Brand & Strategy Update
Faced with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine in 2022, we put the wellbeing of our PUMA Family first and kept a flexible and pragmatic mindset to execute our strategy and continue our strong growth momentum. 7 From the beginning of the war, we focused on our employees, athletes and partners in Ukraine. We offered safe accommodation in Western Ukraine and welcomed many employees and their families in Germany and Poland, where we also helped with work permits and jobs. PUMA also helped with product donations for aid organizations in Ukraine to get help to those who needed it most.
While the COVID-19 pandemic eased in Europe and the Americas, the situation in 2022 remained challenging in parts of Asia, especially in China, where our employees did an exceptional job despite the repeated lockdowns. The tireless work of our sourcing teams ensured that supply chain disruptions were kept to a minimum throughout the year.
Providing an attractive workplace is an important part of our people strategy, which is why we were very honored to be named “Global Top Employer” for the first time in early 2023. In 2022, we also received several recognitions as an employer such as “Company of the Year” at the German Diversity Awards.
At the start of 2023, a gender pay gap analysis, which was independently certified, showed that PUMA has closed the pay gap between men and women among its employees in Germany. This makes PUMA the second company in Germany to receive the title “Universal Fair Pay Developer" by organization FPI Fair Pay Innovation Lab.
PUMA kept its eight strategic priorities unchanged in 2022: brand heat, product ranges that are right for our consumers, a comprehensive offer for women, quality of our distribution, speed and efficiency of our organizational infrastructure, re-entry into Basketball to improve our position in North America and a focus on local relevance as well as sustainability.
As a sports company, the successes of PUMA’s sponsored athletes and teams increase our brand heat.
In 2022, our PUMA team Morocco sensationally reached the semifinals of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, becoming the first African team to do so in the history of the tournament. Our players Antoine Griezmann, Olivier Giroud and Raphaël Varane were in France’s starting 8 line-up in the final. Neymar Jr. scored his 77th goal for Brazil, equaling the record of football icon and PUMA player Pelé.
In club football, our PUMA teams AC Milan and Manchester City won the league titles in Italy and England, while Olympique de Marseille and Borussia Dortmund came in second in France and Germany. In the Netherlands, PSV Eindhoven won the Dutch Cup.
At the end of the season 2021/22, we secured a long-term extension to our partnership with AC Milan and became the official naming partner of the club’s training center for future talents, which will be called the “PUMA House of Football.” We also expanded our reach in football, as we became the official match ball provider of the Italian football league Serie A, starting from the 2022/23 season.
At the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, USA, Jamaican sprinter Shericka Jackson ran the second fastest 200m time in history, Portuguese athlete Pedro Pichardo took the gold in the triple jump with the best performance of 2022 and Swedish pole vaulter Armand “Mondo” Duplantis set yet another world record of 6.21 meters. Because of his amazing performances in 2022, Mondo was named “Male Athlete of the Year”. Our Ukrainian PUMA athlete Yaroslava Mahuchikh won gold in the high jump at the World Indoor Championships in Belgrade, Serbia and the European Championships in Munich, Germany.
Throughout the year, we added several new track and field ambassadors to our roster such as Mutaz Essa Barshim, Elaine Thompson-Herah, Abby Steiner and Emmanuel Korir. In early 2023, Olympic 100m Champion Marcell Jacobs also joined the PUMA Family.
With Scuderia Ferrari, Red Bull Racing and Mercedes AMG Petronas, PUMA partnered with the most successful teams of the 2022 Formula 1 season. The increasing popularity of motorsport, and Formula 1 in particular, amplifies these strong partnerships, especially in the United States, where Miami hosted its first Grand Prix in 2022, which was immediately sold out.
In Golf, Cobra PUMA Golf athlete Ewen Ferguson won the Commercial Bank Qatar Masters and the ISPS Handa World Invitational, while Olivia Cowan claimed her maiden Ladies 9 European Tour Victory in India at the Hero Women’s Open. Lexi Thompson won the title at the Aramco Team Series in New York.
Working with ambassadors from culture, music and fashion also creates brand heat for PUMA and helps us to connect with our Gen Z audience. In 2022, we announced a long-term partnership with British-Nigerian rapper and record producer Skepta, with whom we developed a global media campaign for the RS-X sneaker, and who will also design his own PUMA collections.
At the New York Fashion Week, our spectacular FUTROGRADE show took place both on the runway and in the virtual world. The show was curated by PUMA Creative Director June Ambrose, with special appearances by PUMA ambassadors such as Winnie Harlow, Kyle Kuzma, Davido and Usain Bolt.
With the FUTROGRADE event, we continued to explore the possibilities of Web3. We sold two exclusive NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens) as part of the event: A collectible NFT and another which could be exchanged for a pair of futuristic sneakers in the real world.
Whether it is Web3, the Metaverse or NFTs, the virtual world is becoming increasingly relevant for our young audiences. In 2022, we unveiled our largest Web3 collaboration to date with 10KTF and launched “PUMA and the Land of Games” on the online gaming platform Roblox. This virtual environment was also used to launch a real product, Manchester City’s new third kit.
In 2022, we significantly improved our product offering across all business units.
Our performance footwear, especially the running styles VELOCITY and DEVIATE which feature PUMA’s NITRO technology, showed strong sell-through and won awards such as the Runner’s World Editor’s Choice Gold Medal.
