you know that feeling you get when you hear a song you like for the first time that feeling you spark something in you right and it could be art or a Sports Clip you get all excited you want to know more about it and you know exactly who you want to share this with that is what culture is about to me that feeling of wanting to know more and sharing it with someone there's no logical explanation to why I would fall in love with basketball even less logic why I would follow up with the subcultures
connected to basketball like hip-hop or sneakers I grew up in a small town south of Stockholm called tungusta there's nothing in my environment that is even remotely connected to subcultures like hip-hop or culture around basketball there's no basketball on TV there's no basketball in magazines and they did not play hip-hop on the radio but that's the power of a subculture just finds you and I get it as a skinny white kid in Sweden I get a very romanticized image of hip-hop as it finds me in the late 80s but that's also within the power of
a subculture fueled by The Passion of those who are creating it it continues to develop and grow outside of its origin regardless of how the purest and The Originators might feel about that as a teenager in Sweden in the 90s I was all in on hip-hop couldn't really rap though couldn't dance either I was a decent basketball player but I didn't have the confidence or self-belief at age around 14 I had made it into uh Inner City team in Stockholm one of the best teams in the country in my age group these kids were so
much cooler than me they had like cable TV with MTV and subway trains and High Acres and forests and horses that's my neighbors so when I got my first Jordans it gave me confidence you could almost see how cool I think I am in these shoes despite being all dorky and dunking on low rims I don't know if the shoes actually made me play better but they gave me a sense of belonging and with that confidence in me I actually believe I did become a better basketball player so when people ask me why sneakers that's
the main reason sneakers gave me a sense of belonging so to be close to sneakers I started working in sporting goods stores for a few years before I asked my friend Peter that I worked with if he wanted to join me to start our own company we wanted to sell athletic footwear based on looks rather than function you know sneakers in retrospect I wanted to do more than just sell sneakers I wanted to be part of these cultures that sneakers was part of like basketball and music for me it was mostly about hip-hop but there
was different types of sneaking needs for different types of music like rockers coming in for the converse All-Stars and B boys coming in for the Puma Clydes so sneakers became my ticket into these cultures and together with like-minded others that I share this passion with we built a hundred million dollar business out of it and I'm proud of that not the financial result per se because I always care more about what makes the result than the actual result but the result means that we reached a lot of people all around the world that's mind-blowing to
me a few months ago I stopped working at the company we started in 99. we took that further than my wildest teenage dreams could ever have imagined and now it's time to let somebody else push that forward as I was stepping away it gave me some time to reflect over why and how it worked for us it worked because we all want to belong to something everyone we want to be part of something like a family a group of friends our community and we are we're usually part of many things many families or well many
many group of friends and anyway it's in our nature we want to be part of something bigger than ourselves because it gives us a purpose each group in each Community have different cultures and the bigger the group The fewer but stronger ground rules there are to follow like in Sweden you kind of have to celebrate Midsummer Sea by dancing around a pole and eat pickled herring it's what we do it's in our culture everyone's doing it then you have variations of culture or a response to culture or an evolution subcultures like hip-hop hip-hop is a
response to existing music a group of young kids from the black and brown communities in the Bronx they took an existing music and looped it Blended and pushed it forward to make it their own these kids are now old some of them might be grumpy talking about our subculture is so much better than this generation's subculture I don't know I just think they're different but the point is that subcultures always keep on evolving as the Next Generation continues to chop it up and blend it and loop it to make it theirs so if you're building
your brand or on a subculture as we did you have to be on your toes and keep with the movement otherwise you'll get outdated you have to stay in front of the way to catch it right building your brand around a subculture might be even more important today as we're eager to follow individuals more than big corporations and that behavior is not even that new when Nike tried to sell basketball shoes to the world in the late 70s and 80s didn't really work that well Nike almost went out of business but when Michael Jordan asked
the basketball Community by his shoes everyone responded and ended up fueling basketball culture even beyond the sport of basketball not to mention it actually saved Nike and don't mistake this for just marketing Nike has Global Sports hour where they encourage all their employees to do Sports all around the world and if you go to their world eight headquarters in Portland you will find soccer fields and basketball courts and running tracks all over the place because that's the culture that Nike built their world around they're not just selling product to the people they want people to
be part of their culture and they know they have to be about it to talk about it being part of something bigger than your brand is far more powerful than any marketing so if you're someone within a bigger culture builds brand awareness and credibility and today in this era in a world where immediate data points are just infinite we sometimes get caught up in short-term transactional marketing within the past five ten years as social media and inferences have become a thing it's quite natural that you will move towards the short-term transactional marketing and focus Less
on the long-term brand building but here's the irony the lower the brand awareness you have the more you have to spend on your transactional and short-term marketing so the less time you engage with your community in organic ways the more you actually have to pay them to come see you rather than the other way around we build our brand and our business around product of course it wouldn't be a sneaky store without Sneakers but today there's a sneaker store almost around every corner in every major city but we built our brand around a subculture much
