Activewear brand Skins is back under new ownership, after filing for bankruptcy last year. In 2018, former chairman Jaimie Fuller chronicled the rise of the brand for ragtrader.com.au. Here's a look back at that story.
I bought into SKINS about 16 years ago not because I wanted necessarily to make sports compression equipment, but because I wanted to get into sport.
My first business was in printing – something the family was involved with before me – and I dabbled in property, but neither sectors were something I could feel really engaged in. So I set about selling my business interests and wondered what else I could do.
Like almost every other Aussie kid, I would have preferred to be a sportsman, cutting a swathe through the England bowling attack – my number one preference – or even a fly-half for the Wallabies, but that was never going to happen. Instead, on the back of my love for sport and my favourite recreational pursuit of skiing, which my wife and I have long enjoyed, I did the next best thing. I bought a sports compression wear company.
It was a company not only making something that was innovative, bold and ambitious – garments that would improve sports performance and aid recovery – but it was something I could actually use and, best of all, it was my entrée into the sports industry.
More to the point, SKINS needed me, because it was also going broke.
SKINS was a genuine pace-setter. We led the creation and manufacture of sports compression wear. Professional athletes soon discovered it; amateur athletes did too; the company enjoyed rapid growth. Today, we continue to pride ourselves on continuing to lead the sports performance category.
Three years after buying into it, I was able to take majority control of the company – which led to my first mistake.
We started to become more active with advertising and promotional campaigns, and we ran a campaign which said: ‘We don’t pay sports stars to wear our product. They pay us.’
Sales-wise, it worked a treat! At the time the campaign was conceived and first run, the proposition was true.
However, at the same time, with our rapid expansion and brand development, we also started to enter into some agreements to sponsor athletes. It was almost a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand was doing – but it was no excuse for me, as the head of the company, and it certainly wasn’t something the ACCC was happy about.
The next mistake I made was to take the advice of the lawyers – sorry if there are any lawyers reading this – and I convinced myself that we were in the right.
They told me I could fight it because the campaign was based on truth when it ran the first time. What they didn’t tell me is that argument would not wash because when we ran it again 12 months later, it was technically wrong.
The fact is, I should have just put my hand up with a giant mea culpa and apologised. That might have cost me $50,000 at most. Instead, it ended up costing me well over $1 million by the time you include the fine from the ACCC, the lawyers’ ever-burgeoning fees and compensation to my private equity partners.
During this legal bunfight and before the global financial crisis (GFC) hit in 2008, I sold a portion of SKINS to a private equity firm. Big mistake.
It’s one that we’re still unraveling from. In 2011 I had to get out of the private equity arrangement. We borrowed heavily to do so, and with the help of a Japanese partner, we managed to buy out the private equity shareholders.
It was – and is – an expensive lesson, but one that has been – and is – worthwhile.
The point of recounting this with you is simply to say, we make mistakes. As individuals and as businesses. But it’s also part of business to take risks and take the initiative.
Without those two things – risk and initiative – you may as well not bother being in business.
But for every mistake comes the risks and initiatives that work and work well, and have given us a significant return on investment.
The first such move was to take SKINS global. Our product, and the technology behind it, was something that was globally relevant and I thought it would be good to become more than an Australian brand with some international sales. I wanted to be a global brand that was born in Australia, which is what we have become.
It was a bold move to take our global HQ to smack, bang in the middle of Europe where we’re exposed to a variety of culture and influences which help our brand, our technical product team, our creative team and the way we work. Our staff are also from a variety of cultures and influences, and that is evident in how we’ve developed organically.
But with all that, I still wanted to do something valuable, something where my efforts and my activity could help make a difference. I didn’t need to look too much further than the sports industry, which was the reason behind buying SKINS in the first place.
I am passionate about sport. I am a big consumer of it, regardless of who plays it or where it’s played. I believe that, next to music, it’s one of the few cultural pursuits in life that is intergenerational and which helps people come together in celebration.
So while we were busy dealing with these business mistakes, we also set about defining and refining our brand based on our values, and not on our product. That is not to say our product is not vitally important to our brand, but our values are what we stand for in every part of the business.
We settled on: fuelling the true spirit of competition.
What we love about sport is the sense of integrity, determination, competitiveness and fair play that comes from a proverbial level playing field. While there are rules and laws and regulations and referees to more or less deal with the issues on-the-field, the more I learned about sport, and was drawn into its issues, the more I realised it was a complete and utter – and, in many instances, corrupt – mess in terms of its governance and administration. Whether it be world cycling, world athletics, the Olympic movement, world football or world cricket.
This is how SKINS and I have got into movements, PR stunts and long-run campaigns to draw attention to, and help change, sport.
It started with the long-standing allegations around Lance Armstrong and world cycling’s failure. We turned to football and called out FIFA long before the famous FIFA arrests in Zurich in 2015. We’ve called out FIFA’s sponsors for supporting corrupt business practices and unsafe and deadly labour and human rights for workers building the infrastructure for Qatar 2022.
We’ve lobbied the world cricket body for a fairer and more equitable distribution of cricket revenues. We’ve called out Cricket Australia for their role in creating the toxic culture that resulted in the ball tampering scandal that has impacted Aussie cricket and cricketers’ reputation all around the world. And we highlighted how the Pacific nations in rugby have been shortchanged, who not only see their talented players ‘poached’ by other countries, but also miss out on their share of global revenue.
There has been more, and there will continue to be more also.
I want SKINS to stand for making a difference by improving the world of sport because sport doesn’t just define us, it exposes us. Good and bad. Like everything in our world, the ‘good’ doesn’t just happen by itself.
It needs to be nurtured and that’s what I intend to keep doing because it’s the right thing to do – and it’s good for business.