Just a few days after its agreement to outfit Olympique de Marseille from July 2018, Puma announced a new partnership with Borussia Mönchengladbach, to become its official technical supplier from the same season.
The company will supply the licensed team as well as the club's youth teams with jerseys, training apparel and accessories. The partnership further allows Puma to be Gladbach's official partner for replica jerseys and merchandise ranges.
Mönchengladbach is currently donning shirts supplied by Kappa, but Puma previously outfitted the team from 1976 until 1992. The players were wearing wild cats when they achieved their most prolific run in the seventies, winning the German championships five times, as well as one German Cup and two Uefa Cups.
Puma has been ramping up investments in football marketing in recent years, as part of the Forever Faster strategy. It was already active in the Bundesliga with Borussia Dortmund, in which Puma acquired a minority stake. It went on to add partnerships with Arsenal FC, at a reported cost of about £30 million (€35.4m-$37.6m) per year, as well as Olympique de Marseille, for which L'Equipe reported that Puma is paying €15 million per year. That puts the cost way below some of the latest endorsement deals in European football, but associates Puma with popular teams that have a rich history.
Matthias Baümer, Puma's general manager for the German-speaking countries, shared an update on the brand's progress in this market at another press briefing. The new partnership was announced at a joint press conference in Mönchengladbach last week with the team's leadership and Matthias Baümer, who is in charge of German-speaking countries at Puma. As reported by SAZ, Baümer said that Puma's regional sales increased by 18.8 percent last year, with a jump of 21.3 percent for footwear, 15.3 percent for apparel and 25 percent for accessories. Orders for the upcoming fall/winter season in the German-speaking countries are reportedly up by more than 60 percent.
Puma emphasized that the expansion was driven by sales through its retail partners and that it wasn't driven by the growth of own stationary and online retail sales. Some German retailers are apparently unimpressed by the Adidas Group's target to quadruple its online sales to the level of €4 billion by 2022.
