Reebok Founder: How We Built A Brand That Beat Nike - Joe Foster | PEP TALK - S3 EP 2

Key Takeaways

this week on pep talk rwb okay what's that it's a small south african gazelle i think it was about 10 or 15 years later the registrar came back and said well everybody now knows that reebok is a sports shoe the animal is very much secondary wow so you overtook the animal absolutely i needed that product i'm sure in america i needed a distributor in america 1968 when did i get there 1979. 11 years to 11 years to get that's persistent sales it doesn't happen overnight no i think people call it resiliency at that point i knew we could make a five-star shoe and we did aztec aztek's the five-star shoe at that point you're beating knights right i mean you're the five-star shoot and that changed our lives forever our mission is to help 10 million people start and grow a business in pep talk we interview industry leading experts from around the world who share actionable know-how and life lessons that's why we're excited to team up with godaddy to power pep talk i have been using godaddy for years and would promote them on this podcast even if they didn't sponsor us you can use their free website builder and start your online business at no cost for example you don't need lots of money to start a business if you leverage the tools at the purposeful project and godaddy godaddy even help with naming a business check out the links in the podcast notes below to connect to godaddy tools [Music] today we have joe foster he's the founder of reebok in 1958 an incredible company was born in the north of england and became bigger than nike joe today is going to share with us his knowledge on trademarking on sales give us a few stories from that time joe welcome oh thank you thank you simon it's yes indeed uh you've taken me back a long time now yes we're going back for what 60 years now 50 years and more but uh yes those early days quite quite amazing when we when we set up a small factory just away from the family we left the family because that business was dying totally dying so we set up a company but we the other family was jw foster and sons and we couldn't set up as jw foster and so we thought well we need a different name so we set up as mercury good idea mercury the uh uh the winged messenger that was our uh logo wait why mobile interest why did mercury become the original name for for reebok well you know you think of all sorts of things and uh i thought well you're the wing messenger that's that's had to do with athletics running it's a good thing mercury it sounded good you know sounded something we we thought it sounded good anyway and we were happy to go with it in 1958 which we did for 18 months and we were doing well you know we were making money and our accountant he said guys you're making money so you better register your name well i mean i think i was about 25 at that time and was still quite naive why do we need to register the name well he said if somebody else comes along and decides that reebok shoes they uh not reebok sorry mercury shoes they're pretty good and we're going to copy it and you can't stop them because you've not registered your name okay we'll register our name so we applied to the registrar you know want to register mercury oh sorry it's pre-registered oh can you imagine what we felt like you know we've been there 18 months and we're doing nicely and we've got all the logos great stuff and okay so but they offered it to us for a thousand pounds now a thousand pounds doesn't sound much today but you know we'd set up a whole factory for 250 pounds machinery and a lot so you can imagine four times that we didn't have that money so uh talking to the accountants and he said go see a payment agent i know this guy in manchester go see him i tried i went to see him and okay so you can't buy it so you've got to think of a new name but uh don't bring me one name i need 10. i know 10. how can you run a business when you you you're thinking you've got to believe in that ten names you can't just come up with a name you felt you felt like i had to come up with someone you loved there was something you wanted to fall in love with them not just come up with 10 names for the sake of it sort of thing well yeah i mean you've got to think what you're doing is something that you aspire to when it's something really sort of you could think yeah i can believe in that and he pointed through the window it was a nice day in may pointed out the window and he pointed to kodak and i'm saying kodak what's with kodak well they made the name up you know you don't find it in any dictionary apart from the fact that it belongs to kodak oh right so if you can make a name up great stuff okay oh we go off and we're sitting around the table like we're sitting now and we're thinking of names now it can get silly when you're thinking of names and we've got a lot of cylinders but you know we had cougar cougar sports sounds pretty good though yeah because we understood the test of time that one falcon falcon falcon sports yeah you know cool not so bad that's okay but let me take you back to 1943 yeah 43 during the war i'm young i'm eight years old and like with covert we couldn't get anywhere you know the seaside holidays were out now it was what you did at home and they had these stay-at-home holiday things and i was entered into a race 60-yard race okay i won it well i i thought i won it fair and square but you know i was wearing spike shoes because the parent company jadwa foster's been going since 1895 and my grandfather is supposed to have invented