s that have been around for a long time, Reebok has had its ups and downs over the years. Where would you say the brand is today? Is it on the upswing? Joe Foster: Well, I think Reebok sort of stagnated in the late ’90s. We would have thought that by the early 2000s, Reebok would have bounced back. But it didn’t. It became part of Adidas instead. Adidas paid a lot of money for it, so they were entitled to do what they wanted, but Reebok didn’t really flourish with Adidas. They were in the same space, so [Adidas] said, ‘You do fitness, we’ll do performance.’ But it didn’t do any good for Reebok. I must admit, it was refreshing when we heard that Adidas was going to sell. I’d had conversations with people for a long time, ‘When are you going to sell? It’s not working, what’s going to happen?’ They always said, ‘No, no, we’re not going to sell.’ Then, all of a sudden, they said, ‘Yes, we’re going to sell.’ There must have been five or six different people interested in buying Reebok, and I spoke with at least two of them, but not ABG [Authentic Brands Group]. They came out of the blue, but they had [former Reebok ambassador] Shaq, and he was in love with the brand. You need to be in love with a brand if you’re going to do this. All the bids went in, and we learned that ABG [had bid] US$2.5 billion. The valuation was about US$1 billion. The people I had been talking to were like, ‘Maybe we can get it for less.’ So when I met them afterwards, they said, ‘We were nowhere near.’ I think ABG didn’t want to go into a bidding war, so they bought it, and that’s brilliant. They bring something different. Instead of the brand being stuck in one place in Boston, and all the thinking and feeling coming from Boston, now, it’s global. There’s separate thinking going on here in Australia; we were in India a few weeks ago, and they’re thinking differently there. You’ve really got to keep the brand spirit – the way you use the name, the silhouettes – [consistent], and then you’ve got to have different designers working on it. You’ve got to be able to look at the brand and recognise it. That’s my problem now – wherever we go, I’m [looking around and saying], ‘Those are Brooks, that’s Nike.’ When Adidas changed the lettering and tried to put the delta on the side instead of the vector, the brand became [something else]. People didn’t recognise it. So you’ve got to maintain. Some people may feel a bit bored with that, but it’s like with my book [Shoemaker: The Untold Story of the British Family Firm that Became a Global Brand], I’ve done over 200 podcasts with the book, and it’s all the same story. However, a good podcaster can ask you some different questions, and you get just a different view of it. IR: Famously, there was a time when Reebok was the number one sports brand. What do you think it would take to achieve that again?  JF: I think that ABG are doing the right thing now and that is exposure. The brand disappeared off the shelves. ABG has 38,000 outlets, and that’s going to expose the brand. Plus, we have a range of different ways of thinking. We’ve got a group over in Milan doing collaborations, so I think that Adidas and Nike had better get worried because we’re coming from a different angle, and they’re still stuck in the same rut. They’ve done very well, they’re good brands, no problem with that, but what we needed was exposure. It’s going to take two or three years, but the first year is going to double or even triple the visibility and the sales of the Reebok brand.  I meet so many people in America, and they’re probably in their late 40s, and they’re like, ‘I was a kid when Pump came out. I really wanted it, and my mum and dad said it was too expensive.’ I think that was probably the most iconic moment in Reebook’s existence, because it was so visible. Basketball was becoming really big, and we brought the Pump in and Dee Brown dunked from halfway without even looking, and then he bent down and pumped his shoes up. It’s those iconic moments that people remember, and that’s what makes a brand. Foster retired from the business in 1989. Image: Supplied IR: Do you think retail has fundamentally changed from when you were building the brand and running it in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s? Or is it essentially the same business?  JG: It’s changed more than fundamentally, it’s changed totally. When I used to sell my product, it was to a sports shop, and a sports shop did everything from selling games, to snooker cues, they did everything, so [footwear] was just a little part of the sports store. Now, footwear has changed the world over – sneaker culture – everybody on the street is wearing something which is driven by sports brands.  The other thing that’s changed is the High Street is dying, but we now have malls, and malls are entertainment. We all want entertainment, and that’s the main thing about going into the mall. Even if you go into the store and you don’t buy because you can buy cheaper online, that’s what happens. So retail is really the showcase for the brands, and I think it’s going to grow more and more.  ABG has got distribution with retailers, and they’re all big retailers. In my early days, there were maybe four independent retailers in a town. Now, you might have two, but they’re conglomerates.  IR: Hearing you tell the story of Reebok, it strikes me that there were some major turning points that came down to luck. You mentioned, for instance, the employee in LA who went to his wife’s aerobics class in the 1980s and got the idea for an aerobics shoe, which completely changed the fortune of Reebok. What role do you think luck has played in the success of your business?  JF: I think you just have to keep trying at whatever comes along and keep pushing. We call it white space. Where can we go where nobody is?  In the north of England, we had fell running – running up and down hills. We also had Rugby League, which – as far as Europe is concerned – is a north of England sport. We had dozens of these white spaces, and of course, the biggest white space was aerobics. So looking for white space was important for us to find a niche and grow the niche.  IR: Do you ever regret stepping away from the business when you did, in 1989? JF: People do ask me, ‘Do you regret…?’ I mean, no. The things I can regret are the fact that I lost my brother [Reebok co-founder, Jeff Foster]. I also lost my daughter. If you could change that, you would change that. But nothing else. We became number one, we overtook Nike, we overtook Adidas, I mean, what’s to regret? You could do things in a different way, but if we had, maybe we wouldn’t have become number one. CEOs come and go. People who work at a company come and go. But you can’t get rid of a founder.  IR: Do you feel like you’ve learned something about the brand having stepped away and having this external perspective on it? JF: What I learned is that we were right to put everything we had behind the brand. Only a few people know about Joe Foster. I’m selling myself now because of my book, but we were right to just concentrate on the brand. Don’t play around with it. When Adidas took it on, they changed the lettering on the side, they changed the vector and put the delta on, and nobody recognised the brand. Eventually, five years ago, somebody finally said, ‘What are we doing this for, and they brought it back, and it started to grow again.’ So what I learned is don’t play around with the brand. IR: I know that your early school years were disrupted by World War II, and when you did return to school, it sounds like you did well, but you didn’t really enjoy it. It reminded me of some other business people who famously didn’t like school, and I was curious whether you think there’s any connection between being good at business and not being very academic?  JF: I don’t want to be academic. Being academic points you in a certain direction – you become a doctor because you’re clever, but I think you have to have a very open mind. I probably didn’t think I would be a shoemaker, but it moved in that direction, and then you think, I could do this, I could do that.  I could have studied electronics, and I could have done a lot of things, but I didn’t want to become an academic purely because I wanted to be free to do other things and think about other things. I think it’s better not to be an academic if you want to be an entrepreneur.