Business

Saturday November 7, 2009

Up Close and Personal

By M. HAFIDZ MAHPAR


The founder and president of Italy’s largest footwear brand, Geox SpA, shares about his true calling – designing and marketing shoes.

MARIO Moretti Polegato grew up in a family that had been in the wine business for three generations. He even studied wine technology at the University of Ferrara in Italy.

Today, while the 57-year-old Italian still lives in the small village of Crocetta del Montello where the wine business is headquartered, he has veered far from the family business.

Polegato’s true calling, as it turned out, is designing and marketing shoes.

He is the founder, president and biggest shareholder of Geox S.p.A, Italy’s largest footwear brand and the world’s second largest footwear brand in the lifestyle casual leather shoe category.

The family wine business is now overseen by younger brother Giancarlo.

Polegato, explaining his career change, tells StarBizWeek: “There is a French expression: Life is life. It’s impossible to know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Everybody doesn’t know his destiny.”

He was in Kuala Lumpur recently to speak at the Forbes Global CEO Conference in KL and to launch Geox 2009/2010 Autumn/Winter collection at the Bankers Club.

The seed of Polegato’s career change was sown in, of all places, the Nevada desert – an environment that contrasts sharply from the Alpine foothills of his birthplace.

The story goes that one day in the 1990s, after he finished promoting his family wine at an exhibition in Reno (not far from Las Vegas), he went for a walk in the desert. To soothe his overheated feet, he used his Swiss knife to cut holes in his sneakers’ rubber soles. That was his eureka moment.

“Later, when I came back to Italy, I introduced a new (shoe) technology. I utilised a special material that we call the membrane, which is water-proof and breathable at the same time because it is made with millions of micro-pores,” Polegato says.

“These pores are smaller than a drop of water. The vapour from our skin is 700 times smaller than a drop of water. So perspiration goes out through the pores but water (from outside) won’t come in.”

Polegato had created the world’s first breathable rubber-soled shoes.

Immediately he patented the technology in Italy, and today he has patented it in other countries as well, covering Europe, Asia and America.

Not everyone shared Polegato’s enthusiasm, however. “I offered this technology to the large footwear companies in Italy, Germany and America, but incredibly, nobody believed in me.”

In the end he decided to produce the shoes himself in Italy.

He spent three years to find a partner and set up Geox in 1995.

Explaining the name, he says Geo is Greek for earth, “because when you’re walking, the best walk is when you walk barefoot – feet on the ground. X is a technology symbol.”

Polegato started Geox with just five employees, all from the Montebelluna area, which is about 7km from Crocetta del Montello.

The employees were assigned specific responsibilities, from marketing to production. Today, 14 years hence, Geox employs directly and indirectly 30,000 people (including those employed by companies contract manufacturing its products) and is listed on the Milan Stock Exchange.

Its net sales – at 892.5 million euros last year – has outstripped that of his family’s wine business.

Geox, which first ventured outside Italy in 2000, currently has about 1,000 Geox shops worldwide. Its products, which today also include a clothing range, are also sold at 10,000 independent multi-brand points of sale.

The brand entered the Malaysian market in 2005, and in the first eight months of this year, local sales grew 27%. The Geox stores are located in The Gardens (Mid Valley), Pavilion Kuala Lumpur and 1Utama. The company is waiting for space availability at Suria KLCC for its fourth single-brand store.

In addition, Geox shoes are sold at Isetan and Parkson.

For would-be entrepreneurs, Polegato offers this piece of advice: “The market is full of products in all categories – low, medium and high prices. What is necessary to do is to develop your business by creating a new product, creating an innovation in your product. Geox has been successful because we created a new technology. Our product is unique; we created a new segment in the shoe business.”

Geox shoes combine fashion and comfort. “It’s Italian style – the company is Italian and I’m Italian too, and a lot of people appreciate having Italian style in their shoes, cars (like Ferrari), clothing, etc,” he says. Its breathable feature, meanwhile, provides comfort.

“Entrepreneurs should invest more in innovation, collaborate more with universities, and invest more in young people, because this is the key to win against the competition in the future,” he says.

Polegato, who has taught on intellectual property in various universities, emphasises the importance of creativity. “An idea,” he states, “is worth more than a factory.”

Polegato believes that everyone can walk in his footsteps and be as successful.

“Everybody has the possibility to repeat my experience, my story, because everybody has a brain that can be utilised.”

Today Geox outsources 100% the production of its shoes, which are made in Italy and other countries.

“The shoes are of high quality because the design, technology and raw materials – the leather – are Italian. In the end, it’s Italian style,” Polegato says.

Geox, which previously focused on brown shoes (both formal and casual), branched out into sports footwear with the launch of its running shoes last year. This year it added a golf shoe range.

For the sports shoes, the company utilises a patented new technology called NET System. Much of the surface of the sole consists of a net which, when combined with the breathable and waterproof Geox membrane, increases the sole’s breathability and prevents external elements from penetrating inside the shoe.

Why did it take so long for Geox to enter the sports shoes market?

“The shoe business is very large,” he explains. “It’s impossible to enter every sector immediately because there’s a different mindset in every sector, a different ability. For example, Geox is now a family brand in fashion because Geox produces children’s shoes, men’s shoes, women’s shoes, elegant shoes, and golf shoes – our collection is very large. Now it’s a good time to complete our collection with the white shoes.”

Polegato’s goal is to make Geox one of the top brands in the world in every market segment.

“Now we’re in a leading position in many countries where we operate. For example, in Italy, for every 10 people, one to two use Geox. Last year, Italy’s population was about 57 million people and we sold 7 million pairs of shoes.

“Now we want to repeat the Italian experience in every country where we are in, including Malaysia,” he says.

Asked what he enjoys most about his work, Polegato says it is travelling, because it gives him the opportunity to get in contact with many different people and cultures.

Even when not working, he indulges in pastimes that take him places, such as motorbike riding – a hobby he developed when he was young. He would ride almost every weekend with his friends except during autumn and winter, when the weather turns too cold.

They may go on short trips to the beach or ride on the hills around Montebelluna. “When we have the chance to take more time off, we would go to Umbria or Liguria, where great landscapes can be found,” he says.

As a parting shot, I ask him whether he has any regrets for not continuing in his family’s wine business.

It is the question that gives him the longest pause. Polegato replies: “I like wines, I like my family. The wine business is different because it is more conservative. Shoes is more of an innovator business. In my mind, I’m an inventor. And the shoe business satisfies me.”

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