We expanded our product offering in Running & Training and introduced our SEASONS collection, a range of outdoor items made to protect against the elements all year round.
Our innovative PUMA ULTRA and FUTURE as well as the classic KING football boots were very successful and gained market share throughout the year. For the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, we launched our football boots in the “Fearless Pack” edition. They were worn by 105 players in the tournament and very visible on pitch thanks to their striking colors.
We reintroduced an important sneaker style from our archives, the SLIPSTREAM, which was presented by PUMA ambassadors such as Neymar Jr, Danna Paola and Romeo Beckham in a global campaign. As part of our collaborations with AMI Paris, MCM, Palomo Spain, Vogue, Pokémon, Garfield and others we created fashion-forward Sportstyle collections that resonated well with our customers.
Our women’s offering also benefited from the launch of innovative products in Sportstyle, Teamsport, Basketball and other business units in 2022.
Global pop superstar Dua Lipa headed the campaigns for successful women’s styles such as the MAYZE and the SLIPSTREAM in 2022, and she presented the second drop of her own collection called “Flutur”, which featured bold designs and colors.
To capture the increasing popularity of women’s football at the UEFA Women’s Euro in England, we launched special editions of the FUTURE 1.4 and the ULTRA ULTIMATE football boots in women’s specific fits. With Austria, Iceland, Italy and Switzerland, PUMA supported four teams and more than 70 individual players at the tournament.
Our strategy to offer women’s specific fits in performance sports included Basketball, where we presented the Stewie 1, the first signature shoe for a female athlete in over a decade with WNBA star Breanna “Stewie” Stewart.
The success of our athletes in basketball has increased our credibility in the sport, an important part of our positioning in the North American market. PUMA Basketball athlete LaMelo Ball became the fourth-youngest player to compete in the NBA All Star Game, while Marcus Smart was named NBA Defensive Player of the Year and Jackie Young the most improved player of the year in the WNBA.
Our partnership with LaMelo Ball has also been a great commercial success, with the introduction of his first signature shoe, MB.01, which quickly sold out in several styles and colors. In 2022, we continued this successful collaboration with several versions of LaMelo’s second shoe, the MB.02, for which we also saw very good sell-through.
To improve our distribution reach around the world, we launched our PUMA.com online store in the Philippines, Thailand, Norway, Saudi Arabia and several other new countries in the Middle East and Africa, now servicing consumers in more than 50 countries. For our most loyal consumers we created our new PUMA Shopping App which offers virtual try-ons of selected products and a simple check-out process. The App was launched in India, the USA, the UK and Japan in 2022 with further markets to follow in 2023 and received great ratings by our consumers. We also expanded our network of PUMA Stores around the world, including new flagship stores in Singapore and Buenos Aires.
It is important for us to complement our international offer with products that have strong local relevance. This also includes our presence in sports such as cricket, rugby, padel or handball, where PUMA team Denmark won the Men’s Handball World Championship for a record-breaking third time in a row in early 2023. We also signed new locally relevant brand ambassadors, such as pop singers Eleni Foureira from Greece, Teodora from Serbia or most recently the captain of the women’s Indian Cricket Team Harmanpreet Kaur.
To reach out to young audiences who are particularly concerned about sustainability, the environment and climate change, we held our first ‘Conference of the People’ in London. In an open conversation about sustainability in our industry, our industry peers, activists, NGOs, experts and ambassadors joined Gen Z representatives on stage. We took the opportunity to explain our Forever Better sustainability strategy in great detail, including the RE:SUEDE and RE:JERSEY circularity projects. But we also listened and gathered valuable feedback on how to talk to young generations about sustainability.
As part of our biodegradability experiment RE:SUEDE, 500 volunteers in Germany tested an experimental version of our iconic SUEDE for half a year before returning the worn sneakers to us. PUMA will now explore whether they can be biodegraded in a controlled industrial setting. 12 Our circularity project RE:JERSEY was introduced with PUMA football teams Manchester City, AC Milan, Borussia Dortmund, Olympique de Marseille and Girona FC. Here we trialed a novel chemical recycling process, which turns old polyester garments into yarn for new products. We expect to scale up this process in the coming years to help reach our circularity and recycling goals.
On a corporate level, we announced that we had reduced our own carbon emissions and those coming from our supply chain between 2017 and 2021, even though the business grew strongly in the same period.
These and other sustainability efforts were recognized when industry publication Business of Fashion named PUMA the most sustainable brand in a ranking of 30 companies. We also received the Footwear News Sustainability Leadership Award and were given the highest possible mark for our transparency and performance on climate change by not-for-profit charity CDP.
In terms of organization, Arne Freundt was appointed as CEO and Chairman of the Management Board of PUMA SE in November. Arne has more than ten years of experience at PUMA and most recently worked as Chief Commercial Officer and as a Member of the Management Board. He replaces Bjørn Gulden, who left the company in 2022 after nine years as CEO. Our management board was strengthened to four members when Maria Valdes was appointed Chief Product Officer in December.
In April, Héloïse Temple-Boyer became the new Chair of PUMA’s Supervisory Board. She has been a part of the Supervisory Board since 2019 and is a member of the Audit Committee.
