Make intelligent compromises
Brooks believes in partnerships. He wants to help all his customers be successful. After all, if he can give customers like Bass
Pro Shops, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Wal-Mart what they want,
he should get what he wants — higher sales, more and better shelf
space, a better market position — in return.
Walking that fine line between supplier and friend can be tricky.
“Sometimes customers ask us to support them and help take
inventory back,” he says. “We never want to do that. But sometimes we will. If exceptions have to be made, they will be made,
but that doesn’t mean it’s carte blanche, that anytime you’ve got an
inventory problem we’re there to relieve that for you.”
That’s when you can make creativity come in to play.
“We’ll do other things,” he says. “We’ll run a promotion. We’ll do
a trunk show.”
In rare circumstances, Brooks might even partner with a customer to offer an exclusive product line, but even that has to have
some preset limitations.
“We’ll give a one-season or one-year exclusivity,” he says. “Not
for any longer than that.”
Allowing a product to remain exclusive to one customer for too
long would risk upsetting other Rocky Brand customers and
possibly compromise the product’s true sales potential.
Brooks has been fire-tested on this policy, too.
In 2002, executives at Dick’s Sporting Goods agreed to be the
sole seller of Rocky Brands’ new line of hunting apparel.
“We gave them a test on Rocky Brands for one season, and it
was extremely successful,” Brooks says. “They sold the stuff
out like it was free.”
But when the season drew to an end, executives at Dick’s
weren’t ready to let go of the exclusivity.
“They had so much success, they said, ‘Wow. Let’s do a five-year contract,’” Brooks says.
But that wasn’t their original deal.
“We were at a crossroads,” Brooks says. “We could’ve let
them license it, and they probably could’ve sold, maybe $25
million worth of stuff, and I could’ve gotten a nice licensing
fee. But I wasn’t going to have as much control over the quality and the pricing and the innovation. They were all about selling a lot of stuff. I just wasn’t comfortable going down that
road.
“So, begrudgingly, I said to one of my good customers,
‘Thanks for the test, but we’re not going to give you the exclusive right to this brand of apparel for a licensing deal. We’re
going to do it ourselves.’ So I elected again to upset another
good customer for a couple seasons.”
Dick’s didn’t take the refusal lightly.
“They didn’t buy from us for a few years,” Brooks says. “They
were very, very upset over that. It took two or three years to
get them back involved. But they’ve come back, and they’re a
big customer today.”
