GNARLY FOOTING: Skate Shoe Maker Sole Counts $100M in Sales
By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO
Pierre Andr & #233; Senizergues is told to “relax” for a photo shoot.
No problem.
He does a handstand on his skateboard, then flips into the air, plants his feet on the deck and lands perfectly on the ground.
And that was just for practice.
Senizergues does the move again,this time starting with a one-arm handstand.
The photographer frantically clicks away trying to keep up with him. The 10-second stunt is a dazzler, especially since Senizergues retired from professional skateboarding years ago and is maneuvering in a cramped space in a footwear showroom at his Lake Forest-based Sole Technology Inc.
Sole is one of the hottest names in the action sports industry. The 13-year-old company started with one skateboarding shoe, Etnies, and now counts three others as well as apparel.
The company’s brands are & #233;S (an athletic shoe for skateboard shops), Emerica (an anti-fashion skateboarding shoe also for skateboard stores) and 32 (a snowboarding boot sold in action sport stores alongside Etnies).
Sole now counts $100 million in yearly sales, up from a million a year in the early 1990s, said Senizergues, the company’s chief executive. It started with two workers and now has more than 200, with plans to grow.
Sole is adding an 80,000-square-foot warehouse across the street from its main campus, which stands to bring its total square footage to around 150,000. The company does research and development, production, apparel storage and marketing in Lake Forest.
The challenge for Sole is striking a balance,staying cool with 12- to 24-year-old skate rats while meeting growth goals. It’s done this so far by giving kids a choice, according to Matt Pindroh, president of Liberty Board Shop in Brea.
Sole “lets people identify on their own with what category they want to fall into,” said Pindroh, who carries all of the company’s brands. “We see it all the time, where kids will come in and they won’t wear Etnies, but they’ll put on Emerica shoes. Little do they know it’s the same company.”
The strategy was sort of stumbled on by founder Senizergues, a humble and articulate France native who grew up skateboarding, but had no background in business or shoe development.
He graduated from the University of Paris with an engineering degree, and, at age 22 in the mid-1980s, took a “real” job with IBM Corp.
Not for long.
Lured by glossy American skate magazines, Senizergues said he dreamed of coming to the U.S. to skate. So, after two months with Big Blue, he earned enough money for a plane ticket and flew to Los Angeles for a vacation. The first night he stayed with some friends. The next day he went to Venice Beach to skate.
Twenty-four hours later his life changed.
Scouts from board maker Sims Skateboards and axle maker Tracker spotted him. They sponsored Senizergues and helped him turn pro.
“I assumed I’d be an engineer all my life,” he said. “It was like a dream to be a professional skateboarder and make a living traveling all around the world.”
Senizergues called his parents and IBM and told them of his plans.
“It was a bit nuts for sure,” he said. “Back in the day, it was hard to make a living skateboarding. Now it’s different because it has become so much more mainstream.”
In the late-1980s, Senizergues called his van home and said he was booted from a lot of parking lots.
“I had to go to contests and win to survive,” he said.
Senizergues won several world titles. Each contest, he took home $1,000 to $2,000, which was enough to get by on for a month.
Five years later, at around age 27, Senizergues began having some back problems and said he realized he couldn’t skate forever.
He eventually hooked up with some friends in France who were running a high-fashion shoe company called Rautureau Apple Shoes.
They were launching a skateboarding shoe line, Etnies, and first wanted to sponsor Senizergues. But that didn’t work with his plans at the time, he said.
Soon after, Senizer-gues proposed distributing Etnies in the U.S. in 1990. He licensed the brand and set up a small office in An-aheim. He used his contest winnings to fund the company and got small loans from France.
“I wanted to make better shoes for skateboarders,” Senizergues said. “A lot of companies were making shoes but not really from a professional skateboarder’s point of view. I was getting injured from wearing those shoes.”
At the time, he said, skate shoes had a “real basic outsole” and lacked support.
“I could see a big difference from those basic shoes and what the bigger companies like Nike and Reebok were doing,” he said. “I wanted to bring skateboarding shoe labels to the level of those other guys. Today, it’s really close. The technology is pretty similar.”
Etnies had a hard start. No one ever had heard of the brand. And skateshops were gun-shy about giving them a go.
“When I came into stores they knew me because I was in the magazines. But they looked at me as a skateboarder,” Sen-izergues said. “They were not looking at me as running a business.”
There were some glitches, too. The shoes were made in Asia (as they still are), and Senizergues said he had some delivery issues that eventually were ironed out.