the spike run issue i've got spike running shoes on i'm running 60 hours and i win fantastic so i got like my price and what do i get 1943 what do i get a dictionary what a wonderful prize yeah and i'm saying come on guys where's the ball you know was a football a dictionary well a bit disgusted of course with a dictionary but then and i didn't know at the time this was a webster's dictionary and webster's diction is an american dictionary and there are a number of spellings in an american dictionary which are different from the english oxford dictionary however fast forward and we're now in 1960. and i've got my american dictionary just si by my side and we're trying to think of names and i love the letter r i don't know why one of those things like why did i pick mercury i don't know why just like it and so let's r i o my american dictionary letter r and i'm coming through from there and i come across r w b ok what's that it's a small south african gazelle we're a running company gazelle that's it top of the list now had i been looking at my oxford english dictionary that would have been r h e b o c k and something that would have been not as uh interesting but you know by accident something that happened in 1943 instead of getting the ball i've got reebok yeah it's a great point is it sometimes bad luck turns into good luck basically right you at the time oh no a dictionary but it was all part of the fate of what was what was to come right well yes if you believe in faith that was fair the fact that you won a running race a running race is the actual reason you got the dictionary absolutely it feels like there was a predestined plan there for you to create something great wasn't it oh absolutely fantastic but you know i put this at the top of the list and i took the ten names back to the uh agent he sent them through they checked them all through and the register there's only one that was reebok that was clear a couple of things that uh questioned one was rebo and that was ladies underwear and we and they the guy said no no no problem the other one was railbrook railbrook was a tootles made shirts called railbrook but he was the agent for them so he acted for them and he said no we're not going to worry about reebok so we got reebok one caveat from the registrar was we're going to have to go in part b of the register and we're saying we didn't you know we thought to register as a register okay okay why is that well if somebody starts making shoes out of uh reebok skin you can't stop them okay fine and jeff and i we looked at each other and said nah that's never going to happen yeah no so we'll we'll be reebok i think it was about 10 or 15 years later the registrar came back and said we've moved into part a of the register and why well everybody now knows that reebok is a sports shoe the animal is very much secondary wow so you overtook the animal in a literal trademark sense absolutely but i think what you're mentioning here again it's very useful for people to keep an eye on that you know it can be a very costly exercise to start a business and then have to change it i'm sure you had to remodel all the materials to rebrand for reebok and and actually for small businesses that could really hurt you if you don't think about this ahead of time and even today i feel like a lot of people don't know what this story you're telling this this important thing about it ahead of time and even you say registry b and people don't understand what that is yeah yeah i think it's and you can it's all of course on the internet you can google trademarks but a lot of people get confused so it's uh it's a great story though i love i love the idea that you you became more famous than the the wonderful animal absolutely that's incredible i just want to take a moment to thank our sponsor taylor brands for supporting this podcast and entrepreneurs taylor brands are aligned with our mission to help you start and grow a business and already empower millions of customers around the world to kickstart their business with their ai driven one-stop shop for aspiring small business owners with everything you need to jump start your business such as a logo maker business mailbox online and physical business cards printed merchandise social media tools and so much more to find out more about taylor brands and how they can help you click the link below and get 40 off your first order using the code pep now let's get back to the podcast the other thing i wanted to ask you that i felt you know you've got so much knowledge of your career and and what you've achieved sales sales is something that a lot of our audience ask about and i know you've got a lot of experience in it and i'd love to hear your view on you know what makes a good sales person what makes a good sale how did you manage to get reebok into america because i know that was a big deal and one of the reasons you became bigger at night because because of that deal so share your your knowledge there that would take me all day to show everything but you know let's pick some bits out of that one yeah i uh i realized that jw foster's my father my grandfather's business they didn't really recognize the fact that you've got to go out and sell your product um they advertised and they they they use the network of athletics and that really grew the business in those you know the early 1900s brilliant fantastic and gold medals and world records galore so they didn't pick up on the idea that you've got to push your product you've got to do something and we were reebok we hadn't had that famous uh 1900s world records