Ashe is a new Nordic player in the international sports market. Since the turn of 2024, work has been underway to form a unified Nordic distributor based on five companies, all owned by the investment company Storskogen. As a result, there is now common management and a common workforce working to distribute over 30 global brands throughout the Nordic region. Among these are Nike, Babolat, Blizzard, Tecnica, Giro, Trangia, Morakniv, Dynafit, Primus, Silva and Gant Footwear. They are categorized into four divisions: Sports, Outdoor, Sports Fashion and Team Sales.
SGI Europe has chatted with Ashe’s CEO, Jacob Sandström, who is excited to finally present the new company.
Stronger together
SGI Europe: Why was Ashe formed?
Sandström: All five companies in the sports industry that are now part of Ashe are owned by Storskogen, which bought them over a five-year period. Storskogen’s concept is to acquire profitable companies with a long ownership horizon. In some cases, large companies are merged with operations throughout the Nordic region and with a strategy to exploit synergies. This has been done three times before with good results – in hair care, protective equipment and in flooring. Ten months ago, the decision was made to merge the five companies in sports and active lifestyle under the name Ashe.
Today, it’s difficult to achieve good profitability in retail distribution. There are so many parts you need to deliver to make your customers – the stores – happy. You need to help with marketing. You need to have salespeople on the road, train store staff, be able to offer drop-shipping solutions, integrate ERP systems and have efficient inventory management. You also need to know your street. What is the end consumer looking for? The difficulty today is, therefore, to be efficient but at the same time super local. It’s not possible to do all this yourself as a sole distributor. The only way to manage all this, we believe, is scale.
The million-dollar question achieve long-term profitability
So what’s your solution to the million-dollar question – how to achieve long-term profitability in retail in 2024/25?
In short, we do everything I mentioned centrally instead of in five locations. Internally, at Ashe, we have built a business model that works the same for all brands that are part of the company. Instead of a company with maybe three brands investing money and time in a business system, managing inventory and logistics, and investing in a marketing department, we have everything centralized for all the brands that are part of Ashe to use. Then we work brand-specifically with Nordic brand managers who really know their category in depth, know their customers and understand the user. They, in turn, get help from the central marketing department to organize events. But our customers want to have a relationship and do business with physical people. I think that applies to all retail today.
What is Ashe’s turnover today?
We had a turnover of just over SEK 400 million (€35m) last year, and we can add that we are coming from two tough years. All five companies that makeup Ashe are profitable, so this is by no means a rescue operation. We believe in a turnaround for the sports industry in the near future and are investing for the future.
Growth plans
What’s the growth plan for the company?
We have a billion-kronor (about €90m) turnover target for Ashe that we intend to try to reach in a couple of years. We are optimistic and have a plan to create long-term profitable growth. But to reach one billion, we will need to invest a lot in the coming years. These investments will partly consist of cloud-based ERP systems for warehousing and business intelligence. We will also hire more employees. For example, we need more traveling salespeople in Ashe. The investments are about both heart and brain. Where we can be both big and close. If you manage to strike that balance, it will be a profitable company in the long term.
What does the international plan look like?
We are a Nordic company with sales teams in all countries. For some brands, such as NIke, we handle distribution for specific parts throughout the Nordic region. For others, like Babolat, we only do it in Sweden. The opportunity and desire of several of our brands is for us to become their Nordic partner. This is the development we see in many industries today, where the Nordic region is treated as a market – both from a streamlining and a deepening perspective. A larger, Nordic player can simply be more sophisticated and offer more and better services. We won’t necessarily do everything for everyone, but that trend obviously means a lot of growth potential for us.
Why the name Ashe, since it comes from one of the iconic tennis players of the ’70s?
”We first had several name suggestions on the table, because many internally wanted something with “Norden”, “group” and “sport” in the name. However, the strategy for Ashe is about creating a community between brands, customers and users – being a modern and more sophisticated brand partner. That’s when Ashe seemed to make sense, and I think it works better. Also, many of us in the company like to play tennis. Many of us are active, and we like what we do – sports products.
