With sports-inspired lifestyle shoes and clothing enjoying a boom all over the world, the well-known Italian brand of sneakers is developing further its new Superga Sport line by investing in sponsorships with former tennis stars. After the rather successful launch of a new line of Superga shoes co-branded with Adriano Panatta earlier this year, it will come out next year with a line of Ivan Lendl shoes.
Born in Rome in 1950, Panatta achieved international notoriety in the 1970s as the only player to have defeated Björn Borg at the French Tennis Open, which he subsequently won in 1976. Superga Sport's new line of Panatta shoes was first shown at the Pitti Uomo fair in Florence last June. In the same month, a limited edition of 100 pairs sold out quickly at an exclusive promotion at the BHV department store in Paris.
Born in the Czech Republic in 1960, Lendl won the French Open, the Australian Open and the U.S. Open in the 1980s. He failed in the Wimbledon tournament, but acting as Andy Murray's coach, he helped him to win the English contest this summer. Superga's new Ivan Lendl line will only be marketed in Europe in the second part of 2017, but its licensees in the Southern Hemisphere have already started to take orders for it.
The new collection of Superga Sport shoes is more technical than its classical sneakers, but is not intended for use playing tennis or other sports, although the brand's origins are connected with sport, like those of Converse and others. The line features the distinctive swallow tail logo that Superga used in the 1970s for the vulcanized sports shoes that it sold widely at the time for volleyball, basketball, football and other sports.
Big sports brands like Adidas, Nike, Puma or Asics, which we cover through our European edition of the Sporting Goods Intelligence newsletter, have successfully addressed the casual footwear market lately with re-editions of old sneakers like the Stan Smith. In the third quarter of this year, the Adidas Originals segment of the Adidas brand recorded a sales' increase of 41 percent.
Besides the heritage factor and the rapidly growing sales of sneakers by major sports brands, one of the reasons for Superga's association with well-known male tennis players is an effort to address the male customer more forcibly. Most of Superga's collaborations with fashion models and other celebrities have been with women, which have been the brand's main target group. About 80 percent of its followers on Instagram are women between the ages of 18 and 35, but a recently release men's style in suede has triggered strong orders.
The Panatta Sport initiative is also meant to further diversify the range, where 75 percent of the volume sold consists of many different variations on the theme of Superga's iconic 2750 model. As more than two-thirds of the orders have been concentrated on 16 styles, the new management of the brand has decided to reduce the number of SKUs.
Superga's new initiative crowns a strong progress of the brand in the fashion casual segment of the footwear market, which is rising faster than the comfort casual, athletic and rugged outdoor segments, as our most recent market surveys have shown (see Shoe Intelligence vol. 18, N° 18+19 of Oct. 7, 2016).
Along with Skechers, Superga has been the fastest-growing brand in the fashion casual segment of the market. In the seven years since its takeover by BasicNet, its annual direct sales and those of a growing list of licensees around the world have risen from nearly nothing to the equivalent of more than $130 million in the past year.
Superga, its licensees and their franchisees are currently running 174 single-brand stores around the world, 70 of which are located in Italy. About 15 new openings are in the pipeline.
Superga's aggregate sales – made directly and through its licensees – were down slightly in the first nine months of this year and will end up more or less flat in 2016 because of a major clean-up of the distribution, especially in Italy. Lower sales of Superga shoes have been recorded in countries that have undergone serious political or economic turmoil such as Turkey. The slowdown of consumption in China and a change of licensee in India have also affected the brand's performance.
However, in the first nine months of this year, the brand recorded a 28 percent increase in the U.S. where Steve Madden is its licensee. Superga also enjoyed strong double-digit growth in markets such as France, Germany, the Nordic and Benelux countries, Argentina, Chile, Vietnam and Singapore. Besides Italy, the biggest markets for the brand are now the U.S., the U.K. and Singapore.
Evidently, the Superga brand has also reached a certain stage of maturity. The management of BasicNet is projecting a slower compound annual growth rate of between 6 and 7 percent for the brand in the next three years, taking it up to a level of between $140 million and $150 million.
BasicNet has appointed Stefania Spinelli, a 10-year veteran of the Italian group, as product manager for the brand. She previously ran the group's Basic Italia subsidiary, which handles direct distribution of all its brands, including Kappa, Robe de Kappa and K-Way.
Some of Superga's success can be attributed to BasicNet's rather sophisticated licensing-based business model, which has been subsequently imitated by the likes of Iconix Brands Group, Sequential Brands or the Global Brands Group.
The licensing strategy is being adopted in a big way by another U.S. company, Cherokee Global Brands, which has bought the Hi-Tec brand of sports shoes and is now licensing it out to other companies such as the Batra Group for some European countries and Carolina Footwear for the U.S. More on this in SGI Europe.
Along with the development of a network of single-brand stores, the Italian heritage of the brand and its association with celebrities and special events have also played a strong role in the success of Superga.