and whatever and i thought right i'd jump in the car go to these retailers in in those days there were three or four ex-footballers had sports stores and that's how the sports trade sort of run in those days so i went around calling in the stores and saying i'm reebok and the guy is saying who's reebok like oh yeah well i can't imagine everybody people listening today can't imagine that no one knows who reebok is i think everybody knows that was it so i show him the product and he looks at me and said well look i've got adidas and i've got dunlop why do i need a reebok ah and i heard that two or three times and that was enough for me i stopped selling i decided that's the end of that road and we used to go around to athletics meetings used to sell over the back of our car and uh all these athletes thought just a minute that's my business that's my trade and it dawned on me that uh the three days in those days the amateur athletic association they produced the handbook and in that handbook was the name and address of every secretary of every club in the country we said about three four hundred what it was all right no brainer that was it a letter to everyone and i offered them 15 discount so as i said look if anybody in the club wants to become an agent they can do just write in i got over 100 agents on that first letter and that was incredible excuse me so uh all of a sudden i'm selling direct and it wasn't long probably a month or more now and these retailers they were ringing me and saying uh i believe he's selling direct to the athletic clubs well we you know we normally sell the athletic clubs uh look if you you stop doing that we'll stock your shoes and uh i thought away too sure no no i'm not going to stop doing that oh you cut out the middleman there you know sometimes they're in the middle that will cause a big problem to go back to that way well i said look you would get wholesale price the athleticist levels to get 15 off and i know you probably give them 15 off anyway so i'm not going to stop but i will advertise that you will stop the shoes if that's what you want to do and i think 90 of the guys who rang up accepted that that argument but you know we're talking about the uk we're talking about athletics not a big market but i knew because fosters had been supplying yale university uh 200 pairs of shoes every month and these were the hand-sewn shoes but i knew that market was big so i wanted to go to america the guys in the company and brother and the wives they were saying no no no i cost too much that's going to be we can't afford that no okay but i'm reading a book it was a eurosport or a sports book and the government were advertising in there they wanted us to export and they were willing to pay for a stand and our return offer to the nsga show that's national sporting goods of america in chicago they were willing to do that plus 50 of the hotel bill if we would go and export well again a no-brainer that was it had no resistance to me doing that so in 1968 off i went with a friend of brigham i went with a friend and we went through times square we actually stayed in in new york bobby we were to the outdoor stores i looked at the sports stores before going on to chicago chicago brilliant nice four days and uh a lot of guys coming up saying oh love your product where do i get this from and i'm saying england england is that new england and no no not new england across the water you know england oh was that near london oh yeah near london fine fine fine but i realized at that point that i needed i needed that product onshore in america i needed a distributor in america i'm 1968. when did i get there 1979. 11 years to 11 years to get that's persistent sales something very important for people to keep make a note of it doesn't happen overnight no i think people call it resiliency yeah resilience yeah it's yeah but um we got a lot of luck and the luck was it in late 60s athletics running in fact road running running training that became a big thing it became a category by 1975 there was a magazine called runners world which started off as an a4 sheet and by 1975 was a full glossy magazine bob anderson was telling you who'd run this race because about about time a lot of half marathons a lot of 5k is 10ks and everybody's out there you know we're talking about 360 million americans 10 we're probably out there now running uh so we're talking about 36 million i hope they're running fantastic it's a big market and bob anderson thought he could tell everybody which shoe to buy anita said the shooter buy is nike that's the number one shoe well phil knight's importing these from japan can he turn up the sort of mechanism to get enough shoes out there because if we said there's 36 million runners probably 3.6 million wanted to buy the number one shoe you know the americans love wow we're going to get number two he could never get the product there in time and one year later bob anderson decides oh no we're having another shoe it was probably new balance so that happened only twice because then the retail trade was such a mess shoes were coming in they were no longer wanted and the ones i wanted nobody could turn it up that quick so he changed to five stars he's star ratings five stars would be the number one shoe and then he go down four three two at that point i knew we could make a five star shoe and we did aztec as takes the five star shoe we tested this out it's part of our gold rage our gold range was inca was a spike uh midas was a road racing shoe but aztec was the royal train issue that's where the volume was and it was