“If you try to stand for everything, you end up standing for nothing.”
— Anon
K-Swiss had positioned itself as a generalist athletic sneaker brand, covering multiple sports, like tennis, running, triathlon, cross-training, skateboarding and more. However, this put the brand in competition with the other big sport generalists like Nike, Adidas, Puma, Reebok, Asics, New Balance etc. For a small, struggling brand this was a tall order…
So, we decided to become a specialist. K-Swiss was founded as a tennis brand, and tennis was always what the brand was known for. So we decided to make K-Swiss a specialist tennis brand again. This immediately reduced the competitive set down to a much smaller and more manageable set of adversaries...
However, there were still too many. Many of these brands are modern equipment brands, whereas K-Swiss is a heritage brand, founded in 1966. So when we say we’re a Heritage Tennis brand, the competitive set reduces to just three brands…
Fred Perry is British and Lacoste is French, and both of those brands lean into that part of their DNA to communicate their brand identity. K-Swiss is American, founded in California, so, we are a Heritage American Tennis brand...
And now we’re alone. We’re the ONLY Heritage American Tennis brand… and we have our differentiated lane.
