect the worst, get ready and enjoy.

How to know the ‘customer’ when you have a global brand? Are the clients the same?

No, no one is the same. But when you deliver a brand and you see that what people have is imagination for that brand. And enthusiasm, if you spread enthusiasm, it’s very attractive to people and people love it.

You have to create that desire for the brand. Demand is also desire.

A friend in Los Angeles, his wife was going to an aerobics class, and Arnold asks him:

-What are you doing?

–We exercise using music and we love it.

When Arnold went there, he saw the instructor, and his tennis shoes: half the class had tennis shoes and the other half did not wear any type of shoes.

It’s when we thought, why don’t we do this specifically for women? We will make it on a women’s last that only fits women’s sizes and not men’s.

And by excluding men they began to desire this brand and wanted to be part of it. They had to wait.

With Women Alone it grew tremendously from a $9 million company to a nearly $1 billion company in 5 years. So: yes, you can create brand hunger.

How can companies today create a global brand in a world with crises like the pandemic or the invasion of Ukraine?

What we are going through with covid-19 and today with war zones is difficult. But now we find out about this because there are social networks, computers. When I started we didn’t have them, or smartphones, you had to get on a plane, travel to different places and meet people.

For me, even now, the US market is the one that influences the rest of the world, as far as a global brand is concerned.

If you go into the United States there are 350 million people maybe more, and many of them have disposable income, so you can achieve great success. That influences others.

Today I would still do that thing of going to the United States and making the mark. It’s full of Mexicans, Latinos, Italians, it’s a total mix of people, it’s growing and it’s a huge market.

Now we have media, and social networks, and therefore it is easier. Today I can talk to someone in the United States from England or in Australia, it’s great. I wish I had that 50 years ago.

So, it’s a new thing, but it’s an exciting time. I think the opportunities are incredible.

Reebok was sold to Adidas in 2005 for $3.8 billion, what lessons would you share with family-owned companies looking for a merger or acquisition?

It was already retired when the sale was made.

When you spend a certain amount of time in a company, you have to bring someone in, give them control to make sure they stay with the times. You can’t do it all yourself.

After a while you run out of ideas, you need people. To me Paul Fireman was brilliant, but when his time came, if he had handed over control, Reebok might have continued to grow.

He didn’t find anyone or couldn’t let him go. And in the end he had to do it.

In a way, the story was that Adidas and Reebok working together would be strong competitors, they were going to kill Nike… But Adidas only wanted to enter the US and Reebok took second place, left in the shade.

Now ABG bought the brand and we started to come out of the shadows. We’ll see more from Reebok, I’m sure.

The tennis market went from sports to the city and to luxury, how was that transition?

Well, this is where all the influences come from. And the influence of sport goes to the street. Now we are all fashion companies, because that is where the business is. The volume is on the street, and even haute couture.

Nike, Adidas, and to some degree Reebok were more performance focused, you can see it on the soccer field, football field, basketball field. That influences sports people, the rest is fashion, do you want something nice and comfortable? What are we going to do when robots take over everything. We are going to need sports, to play, because we have to have fun.

He says that Reebok, a fashion company, will return to the ‘top of mind’, how to shine again?

When Reebok got its logo back, its style grew back once again. What is done today is to give it visibility, that is what Authentic Brands does: go to the retail market.

This is by far what they need to do, make the brand globally visible again.

I think by the end of 2022 they’ll probably be a $3 billion company instead of a $1.5 billion company. And it would grow to 10 billion by 2030, that’s through visibility.

Collaborations, they’ve been good at that. People know the brand, they love it, and they are waiting. Now is the time.

We hope to be an important brand in Mexico in a very short time.

Mistakes in business allow growth. Is there anyone who has marked it?

I probably made more mistakes than good decisions. That’s how you learn. If you are an entrepreneur and you want to be following something, you are going to be left behind. But if you want to be a pioneer, you take a step forward, you take risks, and you are wrong.

If you are afraid, you are not an entrepreneur, you are not in the right place. If it doesn’t work, you change it.

Where is the world of tennis headed?

I feel that today more is spent on shoes than ever, they are collector’s items.

Where it goes? I would say that you have to ask teenagers, they know. I am out of it.

I know where it has been and where those answers can be found, but that is what young people who have the metaverse, video games, are used for, they are the ones who create the future, not me.

There’s the metaverse, I can barely figure out what it means, but it’s driving everything.

See the interview on MILLENNIUM Television this Tuesday, April 12 at 8:45 p.m. in Milenio Negocios.

AMP