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Pro skater André Senizergues turns over $200m a year but he never wanted to be a businessman. Meet the man who has made his fortune by sticking to his skating roots.
WORDS BY JOSH SIMS
“My mum bought me my first skateboard when I was 15, and the first thing I did with it was go horizontal. I found it so hard. But watching these guys do amazing tricks under the Eiffel Tower, they just made me flip out. I never imagined I’d do it professionally.” Not many skaters can expect to go professional, but then not many skaters are Pierre André Senizergues; Parisian, ex-world skateboard champion, software engineer, footwear designer and now CEO of one of the world’s fastest growing urban and extreme sports brands.
It was when Senizergues’ skating career was winding down due to age and back pain that he was given the unexpected opportunity to act on his conviction that there was still a niche in the market for a shoe designed specifically for skateboarders. A French shoe company, Rautureau Apple, had the same idea and offered him the chance to design for a new line called Etnies. Senizergues agreed and determined to take the fledgling brand to skateboarding’s home territory, so in 1990 he moved to California and set up his own distribution company. The teenage years were over…
“I was following my heart but I really had no idea where that was going. In fact, when I think back to what I went through I’m not sure I’d do it again,” he says. “I had huge debt, no experience in sales or logistics, no idea how I was going to get out of it. I could barely speak English. I thought about going back to France to do engineering again, but realised I’d never be able to pay off the debt. What kept me going was that I didn’t know how bad it could get. I just believed from experience that the market needed a better skate shoe.”
But the question was, did the Americans need a French skate shoe? And did they need one from a new brand in the middle of an economic downturn? It seemed so. Etnies’ outsider status only added to its kudos. Indeed, its roots gave it a stronger understanding of skateboarding’s increasingly international culture, leaving its giant competitors, Vans and Airwalk, looking parochial in comparison. Furthermore, Etnies was both the first performance-oriented skateboarding brand and the first to be launched by a pro skateboarder. “Without these factors I don’t think we’d have taken off,” admits Senizergues. “There were major Goliaths and this little David, but skateboarders saw that I was a skateboarder, not a businessman, and that helped our credibility.”
It would take five years before the company turned its first profit. In 1995 Etnies launched its ground-breaking, award-winning Lo Cut style, still its best-seller. A year later, Senizergues raised $1m-plus to buy the brand in its entirety from Rautureau Apple, in part because he didn’t want it to fall into the more corporate hands of people who didn’t understand it, but also convinced that the move would allow him to progress with his ideas more quickly, even reasoning that by having fewer resources he would have to be more creative.
It worked. Three years later Ernst & Young/CNN named him their Entrepreneur of the Year. These days, Sole Technology, Senizergues’ umbrella company, is still private. “It’s better that way,” he says, “we can do what we want and we spend so much time at work that we have to enjoy what we do. If we went public, it would be far more challenging and just about making money.” Importantly though, it is also debt-free and turns over some $200m annually.
In the skateboarding market’s scheme of things, this figure is still relatively small—around half that of its major competitors— but, Senizergues notes, Etnies makes that with a distribution 10 times smaller. Etnies, he suggests, is and needs to be regarded as a specialist and not a “sell-out” product. “We don’t think in terms of fashion, of change for change’s sake,” he says. “That said, we have to deliver the products people want and we need to have an eye for style.”
It is arguably that eye that has given Etnies such impressive figures in the 10 years since Senizergues took ownership. Some 40% of running shoes are not worn for running, but that pales in comparison to skateboarding merchandise, 90% of which
is now bought by people who don’t skate. “They just like the edgy lifestyle, and perhaps the culture that’s all about defying convention.
And the simple fact that skate shoes are very comfortable,” says Senizergues. “They have become kind of trendproof.” That, perhaps, is just as well for a businessman who doesn’t consider himself to be a businessman, and who has a seemingly genuine lack of interest in making money. “I’ve never been inspired by business people,” he says. “And I never wanted to be a businessman. I just knew I could make a better, and better-looking skate shoe. I prefer to think of myself more as an innovator—someone trying to do something new. Certainly money isn’t important. At the end of the day you can’t take it with you.
It’s only important in that it can be used to make a contribution, to leave the right footprint, to grow things around me.” Rather than material gain, and in-keeping with skateboarding’s heritage as an offshoot of “alternative” thinking, Senizergues is driven by expensive but, to him, vitally important environmental issues, a field in which he believes private companies can be pioneering.
Etnies’ footwear is evolving to become more eco-friendly, for instance, and it recently installed a solar system at its HQ. It saves him $38,000 a year off his electricity bill and over 334,000lbs in CO2 emissions, “And it’s ridiculous not to use such technology here, where there’s so much sun,” he enthuses.
The weather also makes California a perfect place for skaters, but these days Senizergues has hung up his little wheels and rarely skates.
“I work too much, and it’s hard when you’ve been a top skateboarder and then find it’s kind of depressing because you’re no longer at the level you used to be at,” he says. “But I can do without that kind of competitive pressure now. I’m just concentrating on making the best skate shoes.”
 First job:
“I was teaching sailing on the English Channel. My first boss was this mad sailor, more like a pirate really. He scared me but I really liked his adventurous edge. And I felt like Captain Cook for a while.”
Best advice you’ve ever been given:
“The best advice I ever got came from my parents. It wasn’t advice in the sense of telling me what to do. They led by example. They showed me how they were doing things and I looked on.”
 Unfulfilled ambition:
“I’d like to sail around the world, just to see if
I could do it. I’ve seen it from an aeroplane and through lots of cities. But the world is mostly water, so I’d like to see it from there, to see what I could discover.”
If the shoe fits: from top, special 20 anniversary edition Calli-slim skate shoes; Etnies takes on the skater-girl market through a separate clothing range.
 Five things I wish I’d known when I started:
- The environmental impact of business. It wasn’t something that businesses thought about much then. But that is changing now, if only because of consumer demand.
- If I’d have known English better that would have helped.
- That it pays to listen more carefully in school.
- Accounting. I’d been to school but never learnt anything about business.
- How to surf. I’m a skateboarder but now I’m in the surf industry. When you’ve passed 40 years old and a 10-foot wave is coming at you it can be intimidating. I seem to spend most of my time with the wave riding me rather me riding the wave.
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