Herbert Hainer on Adidas's Reebok Marathon
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The U.S. was always a challenging market for us. When we took over Reebok in 2006, we saw it as a way to expand here. I felt we could position Reebok as a premium American fitness and training brand and use it to build our market share. I was confident in our plan for how we would make Reebok succeed.
But there were surprises. We had to do much more cleanup work than we thought. Reebok was over-distributed: We didn't want to be in places like Wal-Mart (WMT) or Tesco anymore. About 30 percent of the revenue was at price levels of $39 and below. You earn neither image nor money with those prices.