At SFIA’s 2022 Industry Leaders Summit in a session entitled, “The Secrets to Building a Disruptor Brand,” Wendy Yang, former president of Hoka One One, credited Hoka’s ability to break out in large part to the running brand’s hungry leadership team.
Yang joined Deckers in May 2015 as president of Teva and, a few months later, gained oversight over Hoka. Before joining Deckers, she was at New Balance with past roles including working at Timberland, Tommy Hilfiger and Reebok. She left Hoka at the beginning of this summer.
The brand generated about $75 million in annual sales when she joined Hoka. In the trailing 12 months ended June 30, Hoka broke the $1 billion barrier.
During the session, held earlier this week in Chicago, Yang said Hoka’s rapid growth was “certainly rooted in a very disruptive product first and foremost—this large, oversized, different-looking product when it first came on the scene.”
Hoka was founded in France in 2009 by Nicolas Mermoud and Jean-Luc Diard who previously worked for Salomon.
However, Yang noted that when she began leading the brand, sales “were beginning to plateau a bit, and a fair amount of business was being done off-price at a relatively low margin.”
The barefoot and minimalist trend was still happening, and Hoka’s product team began experimenting with “me-too type stuff.” Yang said she felt that carried risks against Hoka’s maximalist message.
“It happens, right?” Yang said. “You’re like, ‘Consumers like that. We need to do our version of that as well.’ So, the team was sort of a little bit all over the place.”
Yang said Hoka’s reach also wasn’t balanced, with 65 percent of products at that time sold to men and 35 percent to women. Geographically, Hoka’s awareness was low beyond Southern California, where triathletes had discovered the brand.
Early on, Yang brought in new leadership across product, marketing, sales, and operations to better position Hoka for growth. She said she believes Hoka’s revamped team benefited because many had “something to prove” after never having guided a major project in the past.
“They hadn’t yet had the big job for themselves,” said Yang. “They hadn’t yet been the ‘head of’ or the ‘vice president of’ or ‘the leader of.’ But from my experience in working with many of them, I felt strongly they had it in them, and they just hadn’t been given a shot at the big job yet.”
Yang added, “Hoka was a chance for us to come together and really collectively leverage the experiences that we each had across our respective careers lessons.” She added that the team brought “real discipline” to plotting Hoka’s growth. With many being former athletes, including not all runners, Hoka’s staff was also driven to compete, believes Yang.
“We set a high bar for ourselves and really from each other, and we did not want to let one another down. We wanted to follow through, do what we said and don’t wait to do tomorrow what you can do today. That’s sort of the attitude that we had, and that’s the culture that we developed across the brand,” said Yang.
Relatedly, Yang believes Hoka’s ability to develop a results-driven, consumer-informed but also brand-led culture has been instrumental to Hoka’s fast success. She elaborated, “I think that’s really important because the consumer wants to be led. So you listen to the consumer, be very consumer informed, but then be brand-led…It’s nuanced, but it’s quite important.”
Hoka further benefited by aligning the organization on brand values around achievement, authenticity, boldness, inclusivity, empowerment, and joy. “Those values are super important,” said Yang. “And it was super important that we instill those across all of our associates. It wasn’t just words on the page.”
Yang said that beyond catapulting Hoka’s growth, including a significant share in the run specialty channel, the brand has been able to shift to selling nearly all product at full price, and women now make up more than 50 percent of the brand’s buyers.
Yang said, “In a nutshell, we really prided ourselves in being bold, being smart and moving fast.”
Yang’s overall discussion focused on what it takes to drive “pro-ruption,” a phrase she defined as “a positive disruption focused on challenging the status quo and making an industry, and, importantly, consumers, stop and take notice.” She discussed what she learned in her career on how brands can disrupt.
Yang’s first stop in the industry was at Reebok as an associate product manager of the tennis category where she met Serena and Venus Williams in their early-teens before going pro. At the time, Reebok was on a roll and had briefly moved ahead of Nike in annual revenues. Yang credited Reebok’s success in the late eighties to then-CEO Paul Fireman, who she said, “brought a real boldness and sense of urgency to the culture of Reebok.” She also said Fireman followed the “there’s always room at the top” mantra, providing opportunities for his employees to succeed.
After Reebok, she went to Tommy Hilfiger, where the designer, at the time, was working closely in guiding the brand. Relating a story about Hilfiger’s obsession with finding the optimal shoe lace for his footwear launch, she learned about the importance of paying attention to detail. Yang said, “He had an intention to detail on product that was really sort of mind-boggling.”
At Timberland, she learned from then-CEO Jeffrey Swartz about the importance of values long before corporate values started being seen as a core leadership tool. Yang shared, “Disruptors aren’t afraid to forge a new path and often put focus time and energy on something that goes well beyond just the product or service.”
On New Balance, Yang noted that the Boston-based company has found success without the “deep, deep pockets of a public company.” She said, “The lesson I learned there really was definitely you have to work smarter, not harder, to find your whitespace, but it absolutely can be done.”
Some smaller brands she’s watching that she sees as disruptors in the sports and related lifestyle space include Cotopaxi, Kizik, Janji, Thousand, and Johnnie-O.
Yang noted that “taking on the status quo” and being disruptive can take on many forms. “There’s no silver bullet here, right? There’s no jazzy secret. It’s hard work,” she concluded.
Photo courtesy Hoka
