Sportif's brave new world

Bobbin, July, 1998 by Kathleen DesMarteau

This was the advice John G. Kirsch, founder of Sportif USA Inc., gave his wife Suzie, probably after an especially firing day of running his apparel company. The directive went on something like this: "Don't you dare keep the business. It's far too complex for anybody but myself, who knows everything about it."

In one of life's cruel twists of fate, Kirsch's family found itself faced with the decision of what to do with Sportif much sooner than it had ever planned, after John Kirsch's twin-engine Beechcraft plane crashed in the snow covered San Bernardino Mountains in March 1991.

At this point, the family chose to ignore the "sell the business" recommendation and to pursue a dream they knew Kirsch held clear - positioning Sportif as a leader in the outdoor apparel industry.

Kirsch's four sons, in their teens and early twenties at the time of their father's death, went on to become active in the business, which they have learned through the school of hard knocks - minus any apprenticeships and management grooming, and without the mentor they always thought they'd have. As vice president Steven Kirsch, now 28, recalls Sportif's first few years under its second generation's reign: "Those were the days when we created the problems in the morning and fixed them in the afternoon. ... In other words, it's when we starting losing our hair and eyesight."

But it's been smoother sailing ever since. In the past seven years they have dramatically changed the company's focus, and brought the firm closer than ever to achieving their father's Sportif branded apparel vision. Now the company's lines - which include everything from its trademark Original 7-Pocket Stretch Short to high-tech outerwear- are in sporting goods and outdoor apparel specialty stores nationwide, serving the marine, hiking, snow sports and tourist markets, among others.

Shifting Emphasis to the Sportif Brand

Some of Sportif's apparel industry cohorts might have thought the company was crazy a couple of years ago, when it essentially closed the door on the private label contracting programs it had with such major brands as L.L. Bean, Lands' End and Eddie Bauer. To boot, the decision came after a period of rapid sales growth, and at a time when the company was doing more than 50 percent of its volume in private label.

But Sportif's management team, led by president John Kirsch, the eldest son of the company's founder, firmly believed there could be no solid future for its own brand if the company continued to devote resources to building products for other companies.

"You have to look at your business from a return on capital investments standpoint and look at where you are putting all of your eggs," Kirsch says. "The contractual business is a quick fix. It's easy, and you can get the orders right away as long as you're cheap. But to develop a brand and an image - that's a long road, and it takes lots of time and dollars, but it also has a future."

Steven Kirsch adds, "The problem with private label is that ultimately, your customers control you. We didn't want that, and we didn't want other companies determining our factory load."

To absorb the loss of most of its contracting business, Sportif cut the number of employees at its Sparks, NV, headquarters from 75 to 38, and took a significant hit to its sales volume. "We knew there would be an uncomfortable interim. We'd never had to downsize before, and that was extremely difficult," John Kirsch recalls. "But it was either that or perish. We made the move, and surprisingly, over the past three years, we've only added four people, and yet our sales volume has continued to increase.

"The private label business was terribly taxing on personnel and overhead. One primary reason was that we were very 'undersystemed,'" he concludes. "We had no MRP system, no CAD system. It was tough."

Building Up Its Systems

Although Sportif no longer has to worry about systems requirements for private label programs - 98 percent of its production is for the Sportif USA label - the company realized that it still needed to invest in information systems. "You have to position yourself for growth," John Kirsch emphasizes. "Companies typically stop growing because they hit a ceiling in terms of their systems or capital, among other reasons. We are planning to be able to maximize our growth in the future . . . and keep up with it with our foreign trade zone and the computer systems that we're building." (See "The FTZ Advantage," page 68, for more on Sportif's foreign trade zone.)

This past February, the company began installation of Paragon Business Systems' Softwear[R] program for managing all of its business assets, from purchasing and manufacturing to warehousing, distribution and customer service. The system is built in PRO-IV, a fourth generation computer language also known as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool. RAD-based applications are designed for mission-critical usage, and as Paragon partner Ken Gould emphasizes, this flexibility enables Paragon to tailor Softwear specifically to Sportifs needs.