larger than the product that we sold so we focus on throwing the best parties having the best events telling the best stories in every city we decided to take on and we invited the community to take part of that see the the general idea is to create moments within our world that are so engaging that it makes people want to share that within the community you know you want to give them that feeling you want to spark something in them right we even have a nightclub in the basement of our New York store in a
restaurant next to our Tokyo store because that's where subcultures are defined it's in the music we listen to and the food we eat and the art we enjoy the way we dress like what sneakers we wear that's a way of showing what subculture you're a part of it's like merchandise from a concert you're not buying a Kendrick Lamar hoodie because it's the best fit or the best quality you're buying it to show everyone that you were there you're part of this movement there's a ton of other things to keep your eye on when you run
a business of course like cash flow and well cash flow is pretty much it actually but you also have to make sure that you have a Clear Vision to make sure that everybody that works with you understands where you're going for this establishing what subculture your brand is about makes it easier for everyone to understand what your vision is and what your community is about and as your brand starts to grow it's also a good idea to be clear about what your brand is about what subcultures you're connected to as you start to hire people
in the beginning it's likely you will hire from within the culture because that's how it works you will get from A to B much faster if you work with like-minded people but if you want to go beyond B if you want to go to c and d and even further you're going to need more people with different backgrounds and different experiences you won't get past B if you don't have diversity in your teams around you it's like playing a basketball games with a team of seven foot centers looks good on paper but you're going to
need point guards in shooting guards as well you won't win otherwise so when you do start to hire from outside of the culture it is important that you establish what subculture your brand is about internally as well externally just like Nike building their brand around Sports culture or like Ben and Jerry's when you look at their website they list their board of directors and each Board of director have listed their non-profitable organization or a social or environmental cause they're part of they even have a position called head of global activism and they sell ice cream
but their brand is about something bigger than ice cream and that has to run through the entire organization can't just be a front the community would see right through that so you got to stay real and you got to keep it honest just like Ben and Jerry's you have to get involved and get back and give back to the community of your subculture it's your community that might be the most important thing about building a brand around a subculture I'm not talking about sending a check somewhere I'm talking about actually being there supporting it listening
to it we have this billboard above our store in New York and running up to Election Day in 2020 there was a lot of Engagement in our community about getting everybody to vote so we teamed up with the organization when we all vote and asked a true New York artist kunley Martins to paint this message over our billboard you can't take part of a community without being part of a community you got to support it and if you want to be a leader within your community you also need to enable others within it if you
help your community grow you'll grow with it as young kids when we started we had the upper hand because we know more about the subculture than the grown-ups so as we grow up we kind of have to put on the Next Generation so we hire young photographers young stylists designers and put them on our platforms like this example working with workers from his brand Johnny to repurpose the SNS apparel and create a beautiful and authentic campaign with it by getting the Next Generation involved they will continue to shop it up and loop it and blend
it to make the subculture theirs and that's the only way you can actually make them feel like they belong you can't just be about selling stuff to them because being a brand is like being a person if you want to be part of something you need to bring something to the table I grew up playing basketball and in the Summers there's this outdoor court right around the corner from when we open up our store and set them on that became a meeting point for me and my friends and I also made a lot of new
friends there over the Summers over the shared passion for basketball a couple of years ago we had the opportunity to work with Stockholm City to renovate that court and make it a meeting point again and we celebrated it by arranging a classic three on three tournament it was really moving for me to see the next generation of Ballers come with the same fire and engagement intensity as I had when I used to play that chord 20 30 years ago and that is what marketing and brand building is all about it's about connecting with people by
creating emotions you want to make people feel something the emotional connection people have with their subculture is really really powerful so if you can bond with your community or with that shared passion that's a strong emotional connection that will Outlast any hype sneaky rope I was just a kid when we started our company that was probably a good thing I had a strong urge of trying to belong to something called it a sneaker culture hip-hop culture basketball culture maybe all of them I wanted to do more than just consume product I didn't know how to
run a business I never went to business school I needed my friend Peter who I started this with but our passion and our drive to belong to something took us all around the world for us it was not just marketing we wanted to build our brand around bigger things than us we engaged our community and we involved them we had a Clear Vision it was clear what subculture our brand was about internally as well as externally and that kept us real kept us honest we supported our community so we grew when our community grew because
to us our brand was like a person and that person made a community feel something I started as a fan to let these subcultures Define who I was I'm still a fan I still play basketball I still listen to hip-hop both the old version I grew up with and the new because I'm still curious about what comes next I still buy way too many sneakers and they still make me feel like I belong to something I'll be forever connected to this community and I'm super excited to see the culture continue to push things forward thank
you [Applause]
