Marc Hare To Be Product Lead For Lacoste Footwear

Lacoste SneakersBritish footwear manufacturer Pentland has announced the appointment of Marc Hare as the new product director of the Lacoste Footwear Joint Venture. In January 2018, Pentland and The Lacoste Group announced a 50:50 joint venture (JV) based at the Pentland HQ in North London. The JV manages the design, production and manufacturing of Lacoste’s footwear globally. Pentland continues to manage UK distribution, while Lacoste handles distribution in its main territories.

Hare joins the business after having run his own successful streetwear inspired sneaker brand, Mr.Hare, since 2008. Hare will be leading the new ‘Mainline’ and ‘Future Concepts’ product teams and working with Lacoste JV CEO, Gianni Georgiades, to support Lacoste’s vision for the future of the brand.

Speaking about the Lacoste brand, Hare noted that, “Rene Lacoste’s life is one of the greatest stories of 20th century sport. Lacoste is one of those brands that everybody fell in love with at a defining moment in their lives. Sneakers are a global language and culture that seemingly cannot be contained. Opportunities like this don’t come around very often, so any attempt at describing the excitement erupting from within me, at joining this team, would be a woeful understatement.”

He will join the business from 10th September 2018.

Note: Worried that the Lacoste sneaker you bought is fake? Check out my post on detecting counterfeit Lacoste sneakers.

Lacoste Launches New Fall/Winter 2018 Novak Djokovic Collection

Novak DjokovicLast night, in New York, Novak Djokovic visited the Lacoste boutique at Macy’s Herald Square to celebrate the launch of Lacoste’s new Fall/Winter 2018 Novak Djokovic collection. Djokovic took pictures with his fans, and also spent time with kids from the CityParks’ Foundation Tennis Academy. These students had won the chance to meet him by writing essays about a time they had faced adversity in their lives.. This was Djokovic’s first appearance in the United Stafes for Lacoste. In 2017, he was named Lacoste’s “new crocodile,” after Rene Lacoste and he now represents the brand on and off the court.

Technifibre CEO Nicolas Préault Discusses the Merger With Lacoste

tecnifibre-lacoste It’s been almost a year since the tennis racket maker Technifibre was acquired by Lacoste, and their CEO Nicolas Préault was recently interviewed on how the merger is going. And, when he was asked, Nicolas was extremely enthusiastic about the advantages that Lacoste brings to his company:

“Now with the arrival of Lacoste we can think about a lot of things. It was my first mission when I arrived a few months ago. Thierry Guibert (Lacoste’s CEO) asked me to first of all set up the future for the next five years of the future with Tecnifibre; this is done, and then to think about all the possible synergies.

“There are two types of synergies that we are going to set up. The first one is what you can call a classic company where a big company buys a small one. Today we can use all the expertise and the power of the Lacoste group in terms of human resources, in term of legal department, in term of IT systems and so on and so forth. This is very important for us because we move from 45 people to 10,000 collaborators so it’s very important, but it’s not enough.

“There is a second part of the synergy which is much more strategical. The starting point of the thinking that we have set up as a team is to say, well, who are our consumers? The consumers of Tecnifibre are for sure the players, and there are different types of players, in terms of style, in terms of frequency of playing, but the players have some needs which are linked to different parts in terms of product categories, so there are textiles, there are shoes, there are racquets, there are strings, balls and when you think about the market today you have some giants in this market, for example Nike, which have been selling a lot of textiles and shoes but no racquets on one side and on the other side you have another giant like Wilson or Babolat or Head—even some challengers that are moving up like Yonex—which are selling a lot of racquets, strings, balls—they try to sell textile but it’s quite tough and we cannot say that today those guys are really pushing on textiles.”

You can read more of the interview at TennisNow.com.