Shoe designs were another story.
Skaters were buying high tops but wanted low cuts, which led Senizergues to take on designing himself,even though he had no experience.
One of his first: the Lo Cut, which still is sold by Etnies today. The shoe, launched in 1994, helped grow sales from $1 million to $8 million in a year.
“The Lo Cut ripped,” said Eric “EJ” John, who owns Laguna Surf & Sport stores and Quiksilver Boardriders Clubs.
Senizergues was gaining exposure. He branched into Etnies T-shirts, sweatshirts and hats. He launched & #233;S to serve a more athletic skate market, as Etnies was going more mainstream. He also introduced 32, the snowboarding boot.
But Sole hit another glitch around 1996, when Etnies’ French parent was bought by an American company that took back the Etnies U.S. license,only to fall flat on its face with the brand.
Six months later, Senizergues, who had replaced the Etnies name with Emerica, bought the Etnies brand, which was getting nibbles from the likes of Nike Inc. and Reebok International Ltd.
That same year Senizergues founded Sole and put all the labels under one umbrella. He also eventually bought the Etnies brand to Europe and Asia.
Retailer John said he likes how it all worked out.
“I like their model,” he said. “We’re not so tied to one specific brand of shoes. In my opinion, the public doesn’t make the connection between the three.”
Emerica is hot right now, John said, “especially with the hard core skaters.”
He said his stores are seeing “a little bit of a dip with the Etnies brand as they go a little bit more mainstream.”
Sole has gone from a handful of skate shops in California in the early 1990s to about 10,000 worldwide. It has gone from about 10 styles of Etnies to four brands and some 96 styles worn by teamriders in skateboarding, snowboarding, surfing, BMX and motocross. Last week, the company launched a New York showroom.
Competition is a big factor. Torrance-based DVS Shoe Co. is one of Sole’s main rivals. Oregon’s Savier, now part of Nike, may be a company to watch. And Santa Fe Springs-based Vans Inc. is an industry stalwart.
There’s always been a bigger “player than us,” Senizergues said. “You’ve got to play with your advantages.”
Sole can’t forget about its rivals, but “the biggest goal is to focus on their product and their brand,” said Tony Cherbak, a retail analyst in the consumer products group of Deloitte & Touche LLP’s Costa Mesa office.
“If they take care of their customers, that’s going to pay them dividends,” he said.
Skatepark Stink
For many outside of Orange County’s skateboard and cool set, their introduction to Etnies came by way of a stink raised in April when Sole Technology Inc. teamed with Lake Forest to build a skatepark near its headquarters.
The move bought critics out of the woodwork and became fodder for columnists in the county’s two daily newspapers.
Their beef?
The city owns the land near Lake Forest Drive and the Foothill (241) Transportation Corridor and is footing the bulk of the project’s $900,000 price tag.
Etnies is spending about $100,000 to design the skatepark and gets naming rights and permission to stage skateboard competitions and do filming on the property. The park is set to be called the Etnies Skatepark of Lake Forest, though the city is hoping to add other corporate sponsors and defray costs by selling Etnies T-shirts on its Web site and at City Hall.
Critics went wild. Lake Forest snapped up a raw deal in which public property is being sold off for corporate interests, they said.
“Commercialism gone gaga” is how University of Southern California marketing professor Michael Kamins put it in The Los Angeles Times.
Pierre Senizergues, Sole’s chief executive, doesn’t see it that way.
“I think it’s a shame,” he said of the coverage. “The story wasn’t told the way it happened.”
He contends his company’s interest in partnering with the city stems back years. When Sole was taking off and looking to relocate from Costa Mesa, Senizergues said he “decided to move to a new city that I felt was open to suggestions for the kids.”
“I figure now that I have the chance, I can give something back to the kids,” he said.
That was three years ago.
Senizergues said he went to City Hall “and I told them I had this idea to do a skatepark for kids that would be free.”
Growing up, Senizergues said he often wasn’t able to go to skate at parks in Europe because they were too expensive.
“I could bring my input as a skateboarder and use members of my company to build the best skatepark ever,” he said. “A lot of cities were building skateparks with people that didn’t know anything about skateboarding.”
Working with the city helps Sole skirt the liability issues,a stumbling block for skateparks.
City officials call the deal a good marriage. They contend the Etnies name gives the park instant credibility among the fickle teen set.
The city and Sole have been working together on the project, though sometimes, Senizergues says, they have differences.
“It’s like any partnership, you have to make it work,” he said.
,Jennifer Bellantonio
