Sebastien Willefert

Sebastien Willefert is a marketing, commercial and brand strategist with over two decades of experience in the global sporting goods, outdoor and lifestyle industries. He has held senior roles at Berghaus, where he accelerated European sales, at Lafuma, where he led organisational transformation, and at Mavic, where he headed a business unit with a mandate to reposition the brand as a global, premium, softgoods challenger. He holds an Executive MBA from IMD Business School in Lausanne.

Throughout his career, Sebastien has developed a distinctive perspective on brand and business growth — one that combines quantitative rigour in decision-making with a deep conviction that community is not merely an audience, but a strategic lever. He has since extended that approach through consulting and interim mandates with start-ups and scale-ups across sport, fashion and mobility, and has lectured in international business management at SAWI Lausanne and HEG Geneva.

Based in Swiss Romande, Sebastien brings in his column for Sporting Goods Intelligence Europe an operator's eye to the industry's most pressing strategic questions, distilling them into digestible, actionable answers for his column: The Playbook.