The popular parkour clothing company Farang announced that it is closing down after 12 years. What factors in the greater parkour industry contributed to this, and how might future parkour apparel brands learn, pivot, and thrive? In this podcast episode, Jimmy Davids discusses how parkour brands can learn from this, pivot, and thrive. See the full video below or read its key takeaways below the video.
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Main Lessons
Understanding Your Market One of the primary topics we discussed was the concept of the Total Addressable Market (TAM). For parkour businesses, this market is relatively small, given the niche nature of our sport. Unlike brands like Vans, which expanded their market by appealing to various subcultures, parkour businesses often limit themselves by targeting only the existing parkour community. To grow, it's essential to think beyond our immediate circle and find ways to attract new audiences.
Partnering with Parkour Gyms A critical strategy for expanding your reach is partnering with parkour gyms. These gyms serve as gateways, introducing new people to parkour and fostering a broader community. By collaborating with gyms, you can increase brand visibility, drive sales, and create a supportive ecosystem for both your business and the gym. This approach helps build a sustainable revenue stream and brand loyalty.
Leveraging Storytelling and Marketing Effective storytelling and marketing are pivotal in attracting a wider audience. Take a page from brands like Storer, who masterfully engage people who don't practice parkour but find it fascinating. By creating relatable and compelling content, you can tap into the curiosity of potential customers outside the parkour community, thus broadening your market base.
Metrics and Growth Strategies Understanding and optimizing key business metrics, such as the cost to acquire a customer and their lifetime value, is essential for scaling your parkour business. These metrics help you allocate your marketing budget more effectively and ensure a profitable return on investment. It's about spending smartly and maximizing the value each customer brings to your business.
Continuous Learning and Mentorship Lastly, seek out mentors and learn from successful brands outside the parkour industry. The principles of business growth are universal, and there is a wealth of knowledge to be gained from those who have already navigated similar challenges. Motion Mentors is here to support you on this journey, offering advice and mentorship to help you achieve your business goals.
If you found these insights valuable, I encourage you to watch the full podcast episode linked below. It delves deeper into these topics and provides actionable strategies to help your parkour business thrive. Let's grow the parkour industry together!
Podcast Transcripts
00:00 How's it going parkour community? My name is Jimmy Davidson with Motion Mentors. Motion Mentors is a business that is focused on growing the parkour industry as a whole globally. 00:10 And the other day, this week, we had some news that's sort of in the opposite direction of that. Fereng, a well-known and pretty well-loved parkour clothing business. 00:20 out of the UK, or wherever they're based, uhm, has been closing down. And, uh, they, you know, they just released on their Instagram, you know, this post that will show up on screen here, that, you know, it's been a long, been a fun ride, uh, but something's happened internally, I'm not personally sure 00:36 what, uh, but they've decided to close down. Uh, they went on to say that, uh, that they are personally, you know, not sad about it, they're confident in their decision, and they are proud of their, you know, ten plus years of, of being in the parkour clothing industry and growing our sport and contributing 00:53 to it, uh, which they should super definitely be proud of that. You know, in my region, I'm over in California, uh, I, I see four Ferrang shirts pretty often, so, um, it did come as a surprise to me, um, I guess as, as far as like the timing goes of it, but in general, I'm not surprised at, at the business 01:14 closing down, um, not because Ferrang in particular did anything wrong, you know, I actually don't know much about it. I much about how they ran their business, but just that a business that is selling exclusively into the parkour community is going to inherently have some massive challenges. 01:33 So on this episode, I want to kind of zoom in on specifically clothing brands or brands that are selling right into the parkour community. 01:40 Selling products into the parkour community. We've done a lot of conversation around coaching and parkour gyms. And we'll talk a little bit about that, but here I want to zoom in on if you have a parkour clothing business, you have a parkour brand, you are doing something for the parkour community. 01:57 What are your risks? What do we need to consider? And how can we better potentially pivot a little bit to grow ourselves into prosperity, into growing the parkour industry uhm you know without deviating away from parkour, without deviating away from like what makes your sport and our, you know what we're 02:16 all about so special. Uhm okay, so that's interesting to you. Stick around. My name is Jimmy Davidson and we're going to jump on in. 02:23 Alright edit that out Kyle, thank you, well this blank part. Okay so the first thing I want to talk about is the total addressable market, the concept of the T-A-M, total addressable market. 02:45 The T-A-M is ah when you zoom out, it's how many people could you possibly sell your thing to. So if you are a clothing company that's specifically for parkour, you really only advertise the market to the parkour industry. 