Name: SUCCESSION SPOTLIGHT: HOW TO PROPEL A FAN-FAVORITE BRAND INTO THE FUTURE
Uploaded: 2025-06-10
Duration: 13 min 52 s

Dan Sheridan’s career journey at Brooks Running has been both a marathon and a sprint. In his years as COO, he led the organization through the pandemic and seismic shifts in the athletic apparel market. Now, as CEO, the race is on as he navigates increased competition, a new and turbulent geopolitical landscape for trade, and the evolving expectations of today’s workforce. Sheridan will share tales from his journey from COO to CEO, and his unique playbook for what is required to propel Brooks to the level of growth that he envisions, while protecting the brand that passionate runners worldwide have come to expect. 

SUCCESSION SPOTLIGHT: HOW TO PROPEL A FAN-FAVORITE BRAND INTO THE FUTURE 

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So who here is a runner? How about a walker? There we go. You're in our addressable market. Well, we're gonna get, we're gonna get into that in a second. So Dan, thank you for joining us, uh, and giving me your time as both an interviewer and as a customer. You know I have a lot of points of view to share, um, but let's start with, uh, state of your business. Um, you had a very good 2024. There's also a big running boom going on. Can you just summarize really quickly for the audience where you want to take Brooks, which. is primarily known as a brand of running shoes for serious runners, and you've got some ambitions to expand the aperture. So just share that with us. Sure. Well, first off, thanks for having me and happy to be here. So if you don't know Brooks, we're a 110 year old company, the oldest American sporting goods company here in the US, and And we've been on a journey as a company over the probably the last 30 years to focus specifically on the sport of run and even more specifically performance run. So we focus on kind of the upper echelon in our category, higher price points and the like, and what we, what we've seen over that 30 year journey is it's all, all of our Our success is rooted first and foremost in the participation of health and wellness around the world, and you're probably seeing it in your communities. It is absolutely booming right now. I've been in the industry 27 years and never seen a running boom like we're seeing right now. Brooks sits right in the middle of that. We're the number one brand here in the US in performance run. And we are expanding globally and it really comes from an intense strategy that we kind of tag as sharp focus creates mass appeal. And so this pinnacle performance positioning has really opened us up. To anyone that moves, and that's why I say if you run, you walk, or you go to the gym, you're our customer. And so we've had incredible success. We've had about 15% compounded annual growth rate over a 24 year period. Um, rooted in that sharp focus, and we believe that we're kind of just getting started. We're 85% of our revenue comes out of the US, so the next chapter for us is global expansion and running's expanding globally right now. Yeah, and I think the the company overall is, which is part of Berkshire Hathaway, it's just north of $1 billion in sales, and you know some of your competitors are um. Uh, are a multiple of that, so obviously there, there's, there's some room for you, um, some of that involves international, some of that involves, uh, more lifestyle products, you know, New Balance should not have the monopoly on dad shoes, right? So, um, so I'll get back to that in a sec. So my, I guess my first question is, you know, you're primarily, um, until recently running shoes that are sold at running stores. Now you want to sell in more countries. You want to sell more products you want to sell more apparel, uh, and you have some designs on having more of your own well what what's in retail called direct to consumers, so your own website and more of your and some stores as well, that's gonna have implications on operations and you happen to be a former CEO, so you can tell us a little bit about uh how you're going to retool the company operationally for, you know, for so it can cast a much wider net and, and not get lost in it. Yeah, I mean, running is, um, it's unique in in this in this way. It's, it's a very local sport. Think about any sport, you have to either drive to a gym or a court or a or a field to go and do a certain ball or bats. For running, you step out of your house. And so we always think about how local running is around the world. We say that there's probably 10,000 communities around the world where running is, is, you know, um, having its day. And so what we try to do. I really build a multi-channel strategy and what that means is we want to assort our brand, sell our brand wherever the greatest retailers are that are focused on run, and that creates complexity at an operational level because we don't own the systems of these retailers. We don't own the distribution. networks, the transportation networks. So what we've had to do is build an operation that really taps in and has agility into all of these partners around the world, direct to consumers kind of our future in terms of developing that channel that will create complexity as well, but we've already done what I think is the hardest thing, which is servicing. Call it 10,000 retailers around the world through our operations network. So my new COO doesn't love it when I say that. The easy part's coming, but it truly is. And so we're trying to wire this thing where if runnings are sorted in a retail store, we want to be there and we want to service it in a really high service environment. So one of the things that's very difficult, I think people who are not in the consumer and retail space underestimate how difficult it is to Get into footwear or get into apparel, um. You know it's, it's, uh, all name names. I'm a reporter, but like Under Armour stumbled with its running shoes and you would think why, you know, they have all the resources there. You guys make very nice running clothes, um, but you're not a big player yet and so can you maybe just explain quickly to the audience why sometimes, you know, intuitively you think it shouldn't be so difficult for a company and yet it is difficult. Yeah, I mean the um. The biggest secret in building performance running footwear, specifically, I'll get to apparel in a second, is 500 people touch our products from the material vendor to when we put it in a box and ship it. To a, to a retailer. So just let that sit in. We, you know, we used to always talk about handcrafted Italian loafers. Handcrafted performance footwear is real. Um, it takes intention, it