![]() It’s as if the energy of the company culture has lived on in him over the years, buried in some corner of his heart. Litchfield can’t talk about almost anything in his early years at Reebok without smiling. It’s a story about innovation, about missed opportunities and perhaps most of all, about what might have been. Why didn’t Reebok make it? They were beating Nike: How is the brand this small and inconsequential now? ![]() It’s like me going bald: one hair at a time.” It’s not like a car accident where you drive and all of a sudden you crash. As an organization, that can be somewhat contagious - and it’s insidious. “And as soon as you start worrying about other things, or if you start believing the press clippings, good or bad, you tend to begin to doubt yourself. And I think that then they started getting worried about things like: ‘Are these guys going to catch up?’” Litchfield said of Reebok. “I think they started looking over their shoulder a bit. ![]() Apparel is even worse: Reebok holds just 0.3% share, a 12th place ranking. The brand holds just 1.1% market share in the sports footwear space (a rank of 16th), according to Euromonitor International. Over the years, Reebok was reduced to a fraction of what it once was. Its decline has been much slower, as falling sales and an owner that didn’t invest in its growth took their toll. Reebok’s scrappy journey to number one took everyone by surprise, Nike especially. And how they were just seen on equal footing, no pun intended, as everyone else that was out there, which is not the case today.” “But, you know, if you grew up in the ’80s like I did, you kind of remember just what a thing those Reebok shoes were. And we all know the rest of that story - how they were able just to capitalize on Jordan stardom and leap way past Reebok, leaving them behind practically forever,” Smith said. Afterwards, Nike regrouped, they found a very well-known, at the time, basketball player named Michael Jordan. ![]() Reebok becoming number one “kind of caught Nike completely off guard. But Nike had already begun to pull ahead, and it hasn’t given up its lead since. It wasn’t an insignificant amount of money: In fact, Reebok made only slightly less than Adidas that same year. By 1997, less than ten years after Nike and Reebok were neck and neck, Nike had grown to $9.2 billion in net sales, while Reebok was stuck at a slower pace, raking in $3.64 billion. It’s also a story of Nike’s incredible rise. It’s not just a story of Reebok’s plateauing growth and eventual decline. “There were very few chances where they really got to stand and show what they are as a brand on their own.” In the 2000s, it meant Reebok was seen as a subsidiary of Adidas. In the ’80s and ’90s, that meant the battle between Reebok and Nike. “Reebok kind of has the unfortunate case of: They’re always being viewed through the lens of their competitors,” Nicholas Smith, author of “Kicks: The Great American Story of Sneakers,” said in an interview. *Net sales for Adidas are only shown from the company's IPO in 1995 onward. Net sales, in billions, from 1985 to 2020. A far cry from those years in the ’80s when the small British company had unseated the king of all sportswear brands. Now the brand is poised to be sold off by Adidas after a history of underperformance. Granted, 2020 also brought a pandemic, but even in the years leading up to that, Reebok was making about $2 billion. Nike in its fiscal 2020 (which ended in May last year) made over $37 billion, while Reebok made just $1.6 billion (it hasn’t made that little since 1987). If you didn’t grow up in the ’80s, Reebok’s one-time domination of Nike might come as a surprise. Everything was possible,” Litchfield, currently head of product at GoRuck, said in an interview. “It was kind of a positive thing, you know? It was always possible. Paul Litchfield, the former vice president of Reebok’s Advanced Concepts Group (and the developer of Reebok’s famous Pump basketball shoe), remembers it as “full of energy, full of potential, full of stress.” There was a palpable energy from how fast it was growing and, of course, the thrill of taking down the top dog in the space. It was an electric time to be at the company. There comes a time that you’re useful for a company and after that, other people - more corporate people, people more used to these sorts of volumes - they can move in.” “That’s probably why I decided to get off the treadmill and retire and sit back: I’d done so much and for so long. I think we must have been either stupid or just something to keep going and keep pushing and not worrying about it,” Foster said of the brand’s meteoric rise. Get retail news like this in your inbox daily.
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