03:01 Let's say you do that the typical ways, which is just we have a parkour team, we post on YouTube and Instagram, and that's it. 03:09 Maybe you have a, maybe you have an email list and you send to those people. But if your email list is just people who found you via your Instagram and YouTube, which is pretty much solely targeted at existing parkour teams. 03:21 your email list is probably just going to be that as well. So your total addressable market is pretty small, if that's the case. 03:29 Whereas if you look at Vans, I'm going bring up Vans a few times on this podcast. Vans total addressable market is huge. 03:38 They started in the 60s, expanded in the internationally around the 80s, started with just surfing, then pretty shortly after skateboarding. 03:49 I was surprised to learn that they didn't make their dedicated skateboard shoe until like 20 years later. But what happened to them was skateboarding and surfing were a It was like the cultural phenomena of that time. 04:04 So they already had a lot to work with. But then, they started expanding into this ethos of, hey we're for the punk rocker. 04:13 Hey we're for the person who likes to go out to live shows and you know, see metal, see rock, see punk rock. 04:19 Like we are the shoe for them. We are that crowd. We are the shoe for the surfing crowd. We are the shoe for the skateboarding crowd. 04:25 And because so many people identified in that category, it then became the casual shoe of choice for those people, and then all their friends, and then people who wanted to be as cool as those people. 04:40 You know, and that's how it continued to expand, and eventually became the number one shoe company in America, you know, for its time. 04:48 So, their total addressable market was pretty big, and it had room to expand. But the problem with parkour is, our industry, our sport, although it's, you know, what, like 20 years old. 05:02 That's still absolutely infantile. We are, we are little babies, and that's okay, we just have to recognize that. And we have to think in decades. 05:13 You know, like Vans, it took them, they actually went bankrupt, uh, at a few points. But they didn't see a profit until 10 years in. 05:21 Nike, they didn't, they, she's Nike, Phil Knight struggled for a ton of time selling Onitsuka Tigers. He actually was a, he had licensed Tigers from Japan, and he sold them here in America. 05:32 And he just got kicked in the teeth for like a decade until it got traction, until he pivoted from selling Onitsukas to founding Nike. 05:41 And then, and he still got kicked in the teeth for a little while, and by that I mean business is hard. 05:47 And then eventually he succeeded. So you know, these big brands, it takes decades. So if our industry is only like two decades old, and Fereng's only been around for one of those, or like, you know, Etra Fort was only around for less than that, um, there's not even enough time to really get that traction 06:08 going yet. Um, so I just want to throw that out there. So, when we look back at our industry, our total addressable market is small. 06:16 And then if you really consider who's actually buying your stuff, it goes to from your TAM, your total addressable market, down to your serviceable market, your SAM, total serviceable market. 06:28 Um, that is like, if you're selling t-shirts out of, and you're in California, and most of the people who know you are in California, your only real exposure is in California, it could be wherever you are, you know. 06:41 Maybe it's Dubai, maybe it's, you know, New York, whatever, it's just the people around who know you, your serviceable market are those people who are actually interacting with you, who you can actually service, who you can serve, you know, that's even a smaller subset, so, step, big giant hurdle one 06:58 , is if you're selling into the parkour community, first of all, you to be able to expand to the whole parkour community, not just your region, how can you, you know, partner with athletes, how can you partner with gyms, I'll expand on that in a second, how can you create content that is not just for 07:16 like, either your region or is not just for like, hey, here are the top athletes. that only a small subsect of the parkour community even identify with, you know, these, this clothing is for them, you know, how can you make your clothing for everyone in the parkour community, or at least like a wider 07:35 niche in the parkour community, and parkour is already a small, tight niche already. So you, you don't need to niche down much more than that. 07:44 Okay, so I just mentioned how can you partner with parkour gyms to expand your surfaceable market. Uhm, after this I'm going to talk about how can you expand out of the parkour industry and start bringing people in. 07:57 That's where the, that's really where the big opportunity is. Bye. If you are a clothing business, I think, from my perspective, the, one of the best ways to start selling your clothing is to start partnering with parkour gyms. 08:13 And we've seen a couple shoe companies like, you know, Olo or FeiWei, FeiWei has tried to sell through a couple of gyms, Freedom of Motion, my gym, being one of them, um, and there's ways that it works and there's ways that it doesn't work. 08:26 And as a clothing company, um, you have to recognize that parkour gyms, on average, don't take offense at anybody, I didn't for a long time, don't know what we're doing, you know, it's, we are still nailing the opportunities. 