“WE LOOKED AT EVERY OTHER FUNCTION IN THE BUSINESS, AND WE SAID, ‘OK, HOW CAN WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY?’ ”
One day in 2005, Olivier Bernhard, a superstar athlete sponsored by Nike, got a call from a stranger asking for his shoes. “Do me a favor and send them to me,” the man said. He was an engineer. “I’ll put something on them, and you go run.”
Bernhard, a duathlon world champion and six-time Ironman winner, is famous in Switzerland, where he grew up running in the mountains. He’s also a performance junkie; he loves tinkering and pushing to find an edge. Intrigued by the call, he mailed off a pair of his Nikes. “I got my Swoosh shoes back with cut-up garden-hose pieces on the bottom,” Bernhard says with his Swiss-German accent.
“So on a February night—even in my little village, I didn’t want anybody to see me in the shoes; they were really ugly. And I went for a run. I felt, Wow, this is so cool. It’s playful; it’s different. I came back, and before even showering, I had a list of 50 things I would adjust to make it a really comfortable performance running shoe.”
Bernhard spent the next three years building on the engineer’s work—cutting hoses and gluing them on shoes to invent a wildly springy sole that turned feet into pogo sticks and made people feel like they were running on clouds. By 2008, he was thinking about launching a shoe company and went to see his former agent, Caspar Coppetti, now at a global marketing company, for advice.
“Don’t do it,” Coppetti said. “Just drop it. ASAP.”
This seemed wise. The athletic shoe market is crowded, competitive, and defined by juggernauts. Nike was the leader back in 2008 (with more than $18 billion in annual sales), and it remains so today (with about $44 billion). Adidas is currently in second place, with about half of Nike’s sales. Then
