FEATURE | APPAREL
Flight of the Bumblebee
Christian Stadil has transformed the fortunes of Danish sportswear brand Hummel since taking
over in 1999. A business guru in his native country, he has built his success on an all-encompassing
philosophy he calls ‘Company Karma’.
By James Emmett
N
ot many senior figures in
the sports industry begin
an interview by washing
down – in one gulp – some
20 vitamin tablets with a vile-looking
mixture purporting to be a seaweed,
kiwi, banana and mint smoothie.
Christian Stadil (right), owner and chief
executive of Danish sportswear brand
Hummel, explains that the mixture is
his detox secret – a necessary tonic after
what he describes as “some hairy days” in
the build-up to this interview just before
Christmas. On the weekend, Stadil was
attacked near his home in Copenhagen,
managing to hold off and then flee
his assailants through a combination
of quick wits and the skills he learned
practising martial arts in his youth. His
hands, iPhone and, much to his chagrin,
favourite pair of glasses still bear the
scars, though. The incident was followed
by a meeting with Liverpool Football
Club’s Daniel Agger, with whom Stadil is
setting up an online tattoo business, and
then the club’s Christmas party. Worse for
wear the next day, Stadil trooped down to
London for more meetings, one of them
with eminent designer Paul Smith, current
and former cyclists Mark Cavendish and
Brian Holm, and then SportsPro.
In the latter meeting, it immediately
becomes clear that Stadil is no ordinary
sports industry executive.
The sportswear business, especially as
its fronds extend further and further into
fashion, is an increasingly crowded and
competitive one. But the plain facts are
these: Hummel is doing well. In 2012, the
year that saw German sportswear brand
Puma effect a drastic corporate reshuffle,
with its much-heralded chairman, chief
executive, and chief marketing officer all
leaving their posts in the wake of a huge
year-on-year drop in takings, Hummel
registered its best financial results ever.
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“In the street, if you meet a boxer, you have
to wrestle him. This is a good analogy that I
often use in terms of our positioning strategy.”
Core turnover rose to around UK£85
million as the company continued to
enjoy the top-line growth of around 25
per cent it has seen for the last few years.
With licensee partner revenues included,
actual takings were much higher. The first
UK£100 million turnover year – in core
revenues – is expected in 2013, as well as,
potentially, one or two brand acquisitions.
Since Stadil took over in 1999, the
company has grown its core workforce
from 17 to a staff of around 220 today.
Clad largely in the familiar chevrons
of his brand, 41-year-old Stadil cuts a
relaxed and engaging figure. Hummel is
the German word for bumblebee, a fact
which couldn’t be more appropriate for its
owner, who could have been made for the
proverb that draws on the hyperactivity
of the species, and who, when enthused,
talks at the same compelling pace as
Rimsky-Korsakov’s frenzied ‘Flight of the
Bumblebee’ orchestral piece.
Smoothie consumed, Stadil cracks
straight into the history of his brand.
Heritage is a growing marketing trend
in all manner of consumer sectors, not
least sportswear companies. Hummel,
which Stadil believes is the third-oldest
sportswear brand in the world, is well
served here. “We started from a little
town near Hanover in Germany where
there was a shoemaker going to watch
a football game,” recounts the Dane.
“It was raining and all these footballers
were sliding around on the field. Besides
being a shoemaker this man was also an
entrepreneur so he thought it must be
possible to do a football boot differently
so they don’t slide around. He went home,
so the story goes, and he worked all night
and in the morning he came out with
something rather unique – a football boot
with studs. We think he invented the first
screw-in stud boot ever made.”
Albert Messmer, the young cobbler
in the story, had a flair for marketing as
well, it seems. “He was a storyteller,” says
Stadil proudly. “These players playing
with studs could now do things that it
shouldn’t be humanly possible to do, like
the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to carry
its own weight but it can.”