08:41 Operations, we're still nailing, you know, the team building, we're still nailing the profitability, um, in my opinion, those things have been solved, and if you are interested in that, please go to motionmentors.org and read the huge amount of content we have for parkour gyms, but in general, the average 08:59 parkour gym owner in the parkour gym business is still fairly good. And I say that to you, parkour clothing owner, business owner, because when you approach these gyms, you have to, it's not just like, hey, let me sell my stuff at your gym, and I'll make a profit, and maybe you'll make some profit too 09:18 . It's, here's why my clothing brand makes your clothing or parkour brand, and the experience of learning parkour in your gym, even better. 09:27 And this is now a partnership, uh, that, you know, if we don't fulfill our end of the bargain on it, if we don't make your parkour gym even better, you can kick us out. 09:35 You know, here's how each time you sell a shirt, it makes you money. Here's how we are going to make inventory And tracking and restocking as easy as possible on you, the gym owner. 09:46 Uhm, so you want to be an epically good partner for the parkour gym owner, and you need to be a no-brainer. 09:53 The way that you are contributing to their business needs to be so good that they would feel stupid saying no to you, the parkour clothing business. 10:02 So, yeah, I say that to say that you need to really make it friction-free and highly valuable. But then what's on the other side of that? 10:10 If you can get one, two, three, several, a whole region of parkour gyms stocking your clothing, or maybe you're the one producing their branded clothing, so at least you have some volume going through, so that you can leverage that volume to bring your own production costs down, either or both, you know 10:29 , now you have some built-in distribution, you have some built-in cash flow, some built-in brand awareness, uhm, and that's just step one, you know, you can go above and beyond, and, and continue to, you know, support their athletes. 10:42 Support their coaches, support their community around them, and, and really have each gym be like a stake-in-the-ground node to expand your brand awareness. 10:52 And if you start doing that at multiple gyms, and then each of those parkour gym owners start saying, wow, introducing this clothing brand into my business, we started selling the product. 11:02 Twice as many t-shirts as before, you know, which brings us a thousand extra bucks a month. Cool, you know. And then for the students going there, they have a cool design that they can rep parkour through. 11:14 And it's not just the same branded gym t-shirt that they wear to school or wear to college every day. You know, they have some variety. 11:21 So, yeah. There's, there's some serious synergy on that and then you can start to grow your platform that way. And the reason why, I'll say this too, in addition to, the reason why parkour gyms are sort of the only parkour business vertical that is really doing any, any amount of work. 11:42 Well, and we have any traction at all, is because parkour gyms don't just teach parkour to the existing parkour community. 11:50 We don't have open gym just for the existing parkour community. If we did, we would have gone out of business a long time ago. 11:59 What we're doing, what parkour gyms are doing, uh. Is connecting with the local community, people who don't yet do parkour. 12:08 That's important, people who don't yet do parkour. And we're bringing them into the industry, bringing them into the sport. And we're introducing them to their new favorite sport. 12:17 So we're growing, a parkour gym is growing its serviceable market. It's growing its total ability to teach parkour, to earn revenue, and it's not reliant on an existing capped number of people. 12:31 It has its hands on the controls, its hands on the levers of, you know, how many people are going to be learning parkour in this city. 12:38 Increase marketing spend, great, now it's more. You know, so that's growing. That ability to grow your own audience that a parkour gym has is huge, and it's absolutely essential if you want a business that grows big enough to the point to where you can sustain any amount of employees or owners. 12:58 So that's one thing that parkour gyms have on the rest of industry. Now, a t-shirt company, or a shoe company, you know, I'm kind of wrapping that all up into apparel, uhm, totally still sell to the parkour community. 13:13 In fact, let the parkour community continually validate that your design, your brand, your everything that you're about. Is in line, and does contribute to parkour, and does contribute to the community. 13:28 You know, obviously, our sport is all about movement freedom. It's all about reclaiming the built environment, reclaiming your own body, and that synergistic creative expression that you can just go out and generate out in the environment. 13:45 We don't need any uniforms. We don't have any built-in rules like gymnastics. We don't like have to be on the balance beam. 13:50 You don't have to do it the same way like gymnastics every time. You know, we we have that appeal that skateboarding has, and that we can do the self-expression like anywhere. 14:00 You know, and I think it's even more for you. It's skateboarding because we don't have that tool, the skateboard. We're not bound to that. 14:06 We can do literally anything we want. Uhm, so that ethos is really cool. There's a lot there that we can leverage. 14:13 And I'm speaking to the choir, I'm sure. And so if we can take that and market that and advertise that ethos, that movement for skateboarding. 