Who invented rbk

With the partnership, Jay-Z became the first non-athlete to have a signature athletic footwear collection. The launch of Jay Z's first shoe was extremely successful around the world. Later that year, Reebok teamed up with another superstar of the rap world, 50 Cent.

The result was the equally successful "G Unit Collection by Rbk. Reebok has a long-term licensing agreement with the National Hockey League, under which the company serves as the supplier of authentic "on-ice" game jerseys to all 30 NHL teams.

It also has the exclusive worldwide rights to manufacture and market authentic, replica and practice jerseys using the names and logos of the NHL and its teams. In two short years, Rbk Hockey has become one of the most visible and in-demand hockey brands on the market. In , Reebok launched its largest global integrated marketing and advertising campaign in nearly a decade.

The campaign encourages young people to embrace their own individuality by celebrating their contemporary heroes.

Today, the adidas Group, which includes the adidas, Reebok, TaylorMade-adidas Golf and Rockport brands is a global leader in the sporting goods industry and offers a broad portfolio of products. Products from the adidas Group are available in virtually every country of the world.

Activities of the company and its more than 80 subsidiaries are directed from the Group's headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany. The goal of the campaign was to inspire consumers around the world to fulfill their potential and celebrate their individuality.

The message of the campaign was that while many other brands speak about the "blood, sweat and tears" of running, Reebok celebrated the camaraderie, joy and fun of running - Run Easy. Reebok also launched its "There are Two People in Everyone" marketing campaign for the second half of in select regions. The global marketing campaign highlights Reebok's unique brand point of view of celebrating the individual's balance between sport and life.

After wearing it on the court, one of the players said, "These make me feel like I can play harder. That's all Fireman needed to hear. He gave Litchfield's team and Continuum carte blanche to develop the sneaker. But building an inflatable bladder that could withstand the impact of a pound basketball player stopping or cutting on a dime was easier said than done.

Reebok and Continuum partnered with a small medical-device manufacturing company, Dialetrics, to work on the inflatable bladder. Together, they created the second-most innovative piece of footwear technology at the time, next to Nike's Air concept. The major difference between Nike's Air and Reebok's Pump technology was location. Nike's Air sat under the heel. The first two prototypes of the Pump -- the Pro Pump, which was self-inflating, and the Pump Shot, which had a heel pump -- arrived in Massachusetts on Feb.

A day later, Reebok brought the shoe to The Super Show in Atlanta, which at the time was the world's largest sports product show. Reebok unveiled it to much fanfare but discovered at the show that Nike had been working on its own inflatable shoe, the Air Pressure.

Litchfield caught a glimpse of the Nike display and one thing went through his mind. Reebok continued on with its version of the Pump, which it believed was inherently better than Nike's for one primary reason: Nike's had a separate hand-held pump.

That eventually doomed the Nike shoe. It was Nike following, which we never ever did well. I don't think that shoe lasted more than the season. After the Atlanta show, Litchfield told the Pump team that he wanted the shoe on shelves by Black Friday that year. That was nine months away and all Reebok had at the time was a prototype.

Reebok had enough feedback from testing to know a few design changes were necessary. Brown asked for a week to work on it. A week later, Brown returned the shoe to Litchfield. He had moved the pump to the tongue and covered it with silicone to look like a basketball. Litchfield asked for one more change: Move the release valve from the heel to the tongue, next to the pump. One of the Pump's signature design elements was the logo on that orange basketball.

IIt was designed by Jane Hathaway, an in-house graphic designer for Continuum. She was only given 15 minutes to create a better logo than the one Reebok had initially made, so she ran to her computer, and came up with the logo Reebok still uses today.

The Pump as we know it was born. Foot Locker ordered between 5, and 7, pairs, mostly as a favor to Reebok because of their long-standing relationship. All that the engineers at Continuum had to do was re-engineer the inflation mechanism in about five months.

Everything was running smoothly until the shoes arrived in Reebok's Massachusetts warehouse. About 3, pairs weren't inflating. A stitching mistake during production had cut off the air from the release valve. Once it was inflated during testing one last time, that was it.

Knowing his job was on the line, Litchfield worked with Reebok's stitching room to rip out the stitching, replace a piece and restitch all the shoes. The Pump was released on Nov. From conception to market, the Pump took a year -- unheard of in the sneaker market at that time -- to create. A year later, Reebok re-engineered the Pump yet again, moving the inflatable bladder to just the tongue.

It lowered the price significantly. Reebok shipped 75 million pairs of shoes around the world in , according to a article in The New York Times. The Pump had made Reebok a dominant player in the shoe game. Dee Brown made it a "cultural phenomenon," Hardaway said. Shaq's signature shoe was a Pump. Shawn Kemp wore it. Eventually Allen Iverson's shoe, the Question, was made as a Pump. The basketball shoe has been replaced with the InstaPump Fury, a vastly different iteration that's a stripped-down version of the original idea.

