The process is well-known in any business, but it has taken on major proportions in the sporting goods sector in the last few weeks, in preparation for the usual networking at a mammoth ISPO show. Women first: After 18 years of work for several major sports brands, Chrissy Dorn has announced the establishment of her own consultancy in Munich, placing her experience and her contacts at the service of companies that want to enter the European market or to improve their position in certain European countries.
Fluent in German, English and French, and with a knowledge of Italian and Spanish, Chrissy has started with a pan-European research assignment for Jetboil, an American supplier of camping cookers, and she has other contacts. She has set up her own website, www.chrissydorn.com, showing her in a challenging climbing posture.
Her last full-time job was with Mountain Hardwear, where she worked as European sales manager, based in Munich. She left this subsidiary of Columbia Sportswear a few months ago for personal reasons. Prior to that she worked in the hotel business in Germany and France and in the sporting goods and outdoor business in the UK and Germany, with stations at Patagonia, Timberland, Wild Roses and Puma.
Also in the Munich area, Dietmar Damith has become managing partner of Sport Invest Search Central Europe, a new executive recruitment company covering the German, Austrian and Swiss markets. It is associated with Sport Invest Search in France, the agency set up by another industry veteran, Andy Gugenheimer, in April 2006.
Damith, who is now 38 years old, spent the last six years on the executive board of Chiemsee, handling mainly sales, marketing and licensing. Through internal promotions, Andreas Mittag and Thomas Pietsch will take over responsibility for marketing and international sales, respectively, reporting to Chiemsee’s chief executive, Florian Steinberger.
Damith will continue as a consultant for Chiemsee in the area of licensing and for special projects. Before joining the German boardsports firm, he worked in marketing and sales at Mistral and at Champion USA.
Last but not least, Michael Plank’s recruitment agency in Munich, Sports-Contacts, has branched over into the Nordic countries through two Finnish executives who have worked for Exel. They are Mika Sulin and Aki Karihtala, and they are going to concentrate at first on the Finnish and Swedish markets.
Sulin has 25 years of experience in the sporting goods industry, including top jobs at Nike and Salomon. Named as Finland’s salesman of the year in 2004, Karhitala boasts 22 years of expertise, mainly at Exel.
The new Nordic operation will work together with Plank’s agency, which works on a platform of more than 2,000 distribution contacts in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Working together with ISPO, the agency launched a new internet portal in June 2007 that allowed Exel, Icon, Gordini, Swany and Mountain Hardwear to find new distribution partners. The site divides 9,000 contacts into five categories: industry (brands and other premium contacts), distributors, sales agencies, sport-specific media and sponsors and provides some retail reports in the countries covered. It can be found at www.sports-contacts.com.