14:22 That radical that radical free creativity, that reclaimation of the built environment and the natural environment. You know, if we can give that to someone who's next to parkour, someone who thinks it's cool but hasn't quite jumped in yet, someone who is open to the idea of trying parkour, someone who's 14:42 not. is creative like that, outdoorsy like that, uhm you know we can start to expand our reach from just people who already do parkour to that ring around it, people who probably watch videos on YouTube, uhm like Storer. 14:58 Storer does an excellent, excellent job of reaching those people who don't do parkour, but they like it. They don't identify as a parkour athlete or even in the parkour community, but they think it's pretty sick. 15:09 So, Storer's videos have a ton of views, ton of reach, and they likely see a complimentary spike in their clothing and apparel sales because those people just want to associate with that. 15:21 So, as a parkour shoe or clothing business, you need to wrap that into your marketing, and then you need to distribute your marketing to those people, which means you have to get out of just the parkour community. 15:33 So, you can't just make your reel and share it to just your parkour friends. You know, you have to have, you have to mix your video, mix your reel, mix your YouTube video. 15:42 So, in a way that's accessible, understandable, and inviting to that new audience. You know, this is why Storr does so much storytelling in their videos. 15:52 That's why they all go and get stuck in a hole, because like, to, personally to me as a parkour athlete, I've been training for almost 20 years, like, I know they can get out of the hole. 16:02 You know? You know? Like, I can get out of the hole too, but to some new person who doesn't do parkour, being in a hole that looks that deep is f****** crazy. 16:11 How are they going to get out of this hole? And they're drawn in, right? So, how can you do that, clothing or shoe company, in what you produce, in the stories you to be video, they can be written content, they can be sharing the stories of your athletes. 16:30 How did they get started? What was their journey like? How can you be as relatable as you can to those people who are just outside of the sphere of parkour? 16:37 Okay, you got it. So, when you can do that, you can expand the piece of people you can sell to, expand people who even care or even have access to knowing what your brand is all about. 16:49 It might take some time. You know, Vans and them have taken ten years. We gotta grow the lifestyle and grow the what does parkour mean for the human spirit side of the whole environment. 17:05 Get more people into this. Leverage parkour gyms because parkour gyms are already doing this. They have to do it or they go out of business. 17:13 So get right there with them, support them and their mission. They'll for sure support you in your mission. Yeah, okay, another thing. 17:22 Just doing a slight pivot. If we talk a little bit more about metrics, a little bit more tactical, a new concept to many clothing or shoe businesses might be the cost to acquire a client. 17:38 So if you do some level of marketing, you know you have a paid Facebook ad, you do Google pay per click, whatever it is, you should be able to track how much money you're spending and how many people come to your website as a result and how many people from that traffic make a purchase. 17:53 So it's cost to acquire a new purchase essentially. And you should be able to see the, you know, how much money means how many more purchases, what's the average order size of those purchases. 18:05 So what's, what's the total value of a new client acquired and how much did I have to spend in my marketing to get those people. 18:13 Your cost to acquire a client. If once you know how much you're spending and then on the other side of that you know how much their average order size is. 18:24 So maybe they're ordering one shirt or five shirts, you know, pair of shoes, pair of shirt also. You know, they're spending like a hundred bucks, two hundred bucks per order on average. 18:33 Once you have that, you ought to be able with your uh software, maybe if you're Shopify or use a Wix or your own thing, you should be able to track how often those people come back. 18:42 Uh either by making an account by using the same credit card information by using the same shipping address. There's multiple ways to calculate if that person comes back and makes another repeat purchase. 18:53 You should be able to gauge their lifetime total revenue and thus their lifetime total profit. And if you know how much you're you spend to acquire a client and then you know how much their lifetime total profit is, you can tweak that equation. 19:09 And as long as you are gaining back more than you're spending into your marketing, you have fire. You have something that you can scale, right? 19:20 So uh, for- parkour gyms, um, we like to see at least like a one to three ratio for every dollar you put out, you're seeing a dollar back or three dollars back. 19:31 Parkour clothing should be actually even easier because you have less fixed costs. You're just- it's an inventory business really. So as long as you're, you know, one dollar out to acquire a client, the money you get in. 19:42 7 And pays for the inventory and pays for the marketing spend and then you have profit. If that's the case. 19:49 Now, just rev up your marketing. You know, like spend incrementally more and watch it grow until you reach the next constraint. 