Messmer built the company into
a reasonably successful domestic
manufacturer of soccer and handball
equipment, which was the way it stayed
until 1974 when a group of Danish
handballers found the brand and began
distributing it in Denmark. They soon
bought it and brought some Danish star
power into the ownership group. Allan
Simonsen, Henning Jensen and Frank
Arnesen, all top names in European
soccer in the late 1970s, were not just
stakeholders, but brand ambassadors. It
was these three men, Stadil says, who
toured Europe finding teams for Hummel
to sponsor. “They were one of the first
brands to use sponsorship actively as
a platform to promote a brand and to
increase sales in retail,” he says. “Before
that people didn’t really use sponsorship
strategically. And at the time there was not
so much money in the game so they got
all these great teams: Tottenham Hotspur,
Aston Villa,
Norwich City,
Real Madrid until
the middle
of the ’90s,
Udinese, Red
Star [Belgrade].
At that time I
like to say it was
the players that chose
the brand. Today
there’s so much more
money in the game
– and respect for that
– but then it was more the
players’ game.”
By the mid 1990s, however,
the company had lost its way. In
1994, Hummel went bankrupt.
“Production was dropped,
stock-keeping was outsourced,
the company went back to
its roots making team
sports stuff only,
primarily out
the back door
to teams,”
explains
Stadil.
“This reconstruction was
very successful actually, but
still the company was very
small and it lost money
– double digit millions
Danish krone.”
Meanwhile, a young
Stadil found his own
business empire gathering
momentum. Studying law
in Denmark’s second city,
Aarhus, he was also
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FEATURE | APPAREL
dabbling in the real estate market. When
his father, also a lawyer, was brought
on to the Hummel board to help with
the restructuring effort, his budding
entrepreneur son would pop in from
time to time, slowly seeing for himself
the potential in this ailing brand. By 1999
he was convinced, launching himself at
the project and taking over. “Only 17
employees,” he says, “double-digit million
losses. But there was potential.”
The potential Stadil saw lay largely in the
brand’s capacity to ride a wave he could see
developing. Something of a business guru,
Stadil says there are three or four key “data
points” – whether a McKinsey report or
the opinion of a local shoeshine boy – that
you need to register before you take the
plunge and invest in the business. “The
economics were so-so,” he explains, “and
the brand positioning was not so good, but
there were other data points.”
The first data point, Stadil says, was
when he noticed a DJ playing in an Adidas
zip-up vintage jacket. “I started to notice
these first movers, opinion leaders, wearing
vintage sportswear, and this was around
’98, ’99, and it’s strange to say today but at
the time we didn’t know what retro was.
There wasn’t really a brand doing it.”
The second data point arrived at a party
in Paris where Stadil saw “a model girl
wearing Puma original track pants.”
The third and fourth data points came
back in Aarhus; first at a thrift store which
Stadil happened to notice kept selling out
of Hummel and then when the company
received a request from a fashion retailer
in the town to reissue some old designs.
“The fifth data point was when I read
an article about the new mega-trend and
that was retro. The article was saying that
now we’re nearing the millennium, what’s
going to happen: Y2K, aliens coming
from the sky, we’re going to go back in
time,” Stadil adds with a laugh.
From the moment Stadil took over,
heritage-based sports lifestyle became
the company’s central strategy. Today,
Hummel concentrates on three key areas:
pure sportswear, “sports fashion, which is
fashion styles for fashion retail, and sports
lifestyle, which is fashion for sports retail.”
But it is sports fashion that now accounts
for half the company’s takings.
Stadil himself plays a hands-on role in
the company’s design department. He is
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53
Edge-of-the-box thinking
F
ollowing the success of
Company Karma, Stadil’s
latest book – In The Shower
With Picasso – examines
Denmark as a hotbed of creativity.
He highlights the case of a friend
of his who produces the hit Danish
crime show, The Killing. “He’s one
of the biggest crime producers in the
world, but he hates crime stories,”
laughs Stadil. “There’s only one thing
he hates more than crime stories and
that’s British crime stories – Morse,
Taggart. It’s so formulaic. In the
Killing 2, it’s a crime story, yes, but
it’s a commentary on the Danish
involvement in Afghanistan. It’s a
double story. You take the existing
idea and you think about it on the
edge of this box. Creativity doesn’t
happen when you think outside the
box, you have to think on the edge of
the box. It’s the same thing we do; we
take sports products and we think on
the edge of the box.”
Of course, this is where Stadil’s
karma projects come in. His latest,
and one that he is most proud of, is
wrapped up in a strategic partnership
with the Roskilde Festival, one of
the largest annual music festivals in
Europe, where Hummel puts on a
girls-only soccer tournament. “Guys
aren’t allowed anywhere near it unless
they’re managers or streakers.”
