Margit Gosau, CEO of Sport 2000 International and Managing Director of the now seven-country alliance Sport 2000 GmbH, was perhaps giving us a taste of things to come in our C-Suite interview with her last month: “There’s a small renaissance of classic sports retail,” she said at the time. “The small retailers in particular have proven to be very resilient. They often own the real estate, they can scale their costs better than the big flagship stores, and that’s why they’re often a little bit more flexible. Large retailers can’t suddenly scale back their business if consumers buy less. When warehouses and stores are full, they tie up a lot of capital.”
The talk that Gosau took part in at this year’s ISPO Munich was in fact titled “The Renaissance of Retail,” and next to her onstage was Christoph Bründl, CEO of the small retailer Bründl Sports.
Gosau had calming words for retail overall. Things had stabilized internationally, especially by comparison with last year, she said, but the market per se was not her focus.
Sport 2000 has been transforming itself from buying group to provider of retail services. Rather than build coalitions to get better terms from wholesalers, the company now seeks to serve its retailers as a kind of consultancy, helping them to specialize, invest in e-commerce and indulge the customer. Product and multi-category retail are no longer central to its business – although, as we have reported, the expressly multi-category Sport 2000 Nordhorn opened in July, followed by two Sport 2000 International “Home of Expert” stores in Belgium and Germany.
Typical of this new approach is Sport 2000’s Absolute store concept, whose name – no accident – is meant to convey purity of category. The concept has two “areas”: community building and sales – and the order in which she listed these seems itself to be no accident.
Thus an Absolute Run store will have lockers and showers, enabling members of its run club to set out from the store on club runs and later emerge clean and fresh.
Also present at the talk and recommending this kind of investment was Eoin Comerford, former CEO of Moosejaw, which Dick’s Sporting Goods acquired from Walmart last year and has since folded into the outdoor retailer Public Lands.
Comerford had opened the talk by ascribing the dominance of Dick’s Sporting Goods in the US to investment in retail, which draws in customers but also, and more importantly, draws in brands. Academy Sports, which has not so invested, is falling behind, he said.
Roger Hurmi, a specialist in consumer behavior, chimed in to say that the ecosystem needs to change. The sporting goods industry must make buying as easy as possible for the customer, he said. It must realign retail to match consumer behavior, customer motivation. Customers choose what is easiest and in their self-interest. Some will join Patagonia in its quest to save the world, but more will make their purchases to achieve a sense of belonging, to go along with their friends.
“Everybody will never be a customer,” Hurni continued. Retailers must abandon the idea that they can sell to all comers. Instead, they should look for the greatest propensities among their customers and give them the easiest time accordingly. But “easiest is not cheapest; it never is.”
Hurmi seemed an odd man out at ISPO Munich. His words ran against what many others were urging at the show – namely, that the sporting goods industry seek to change consumer behavior, in one way or another.
The ISPO talk on mobility, for instance, was about persuasion: namely, how to persuade the public to commit to a minimal regimen of exercise as defined by the World Health Organization (WHO). Day two’s talk On Running was about the same thing. Louise Walther, a neuro-athletic trainer in Germany, spoke of how unpersuasive it is to get people to run with talk of running. In her view, the way to get them running – that is, to change their behavior – is to reframe the sport.
Hurmi, by contrast, seemed to suggest that retailers accept customers the way they are. Retailers should find out what customers want and then deliver it, and do so in ways the customers themselves consider inviting. No persuasion needed.
Christoph Bründl seemed to agree, although taking the retailer’s perspective. By comparison with any other company at ISPO, Bründl Sports is living in the past. The closest it comes to e-commerce is click & reserve. Want one of its products? You’ll have to visit one of its stores, where it can deliver what its CEO called “magic moments and emotion,” which the very geographic setting of the store can influence.
Online sales, Bründl said, are a matter of famous brands along with price and logistics – things you adjust, often in the short term, for profit. Family-owned Bründl Sports was focused instead on generational business and relations between human beings. It put a premium on candor and openness. You face the truth and muster the courage to say it out loud.
To that end, Bründl’s version of investment in retail is the training of the front man, the clerk who walks the salesfloor, because this is who the Bründl Sports customer deals with.
Perhaps Hurni summed things up best. Retail, he said, should shift its focus away from the buying and selling – away from transaction. Every other kind of dealing, it seems, is more important to the business.