19:59 You know, maybe it'll grow until you're like, oh shoot, I don't know how to- you have enough inventory for this. 20:04 Oh no, I can't- I don't have enough time to personally produce all these uh articles of clothing or if you're a shoe company like, you know, I can't get my inventory back in from China, you know, or made in America or wherever you're doing it. 20:17 Can't get it in in time. What I'm saying is you expand until you're next constraint. And if you find that ratio, every dollar you spend, you get profit back. 20:27 You have released the most fundamental constraint that really any business has. It's can I spend money to make money? If yes, how much money can I spend to make as much money as possible until I hit the next thing to solve? 20:42 Sometimes- the next thing to solve is, you know, people. Like in a parkour gym, it's oftentimes leadership and people. In a clothing business, it's inventory management. 20:53 How can I produce this for more cheaply? Uh, me as the owner, I was producing all of this clothing myself. 20:59 How can I get some more team members in here? Um, you know- maybe you're a warehouse. You just can't do it in your mom's room anymore. 21:07 Your mom's basement. You gotta move out and get a space and all of a sudden your fixed costs have increased and therefore your prices might need to also or your volume. 21:15 You know, so there's things that happen after. But if you solve this cost you acquire a client versus lifetime gross profit equation, you're- good that's a good problem to have. 21:25 So just wanted to put that in your- in your bucket of, you know, once you have figured out who you can sell to and you- you have a game plan of here is how I can expand my total addressable market. 21:36 Then there's actual metrics that you can track. You know, how much profit am I making per sale? Which might ever- for you. 21:43 Just order size, what's my cost to acquire a client, what's my lifetime gross, revenue gross profit, and there's a few others. 21:50 If you thought that was interesting so far and you have a clothing business, you have a parkour gym, you have a coaching business, whatever it is, motion mentors is here to help us all together grow the parkour industry. 22:03 So please feel free to reach out to us, please feel free to, you know, let us know what you are currently struggling with, what you want to do, what you're trying to do. 22:11 We would love to just give you our free advice and frankly there's a lot already on our website, motionmentors.org. Um, and if it works out, we'd love to partner with you, be a mentor with you and alongside you and help you get to. 22:23 Do your next step. Uhm. Great. So, okay, send a lot there. If you guys are interested in learning more, uhh, book, go read shoe dog by Phil Knight. 22:36 It's Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. It's his story going from leasing, you know, the rights to sell on a city tires in America. 22:43 All the way to Nike, you know, what he has today. Umm, on the podcast, How I Built This, uhh, they recently republished a uhh, interview with, what's his name, Bayard Winthrop. 22:56 He's the owner of American Giant. American Giant's a clothing company that exclusively produces and manufactures in America. Good. And they were able to make just an absolutely huge business. 23:07 And their whole thing was everything's made in America in top quality. And they told that story really really well. And that worked. 23:15 And that went against the common wisdom of like you can't make, you can't fully manufacture clothing in America anymore. The industry doesn't exist. 23:22 It's just. And that was true. But you know, Baird figured it out. And he put it together. So that's a great story there that you can wrap your head around. 23:31 Uhm, and there's there's plenty of others. In sharing those things with you, that book by Phil Knight and the story of American Giant. 23:38 I'm pointing out that a lot of these problems have already been solved. How to start and grow and expand a clothing business, a shoe business, apparel at large has already been solved. 23:51 You just need to figure out how to make that happen in the park or industry. So go and find mentors whether it's us or it's just listening to stories like Phil Knight's or you know watching tons of YouTube content. 24:03 On this but get outside of the industry, find the mentors for you and figure out how this problem has already been solved in the past and let's claw that back and drag its dead body into parkour and breathe some more life into it for us. 24:18 Okay? So we can grow this. I personally radically believe in parkour. I, I think it, I think it has more legs than skateboarding. 24:28 I think it has a deeper connection to the human spirit that that like primal, primate instinct that humans have. I think parkour is like the best situated sport to do that. 24:41 We just need to as a community. Get better at storytelling, get better at marketing and advertising, get better at sales, and then just learn from the giants who have come before us in the other industries. 24:51 If we don't do that, the decade of time that it's already naturally going to take somebody to grow up by thriving business is going to take two decades, three decades, or you're just going to burn out and, and, not make it by then. 25:05 So, get outside of yourself, get outside of parkour, find a mentor, that's what I do every day. You know, I have plenty of mentors outside of the parkour space that help me grow my currently three parkour gyms and this business motion mentors. 25:19 Um, and I want that for you too. Okay, let's keep the conversation going if that was helpful. Thanks to you, reach out, shoot us a DM. 25:25 We would love to help you grow your parkour business. Again, my name is Jimmy Davidson and good luck out there guys. 25:31 Thanks a lot. See ya.
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