Sporting Goods Industry
The global sports and fitness clothing industry is highly fragmented, with many brands competing, from basic discount brands to high-end fashion names. Even well-established brands have to work hard to maintain their share of the market. Consumers are demanding more versatile wear with wider functionality, which means retailers continue producing new styles of sports apparel for men and women. In some instances, sports apparel companies, like Adidas and Puma, have begun collaborating with fashion designers in order to produce new styles which will broaden their product lines.
Puma has a long-term mission of becoming the most desirable sport lifestyle company in the world. Describing themselves as the 'blue mountains', Puma has been trying to incorporate more edge, creativity and uniqueness to their designs which is evident with their collaborations with designer fashion names such as Sergio Rossi and Alexander McQueen.
Adidas is on the move and always has been. It has had an adventurous history since it first grew out of a family business in Herzogenaurach, Germany in the 1920s. With the hostile separation of two brothers’ interests in the 1940s, nearly going bust in the 1980s and then executing two rescue operations, first by sending production offshore to Asia and then by reinventing itself into a design and marketing company.
Adidas AG is the largest sportswear manufacturer in Europe and the second largest in the world. The company employed approximately 53,731 people worldwide in 2014. The Adidas Group's global net sales amounted to about 14.53 billion euros in 2014. In that year as well, the North American region of the adidas Group generated 19 percent of the company's retail net sales.