Hummel projects in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone are the bedrock of its ‘Company Karma’ strategy
on the board of the Danish Design School
and collaborations form a fundamental
part of Hummel’s seasonal collections.
One such collaboration recently spawned
a particularly well-received collection
in Japan, hummel J, whose apparel line
included bee-print, waterproof, fleecelined trousers. It is a marriage, Stadil
insists, between high fashion and sports
functionality. “There has to be an element
of sports,” he says. “I had a meeting with
the designers last week and they were
making some jeans for kids, and I said,
‘Guys, that’s not good enough. There has
to be an element of sport.’ Back in the day
when I was designing, I coined the phrase
‘change one thing only’. So we can make a
vest as a fashion style, but then the fabric
International soccer: losing its appeal?
H
ummel signed its first
deal with the Danish
Football Association in
1979 and went on to enjoy
what Stadil describes as “27 really
great years” as sponsor and supplier
of the Danish national team. Adidas,
however, has backed the team through
the last handful of major tournaments.
“Would we take them back?” ponders
Stadil. “Maybe, but a national team
plays around ten times a year; they have
to get further than the quarter-finals
in major tournaments to be shown
worldwide. But a club team plays 55
times a year. From an ROI perspective,
a national team gets less and less
relevant. People think globally; they’re
interested in where their kids can go
to kindergarten and also about what’s
happening in Afghanistan; they don’t
think so much about the national state.
The national state has lost influence,
and you see this with football. The
club teams play more games and people
who support them, they support a local
club, and they also support Barcelona,
or Liverpool.”
“Today they have chosen to make peace,” says Stadil of those in Hummel’s Sierra Leone project
or the functionality has to be for sport.”
There is an element of sport in
Hummel’s business strategy as well as its
designs. The idea of the underdog, the
challenger, the very idea first propounded
by Albert Messmer in 1923, is one that
Stadil is keen to maintain today. “In
martial arts we say, ‘Don’t box a boxer,
don’t wrestle a wrestler,’” he says. “In the
street, if you meet a boxer, you have to
wrestle him. This is a good analogy that I
often use with my colleagues in terms of
our positioning strategy. Should we go out
in the market and say, ‘Now we’re going to
sponsor a half-baked team because we’re
not a rich sponsor and can’t afford Man
Utd or Liverpool?’ I say, ‘No, we should
do something differently.’”
Stadil clearly doesn’t have a problem
thinking differently and Hummel’s
marketing strategy, particularly its use
of sponsorship, has come to reflect that.
Although Hummel is the kit supplier and
sponsor of a number of handball and
soccer sides across Europe, including a
host of top Danish sides and a handful
of teams from the lower reaches of the
German Bundesliga, there is no standout
name amongst them. Instead, Stadil
and his marketing team prefer to focus
on unique but not necessarily hugely
exposed projects that make tangible
differences to local communities.
Two such sponsorships are Hummel’s
deals with both the Sierra Leone and
Afghanistan football associations.
Both are a manifestation of the term
given to the business philosophy that has
won Stadil acclaim as a business visionary
in his native Denmark – ‘Company
Karma’. Stadil has written a book on the
concept and given talks all over the world
but, simply put, it can be distilled to the
following: in business, you’ve got to do
good to do well. It is a philosophy that
permeates every facet of Stadil’s business.
The company struck a five-year deal
with the Afghanistan FA in 2010. It
includes all teams in the country’s top
league as well as all national teams,
including the country’s fledgling women’s
team. “What is the story behind that?”
Stadil asks himself. “It’s just basic karma.
Normally you have all these provinces
fighting each other for many years –
it’s not only Afghanistan fighting the
Russians, the Americans or the Brits, they
also fight internally. The only place they
live at peace is on the field. So it’s really a
fantastic story.”