takes process, and, and one of the reasons there's so many hands in that. over the years labor was so cheap that you could, you could have that many people doing that. But what has happened over the time is that Southeast Asia has become the hub to build the best running shoes in the world. And so we've been able to tap into that. We have partners in Asia for 25 years now that are just fantastic. making performance running gear. We're on a journey in apparel. Um, you know the difference between footwear and apparel is if you're a runner, the footwear purchase is a considered purchase. You, you go through a fit cycle, you know exactly what you want, and every detail matters. In apparel, it's more of an emotional purchase that that brand on your. on your your sleeve or your pocket is an expression of yourself in some ways and so it's less of a considered purchase. It's also more commoditized. You can go to just about any retailer and get pretty good performance products. So we're on a journey there. We've got incredible products and apparel. It'll be the next chapter for Brooks. So you, um, just like, uh, uh, Scott from Chipotle before, uh, who was on stage before was the COO before becoming the CEO. You did the same, uh, trajectory. I think one of the things, you know, I covered retail for a very long time. I think there was a fad about 10 years ago as retailers and consumer brands really were worried about Amazon and our e-commerce isn't, uh, uh, infrastructure isn't isn't up to snuff. So there was a lot of CEOs who suddenly became CEOs in retail land. Whereas there used to be, you know, the, the merchants, the product people, you know, the people have that intuition. How what I'm getting at is what advice can you give to the prospective future CEOs here who are CEOs, uh, make sure that they have both sides of their brains, you know, the operational left side and the more intuitive that you might need in the consumer facing, um, you know, it's, it's, uh, you need both, right? Yeah, um, I use this, this saying with my team that, uh, head above the clouds, feet in the mud. And what I mean by that is, you know, at a COO level or a CEO level, you're, you're always focused on what we call horizon 2, kind of 3 years out. I think my job as CEO is if we, if we stumble in 3 years, that's on the CEO. And so I'm always trying to keep my head above the clouds and yet still base myself in reality and and securing the short term, which is, which is feet in the mud and And that transition from COO to CEO, you get, you get less of your feet dirty at times, and, and you're really trying to see above the clouds, you know, I had good advice from Berkshire Hathaway over the years and And when I moved into this role, one of the best advice I got was to understand your biases as you move into new roles, specifically in the CEO role. I grew up at Brooks 27 years there, had many different roles, so I have a lot of biases in what I think I know about each function. And as a CEO, I think you have to hold balance and equity in your frameworks and mental models so that you don't lean on maybe past experiences from 34 years ago that this is how I did it when I was in that role. So it's a, it's an understanding your biases and then really thinking long term as you as you move into the CEO role. So runners are intensely fanatically loyal to specific models and brands and shoes. Um, you know, when you guys discontinued, one of your models a few years ago, I went into mourning and um I think you called us. I, I called Jim Webber, your predecessor. Uh, I did not win, but anyway, um, how do you get customers, especially runners, this is on their feet. This is everybody's thinking. If I had, uh, that shoe prevents me from getting injuries, how do you get people who might be, you know, in love with Hoka and on and, uh, New Balance to give you guys, you know, they all know that Brooks are great shoes, and I also know AI is a great, like how do you get people to give you guys a try when people are so fiercely loyal? Yeah, I think you know over the years in our industry it was really hard to get people to switch brands. I think that's changed in the last 5 to 6 years for a lot of reasons. One, there's a lot of parity in product. There just is. There's a lot of great product out there. I often say that choosing a running shoes is a bit like choosing your favorite wine. Everyone has a different year, a different vintage, and they, they, they kind of go back to that and they try and find it. And so right now we're in a unique, unique era where there's great product from everyone. So then what is the value prop for the consumer? And you know there's a lot of detail on fit e ride and consistency in product season after season. We update our product every 12 months and so we've been able over a 20 plus year period. To be very consistent in our fit. And so if you love that varietal of the glycerin that Phil wears, that you're going to get that fit every single time, and that comes from long term manufacturing relationships, comes from sweating the details on fit feel ride, you know, on a marathon mile 22 really matters if your shoe is going to work, and we spend every day. Trying to figure that out for the runners, so consistency in our industry is the most important thing, and innovation can't disrupt that consistency. So innovation is moving really fast in materials and mid souls and the like, and you know we've been able to keep innovation coming without, you know, really impacting the consistency of our fit, fuel and ride. OK, so a quick final question for you. I mentioned Jim Webber, uh, whom you succeeded last year. Uh, he was there for more than 20 years. Basically, he saved Brooks, um, and it was on the verge of bankruptcy. I did, I forget. How, what, what do you want to do for Brooks? Yeah. Well, what I was super lucky at Brooks. I studied under Jim Webber, who was the modern day founder of this strategy and as Phil said, really set us on a path for growth. You know, our next version is expanding this brand around the world. As I said, 85% of our revenue comes out of the US. We're mostly footwear, and we have now permission to expand this brand. What's happening and running right now is super interesting. Participation rates around the world are skyrocketing. I was in China two weeks ago. The stat that we were told was there were 40 marathons in 2020. There's 450 marathons in China. So this brand is just getting started and it'll be expansion mode for us. All right, well, on that note, go for a run tomorrow at 5 in the morning when it's 70 and stay healthy. So join me in thanking Dan for being with us today. Thank you.