Reebok thought, why not use a similar idea to make a better basketball shoe? Litchfield had been a firefighter and worked as an EMT, so he was familiar with air splints and thought something like that might work as a bladder for the shoe. He prototyped it and showed it at the Atlanta Super Show in So I was sweating it out pretty good. Ultimately, Reebok ended up completely changing the design. When the shoe launched, there were less than 10, pairs committed to be sold, according to Litchfield — and that was done as a favor from Foot Locker.

The power of some strong marketing campaigns changed the trajectory, and the shoe took off. It was time to leave. Foster knew what Reebok had accomplished in reaching number one, but in the moment, there was hardly any time to savor it. We were running. We were doing everything. The whole thing was a sensation. The culture of the company was a winning culture. Jeff Foster was in charge of production at Reebok, but he died of stomach cancer just as Reebok hit its stride in the U.

The path after reaching number one was more fraught. Reebok tried to break into basketball and other sports. And there was the Dream Team debacle of Reebok had won the contract to make the awards uniforms for the U.

Olympic teams, which included the U. Michael Jordan was by then a Nike brand ambassador. Except, the Dream Team refused to go to the awards ceremony in the Reebok uniforms. No Michael Jordan Reebok photos after all. Fireman largely kept out of the controversy, letting the NBA and other organizations handle the issue.

Nike did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But what Smith saw as a big loss for Reebok, Fireman looks back on as an unexpected win. In fact, even when Reebok took the number one spot from Nike, Fireman knew it was temporary.

Adidas and Nike both had a head start as global sports brands, they were more established in their respective spaces. They also had close relationships with a lot of teams and coaches, which made breaking in difficult, and they had more money to spend.

But they were bigger and better. As Reebok hit its peak and looked for growth outside the fitness segment, the company started picking up other brands as well. Reebok acquired Rockport in , women-focused athletics brand Avia in and the Hockey Company in The way Fireman tells it, it came about quite by accident. A former Reebok employee ended up at the NFL and wanted Fireman to take a meeting to talk about product licensing. It was an uncontrolled brand.

The NFL deal also opened the door to other leagues. By , Fireman had deals with all four major sports leagues. Reebok was trying to carve a path to become the third major global sports brand.

It was poised instead to be acquired by Adidas, and with the sale also went the dream of becoming that third global sports brand, spoken in the same breath as Nike and Adidas. Now, did he do it by himself? Absolutely not. He brought out the best from employees by pushing them to go further, do more. And for a lot of us at Reebok, he got your attention in a way that was challenging. Certainly, he helped scale Reebok to its peak. But no one is flawless. I think later on, he was less about building the brand and more about just maintaining the sales.

But all in: a brilliant man. He built a company that once rivaled Nike — and some still wonder if it could be that strong contender now, under the right circumstances. If Reebok had found its own Herbert Hainer, could it have done the same? Incidentally, struggling to find a leader to replace himself is what led Fireman into negotiations with Adidas.

Had he found someone suited to the task, the conversation around Reebok may be different today. At the time, Foster was thrilled by the fact that Adidas knew they existed. Adidas declined to comment for this story. Nike was getting bigger, and bringing Adidas and Reebok together seemed to be a good way to combat that. Fireman had already tried finding a successor, to no avail. Finding an acquisition partner was another good option. Smart men and women make foolish decisions sometimes. The leadership teams talked for seven months about how to make the merger work, Fireman said, but once the deal was done, those plans were largely forgotten.

Over the years, Reebok lost its licenses with the major sports leagues: Adidas took over its deal with the NBA and the NFL was handed over to a host of other brands. But smart men and women make foolish decisions sometimes. The importance of losing the sports licenses varies depending on who you ask. To Smith, what they really lost was brand visibility. To Litchfield and Fireman, though, it meant a lot — and it was symbolic of the larger movement of Reebok out of the sports market.

One of the first things that Adidas did was they came in and pulled basketball — and the NBA was a big deal to us. But the loss of sports licenses was the least of the issues in the acquisition. By far the largest was that Adidas and Reebok directly competed with each other.

Thus, Reebok got pushed into fitness and training, the latter of which has been on the decline for years, according to Powell.

Powell believes Reebok has also been purposefully held back from opportunities in the retro space since Adidas has had success there. Marketing to the same consumer meant battling over the same market share.

For someone to gain share, somebody else has to lose. As with other things, the sale provides a chance to change that, and allow more dedicated attention to Reebok. They determined to take those assets and build Adidas. The brand had other problems, though. Sales fell in , and before rallying back to levels by Questions around its core identity — what Reebok stood for — began to plague the company as it looked to build itself into more of a sports generalist, so much so that Litchfield left Reebok in The lack of a strong brand identity was made worse by the company changing the style of shoes frequently, and trying to expand into multiple different categories at once.

Poser recalls being a buyer at a major sports retailer when Reebok put out a premium running shoe — it sold well, but then the company changed the last a tool used to shape footwear for the shoe the following year and returning customers no longer fit in it. They were both huge stars of the day, and helped Reebok become associated with the basketball space.

And giant men need really supportive footwear, which tends to make [the shoes] kind of ugly.