The projects have personal significance
for Stadil. He recounts an occasion
early on in the Afghanistan deal when
Hummel organised a match between
the Afghanistan women’s team and a
team of female NATO soldiers who had
been policing the war-torn country. The
Afghan ladies, victims of repression their
whole lives, ended up 1-0 victors, but
Stadil, who was there for the game, was
stuck by the contrast between the historic
events on the pitch and the still-febrile,
militaristic atmosphere off it. “I felt like
the colonel in Apocalypse Now,” he
recalls, “watching as people go surfing
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FEATURE | APPAREL
Designer marketers
A
lthough Hummel dedicates
a rather orthodox ten
per cent of its revenues
to marketing – an effort
topped up by its various licensees
around the world – Stadil is happy
to admit that such is the nature
of the contemporary sportswear
manufacturing business that
marketing is the single most crucial
aspect of the job. “We are not a
production company,” he says.
“Where we should have our primary
focus and core competencies is on the
marketing and the brand positioning
side. Anybody today can make clothes.
Shoes are a little bit more difficult
and there’s a higher entry barrier in
the marketplace. But if we sat here
now and decided we wanted to make
a SportsPro collection, we could make
a design now, we could upload the
design to a crowd-sourcing site, in
two days’ time we have our collection
and we’re in the fashion business.
It’s easier than ever before, but what
does this mean? It means that we as
a company have to position ourselves
better than others.”
Stadil explains that it’s not just
boutique, DIY operations that
represent a threat. Sports retailers have
woken up to the fact that, by raising
the price point and fully exploiting
all their own marketing channels,
own-brand labels can deliver sky-high
margins. “JD Sports more or less only
have their own brands now,” he says.
“We really have to get up early in the
morning to defend against that.”
“We will work more conceptually. In all our
sponsor contracts we’ve built in that the club
has to have a karma project.”
when the bombs and napalm are falling.”
Another ‘karma project’ close to
Stadil’s heart is the one Hummel funds in
Sierra Leone. Alongside its sponsorship
of the country’s national team, the
company works with an NGO called
Play31 – which won a Beyond Sport
award in 2011 – to develop and put on
soccer workshops around the country.
Evidence of the brutality of the country’s
recent civil war left a visceral impression
on Stadil when he visited. “There are
terrible stories about child soldiers who
were given brown-brown, gunpowder
mixed with heroin and speed – 12-yearold guys with Kalashnikovs. I’ve been
talking to guys who have tried to take a
baby from a woman and put the baby on
a bonfire. These stories you hear all the
time. Today they have chosen to make
peace. This country is a role model for the
whole world. We have these villages that
formerly raped and killed, and now they
meet on the pitch and play football, and
54 | SportsProMedia.com
this is company karma for us – combining
doing well with doing good.”
Karma projects now form such a crucial
pillar in the Hummel business strategy
that Stadil insists that any marketing
partnership signed now has to include
at least one. “We want to tear down the
boundary between our company and our
marketing partners,” he says. “We don’t
believe in signing a contract and saying,
‘Here’s the equipment, see you in a year.’
We want to, we have to and we will work
more conceptually. In all our sponsor
contracts we’ve built in that the club has
to have a karma project. A good example
is that we’ve just signed Karlsruhe in
Germany and we just signed St Pauli;
we just signed a deal with Brondby. In
all those contracts there’s a clause saying
they have to have a karma project. It’s the
hammer on the nail in terms of how we
like to think.”
Stadil’s belief in karma extends to the
style in which he runs his companies.
Stadil, a keen rock climber, draws on personal
philosophies to inform his business strategies
He tries to keep corporate structures
across all his companies – and all told he
employs some 3,800 people – as flat as
possible and insists that “everybody has
my number”. While he protests that he is
not religious – “for me it’s a philosophy,
not a religion” – Buddhism continues to
have a profound influence on all elements
of his life. His first son is due to be born
this spring and he plans to call him
Winston Balthazaar Bodhi – the Bodhi
not after “the Patrick Swayze character in
Point Break”, but after the word for the
Buddhist concept of enlightenment and
Buddha’s understanding of the nature of
things. He has also managed to bring key
Buddhist principals to the business world
and make them successful.
Company Karma works, but much of
Hummel’s success could be ascribed to
Stadil’s own brand of karmic charisma.
His style is both spiritual and intense, as
well as amusing and light-hearted.
When asked what sports he himself
likes to practise, his response is typical.
He did black-belt level martial arts
for 20 years, he says, and now enjoys
surfing – both of them physical activities
renowned for their zen qualities – along
with rock climbing. The latter, he says, is
just an excuse to get a picture of himself
shirtless in a magazine.