great we did that in the commonwealth games in edmonton and we got shed a lot of gold medals great fantastic so now february 1979 and i've got the stand again in chicago and i've got my shoe and along came kmart and came out wanted 25 000 purse wow and this shoe wasn't needed five star then but running was growing that fast right that was about six months work for our small factory back in the uk but you know we realized that if we were going to do if we were going to go for a five-star shoe we needed help and barter biggest shoe company in the world down in tilbury and they said they would help i had a friend there if you read the book you'll pick up on what why i had a friend now we'll help you okay but then came i said we're at a better price and uh right i knew that meant that this wouldn't be made in the uk it would have to be made in south korea but we'd already again made a contact with the biggest factory in south korea so we knew we could go though if necessary and this looked like necessary fine but i'm still the the show and along came paul fireman and paul fireman with his brother and his brother-in-law they were running a wholesale uh camping business where they said tents uh outdoor business tents fishing rods you name it and paul was obviously fed up of doing what he was doing so he said joe love to be your distributor but we need a five-star shoot i said come on have a look at this aztec paul saying yeah well you know maybe it's going to be a five star but it's not there yet well i think it's june or july when the uh the shoe issue of runner's world was coming out so he said i'll be a man if you get a five-star shoe that's me in and well it's a long time from february to uh to the end of june when the magazine would come out so i'd again come back to the uk went out had a look at paul feynman's outfit had a look at kmart i came out i thought wow i might get 25 000 pairs here but it might be my first and last if i don't sell enough or they don't sell enough shoes on that square footage they're going to give to my product but paul okay small company but you know he had reps out there and the main thing is you know you can see when a guy is interested this was not he was not just came out a big operation he was paul fireman and he wanted something different you know he was hungry he could sell that i think in america in those days called you've got wrinkles in your belly you're hungry you need something i could see that but we needed a five star paul came over to the uk because he wanted to see what was reebok like of course he didn't know reebok not many people in america did um and of course we we had three events that he went to and the winner was reebok i wonder why you know and fifty percent of the people running in those races were wearing reebok he was convinced that's clever today they'd be called social media influencers really but you know you used people of influence that were successful to leverage them lift the brand up probably the first one the first companies to maybe leverage that that kind of model other people being successful therefore translated into your shoe being the best shoe yeah i mean we we use a lot of things like that and we you know marathons became city marathon became television that was it everybody went watching these city marathons and we set up our company reebok racing club we set up weirwood racing club where we would uh sell shoes and we'll sell this at cost price to athletes we give them top athletes and our top athletes went into these races they were not the ones who were going to win but we said to the guys lou here's the kit you get your shoes just stay at the front as long as you can in the television you know it doesn't matter that you don't win the race but if you're upfront they're going to be seeing reebok racing club reebok racing club reebok race they're going to be seeing that so you know that's one of the things that we did that again using the media but uh we titled back down to aztec and uh we came along though it was the end of july i think it was when the magazine came out and i picked up the phone to paul fireman and uh i think i must have got him out of bed he was a bit sort of daughter probably seven to look in the morning for him i said paul get down to the local kiosk see if the runner's world's out let's see if we got five stars he did an hour later he came back joe aztec five stars fantastic that was it at that point you're beating knight right i mean you're the five-star shoot well yeah well i think nike also had a five-star shoot i think it was about four maybe five five-star shoes but the point is we had one so at that point we were on the hook we were going to go into the market instead of us push push push and now that five or six failed attempts with different uh good guys but they couldn't get into the market this one would bring us into the market so uh but he also said you've got inca five stars and buy just five stars we had three five star shoes to get into the american market and that changed our lives forever [Music] thank you for listening to our podcast today and i hope you got value from it please feel free to follow us on any of our social media channels and if you have any questions about business ask us we will help you again we want to thank our sponsor godaddy for supporting this podcast from naming your business and buying a domain name to building a website for free godaddy has you covered godaddy provides us entrepreneurs all the help and tools we need to grow a business online you're not alone entrepreneurs see you in the next one