New York - As a consumer, Steven Pokk shares
some rarefied company. Like basketball legends Shaquille O’Neill, Dee
Brown, and Allen Iverson, Pokk owns 15 pairs of Reebok sneakers.
But the
Adidas-owned brand has fallen far since its heyday on NBA courts in the 1980s
and 1990s. In a bid to rebound, it signed a 10-year deal in 2011 to be the
official sportswear brand of Crossfit, then a budding workout regimen that
mixes a range of fitness strategies, from weights and rowing machines to running
and calisthenics. It was a savvy move for a company desperate to stay
relevant.
At the
time, Pokk, a 33 year-old personal trainer in New York, was just getting into the Crossfit
craze. With purpose-built sneakers and a standing 15 percent discount, Reebok
made him a brand evangelist, one of its first since all those basketball greats
from the 1990s.
In late
2014, Pokk and a couple of buddies opened their own Crossfit gym (or “box,” as
the vernacular goes): Crossfit Kingsboro in Brooklyn, NY.
A month later, Adidas arch enemy Nike Inc. quietly began selling its first
trainer for the Crossfit crowd, the Metcon. Pokk rushed out and bought a pair.
He now owns eight iterations, wearing them to the gym, walking his dogs and,
well, all the time. “I’m wearing them right now,” he said, as he left on a
vacation to Australia.
Sneaker market
As Nike
battles Adidas for a slice of the global soccer-cleat market and tries to fend
off Under Armour on basketball courts, it’s quietly edging into a
multibillion dollar category that could have far greater impact on the future
of the sneaker market. Reebok, meanwhile, is trying to hang onto share in the
one place where it presciently decided to plant its flag.
Nike
declined to answer questions for this article, citing a quiet period in advance
of its earnings report December 20. And Reebok said there was no reliable way
to gauge market-share in the Crossfit community, so we at Bloomberg decided to
do a small survey of our own. We dropped in on classes at five gyms around the
country to see what people were wearing to work out. In this admittedly
unscientific survey, Nike had won over slightly half of the Crossfit crowd,
Reebok had a bit more than a one-quarter share, and the remainder was split
among such smaller running specialists as Asics and New Balance and
cross-training startups like No Bull.
Make no
mistake, the spoils of winning this workout battle will be huge. “It’s become
the fastest-growing fitness property in the world,” said Reebok President Matt
O’Toole.
How fast
exactly? There are now about 8 000 Crossfit gyms in the US and an
additional 4 000 or so abroad. In them, sweaty masses run through one-hour
sessions designed to build overall fitness with stretching, weights, and
low-impact body movements. It’s a proprietary program, but it requires little
in the way of gear or technical training. As such, thousands of gyms offer
Crossfit-like training, but they don’t bother to pay the $3 000 or so a year to
license the Crossfit name.
Those who
try a Crossfit class will quickly notice three things: a wide range of
ages and body types, a bunch of people who appear to know one another, and a
lot of lingo that will be foreign to a newcomer. This includes Turkish get-up,
kipping, WOD, and burpee–lots and lots of “burpee.” These ingredients are, in
part, what make this market attractive. Virtually anyone can do a
Crossfit-style workout, and do it for a long time. In that sense,
Crossfit-style cross-training is similar to running, the largest category in
the game of selling shirts, shorts, and most important, shoes. But it’s the
camaraderie and the lingo that makes Crossfit sticky. There’s a social
element to the gym that is hard to replicate while huffing and puffing on a
10-kilometer run or in a mirrored room full of beefy guys grunting through bicep
curls.
A photo posted by Waneska Overbeck🐚🌴 (@wanoverbeck) on Dec 7, 2016 at 6:11am PST
Junkie
Reebok’s
O’Toole became a Crossfit junkie himself before approaching the company
about sponsorship. “I remember thinking, ‘Hey, this is the future: community,
fitness, and this very dynamic approach to working out,’” he said. “There is
not a single gym or fitness provider in my view that is not somehow impacted by
what Crossfit has done.”
Like any
trendy, new club, Crossfit presents its fans with a critical decision: what
to wear. On the apparel side, the answers are easy. But footwear is
trickier, because the regimen is so varied. Sure, there’s a little bit of
running and a little bit of weightlifting. But there’s also a breadth of
activities designed to get bodies in awkward positions. On any given day, a
Crossfitter might be asked to crawl like a bear, jump rope, carry an empty beer
keg, or walk up a wall into a handstand. Sure, running requires cushioning, and
basketball demands ankle support. But what are the correct shoes for climbing a
rope or swinging a kettle-bell?
“When we
started in 2011, right away we saw there was not a proper shoe for this
activity,” O’Toole said.
Billed as
“the first official Crossfit shoe,” Reebok’s Nano was a strange bit of rubber
alchemy—cushioned enough for a run but flat enough to make a sturdy
weight-lifting platform. Meanwhile, the soles were flexible and the upper was
tough.
Reebok was
already selling its fourth iteration of the Nano when Nike quietly released the
Metcon. Where the Reebok was wrapped in a grid of thick, rubbery plastic, the
Metcon was more spartan. With little marketing effort, they sold out quickly.
“They fit
well, they moved better than the Nano, and they weren’t as boxy feeling,” said
Pokk, the trainer. “And it looked more like just a shoe, where Reebok was
basically posterizing its brand all over the Nano.”
A little
more than a year later, Nike showed off its sophomore effort, the Metcon 2.
This time it made more of them and offered 16 different color patterns. Pokk
said about two-thirds of the people in his Crossfit gym now wear shoes with
swooshes, a number mirrored by our small sneaker survey.
Though Nike
appears to be making great strides, the market is still relatively young and
very much up for grabs. Matt Powell, a sportswear analyst at research firm NPD
Group, said both Nike and Reebok have failed to capture the Crossfit crowd in
the way Michael Jordan’s swoosh took over basketball courts. “It’s weird
because there is, to some extent, a cult following here,” Powell said.
“You would think they could tap into that.”
That’s
exactly the strategy of No Bull, a brand launched in May 2015 by two former
Reebok workers. The company sells, essentially, one shoe in a variety of colour
patterns. As the name suggests, there isn’t much to it. There’s a simple,
minimalist sole, a tough upper, and that’s about it. There are no straps or
plastic grids or toe-straps—just some text on the heel that reads: “No Bull.”
Over-designed
Co-founder
Michael Schaeffer, former creative director of Reebok, said all the other
sneakers aimed at the cross-training crowd are over-designed and overly complex.
“Crossfit
is very bare bones–there are no mirrors, no complicated machines,” he said.
“For us, the product design just kind of flowed out of that.”
His company’s
first shoes sold out within weeks. Though No Bull declined to discuss revenue,
co-founder Marcus Wilson said sales grew 10-fold this year. According to our
tiny shoe audit, No Bull commanded about 3 percent of the market.
A photo posted by NOBULL (@nobullproject) on Dec 8, 2016 at 11:57am PST
“The market
was ripe for this kind of company,” Wilson
said. “Crossfit is very much word-of-mouth driven, they like to support small
businesses, everyone is on social media, and they are very comfortable buying
online … it’s kind of the perfect formula for us.”
Reebok,
meanwhile, still believes its “official” partnership with Crossfit gives it
“authenticity” (read: street cred), particularly in emerging markets. In China, for
example, Crossfit rookies clamor for the brand with its name on the gym.
“We were
definitely the trailblazers, and there’s plenty of folks following, but the pie
keeps getting bigger,” O’Toole said. Nike, meanwhile, has been busy crowing
about its new college football uniforms. But if its prior release schedule is
any guide, the company is also putting the finishing touches on a Metcon 3.
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