In for the long run

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, June 18, 2006

BOTHELL – Finishing a marathon tests the runner’s focus and ability and is best completed by not looking too far past the next step.

All of which could be said of Brooks Sports Inc., a company that strives to make great gear for runners and nothing else.

Brooks’ shoes appear on store shelves next to heavyweight brands such as Nike, Adidas and Puma. But the relatively small company in Bothell is applying its knowledge and innovation toward making running shoes and apparel that outstrips the big names.

“In the last five or six years, it’s definitely become a brand that is now taken more seriously for performance, for speed, for fun,” said Scott Jurek, a Brooks-sponsored Seattle ultramarathon champion. “We’ve seen just some great individuals working for the company in those years, and it’s really brought some new life to Brooks.”

The company isn’t new to shoes. Founded in 1914, Brooks first made leather shoes, adding spiked shoes for football and baseball shortly after. Jim Weber, Brooks’ chief executive officer, said some of the company’s patents date back more than 75 years.

It began making running shoes in the 1960s and ’70s, positioning Brooks well when jogging became a real craze.

But problems followed. Brooks reacted slowly to the rise of Nike and the move by that company and others to make its shoes with cheaper labor in Asia. The company ended up first moving its manufacturing work to Latin America, to ill effect.

“They had some of the hottest shoes on the market, but the shoes were falling apart. It was a disaster,” Weber said.

Brooks now uses factories in Asia like its competitors, but even after the manufacturing woes were fixed, the company was trying to emulate Nike’s strategy to make products for a range of athletes.

“Brooks has always been a running company, but we also got into the model where we also were about basketball shoes, cross-training shoes, family footwear,” Weber said.

That all changed at the beginning of the decade. Now, if it’s not about running, Brooks won’t spend much time on it.

“The goal is not to just be a company with good products, but to be at the epicenter of the running experience,” said Weber, who joined the company in 2001.

The tighter focus resulted in better products and record sales. Net sales have risen every year since 2001, reaching roughly $150 million last year, with earnings rising more moderately. The company’s now a division of Russell Athletic, which is being bought by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Three-quarters of Brooks’ sales come from specialty running or athletic shoe stores. Weber said such retailers demand high quality and responsive service, but it’s been worth the extra work to court those stores.

As a result, in the specialty running shoe market, Brooks is the No. 2 brand in market share, behind Asics and well ahead of Nike. Brooks shoes also have earned the “premium brand” reputation, with a pair selling for an average of more than $78, higher than the average running shoes sold by New Balance and Nike.

“It has worked for them,” said Bob Toomey, chief equity strategist at E.K. Riley Advisers in Seattle. “And to the extent that they improve their position in the high-end market, it has kind of a halo effect on the whole brand.”

All the corporate strategy in the world, however, won’t work to boost sales if the shoes and clothes aren’t cutting-edge or of good quality. That’s the job of Pete Humphrey and Craig Vanderoef.

Humphrey, Brooks’ vice president of footwear research and development, emphasizes a point that Weber mentions: It’s not easy to create a great shoe.

“There’s physics, there’s biomechanics and there’s chemistry” that goes into creating each new model,” Humphrey said.

Brooks studies things such as “total rearfoot motion” and “peak plantar pressure” when creating new shoes and parts, such as MoGo, Brooks’ midsole design coming to the market next month. The midsole, which is sandwiched between the shoe’s upper half and the sole itself, is critical for foot support and performance.

The MoGo design took three years to develop, going through 40 permutations along the way, Humphrey said. The final design, Brooks claims, offers 40 percent more cushioning and gives a runner 22 percent more return of energy – the “spring” in one’s step – than Brooks’ former midsole. Just as importantly for the company, the MoGo design can be made more consistently without defects while reducing wasted materials by 50 percent.

In its clothing for runners, Brooks also has sewn in innovations – from designs that maximize ventilation and visibility to fabric spiked with real silver to reduce sweat odor and to dissipate heat and moisture

Vanderoef, an apparel product manager, showed off a jacket made with breathable fabric that uses 3M Scotchlite, a reflective material that shines with up to 500 candlepower. The whole jacket weighs a wispy 3 ounces.

Brooks also makes caps with flashing LED lights built in to make runners more visible on evening jogs.

Vanderoef said the materials Brooks uses aren’t exclusive to the company, but it seeks to use them in new ways.

“It’s not the ingredients, it’s the recipe,” he said. “It’s not what you use, but how you use it.”

Of course, clothing designed to be optimal in all sorts of weather and temperatures can have a downside.

“At this rate, we’re taking away all the excuses. Sometimes I wonder if people hate us because my job is to make sure you can get your run in,” said Vanderoef, who hasn’t skipped his daily run since late 2000.

Weber said that despite the pending ownership change of its parent company, Brooks plans to continue operating in its newfound niche. There’s still plenty of room to grow in the market.

“We’re a smaller company, and we’re more flexible. We’re using that as a weapon,” he said.

Reporter Eric Fetters: 425-339-3453 or fetters@heraldnet.com.