Editor's note: A version of this article first appeared in the October issue of BRAIN.
OGDEN, Utah (BRAIN) — This outdoor-loving community north of Salt Lake City is a long way from Helsinki, Hong Kong and Hollywood, where corporate warriors have spent several years making deals to combine, split up, sell off and acquire various sporting brands including Ogden-based Enve.
The distance, and the size of Enve relative to some of the other brands involved, has allowed the company to quietly go about its business amid the high level maneuvering, said Jeremy Venz, its managing director.
“There really hasn’t been any business changes, or changes to our objectives,” said Venz, who has been with the company since its founding. “There may be a couple new measurement metrics we are asked to report, that’s about it.”
A quick refresher: Helsinki-based Amer Sports bought Enve in 2016 for $50 million. Amer already owned Salomon, Arcteryx, Wilson, and Atomic. Its only cycling brand was Mavic, and so naturally Mavic and Enve were expected to work together. Two years earlier, Amer had moved Mavic from Massachusetts to Utah, where several of Amer's outdoor brands, including Salomon, had U.S. offices.
Sarah Lehman, one of the founders of Enve, became president of Enve and the U.S. commercial director for Mavic (Mavic’s global headquarters remained in France). The brands shared a building in Ogden, as well as U.S. sales and customer service staff.
The pairing was not ideal for either brand. Sales priorities were unclear, the brands’ distinct positioning at the high end was not always clear, and it was difficult to develop a customer service operation for two very different product lines. Globally, Mavic remains an alloy-wheel OE powerhouse, a market where Enve doesn’t compete.
“They tried to go with a two-product approach, but they struggled. … The product and the stories and the tech questions were all so different there was never much success in integrating,” Venz said.
"We spent a year and a half trying to undo what we had done in the previous year."
Venz said Mavic and Enve never integrated its product development and R&D operations. “(The integration) was more on the commercial side,” he said.
Lehman left the company last spring and Mavic got its own U.S. director again, Isaac Wilson. Venz, who had been CFO of Enve for 10 years, took over as Enve’s director.
The two brands underwent a conscious uncoupling, with Mavic moving into its own space in Park City.
The uncoupling began before Amer’s Swedish executives started making rumblings about selling off its cycling business, which lagged its brands in other segments. Internally, it was understood that Amer intended to retain Enve and sell Mavic, but in public comments, Amer executives often neglected to make that clear, creating some unwanted uncertainty in Ogden.
Amer finally sold Mavic to a Beverly Hills, California, investor group, Regent LP, in March.
“By the time it was sold, we were operating completely separate of Mavic, so there wasn’t much impact,” Venz said. “But we had spent a year and a half trying to undo what we had done in the previous year. We spent all that time integrating, and then all that time undoing it, so it took a couple years off our focus on things we need to do as a core brand. So it’s good to be done with that.”
While Amer was selling Mavic, an investor group led by Hong Kong-based Anta Sports was in the process of buying Amer, a deal completed in August.
That means Enve now is owned by a Chinese conglomerate, but Venz said little has changed and he’s had little communication with the new owners.
“I still report to Amer’s CEO. We have 12-month, three-year, and five-year plans with objectives and goals in place, and those are unchanged. … We are truly operating independently at this point, with the objective of being the best company we can be.”
Enve continues to share some resources with Amer’s winter sports brands in Utah.
Venz said Enve, as always, is focused on product innovation, while working on strengthening relationships with IBDs in the U.S. and setting up new sales structures and organizations in Europe and Asia.
