Chris Miller
Building a "planet" of winning brands
with a street-smart marketing strategy

Bob Serling: This is 15-Minute Innovation, and today I'm talking with Chris Miller, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Earth Products, one of the most successful companies in the action sports industry. Chris is also a former professional skateboarder and now does television commentary on action sports for ESPN. So welcome, Chris!

Chris Miller: Thanks, Bob.

Bob: I want to start a little differently than I do with many of these interviews. Rather than getting right into the questions, can you first give everybody a little background on what action sports are and the different areas they encompass?

Chris: Well, "action sports" is kind of a catch-all term, for what some people refer to as the board sports kind of generation. So it's surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding — but it's also kind of expanded to now include sports like wakeboarding and even BMX freestyle and moto-freestyle, as well, on motocross bikes. But really the root of action sports is surfing and the derivative sports that have come from the culture that's associated with it.

Bob: Great. And your background — your entry into all of this — was as a professional skateboarder.

Chris: Yeah, and I was a professional skateboarder for about eight years prior to starting my company. I grew up in Southern California, and the sports and the lifestyle that I did — I surf and I snowboard and skateboarded and did all of these things — so this is just kind of part of my upbringing. In a way action sports is really… although it's global, it's really about this kind of California lifestyle.

Bob: Yeah, very much so. So what are some of the brands that are under the Earth Products banner?

Chris: Well, Earth Products is made up of Adio Footwear, which is a shoe brand, and we sponsor athletes like Tony Hawk, Shaun White, Bam Margera, as well as many other skateboarders, surfers and snowboarders.

We do Planet Earth Apparel, which was the original brand that I started back in 1990, and we do a line of apparel that includes denim, t-shirts, wovens, knits and snowboard outerwear, and we also have a category called Planet Earth Green Label, which is a line of organic and sustainable-fiber clothing.

We have another outerwear brand called Holden Outerwear that is kind of a fashion-oriented premium snowboard outerwear brand, and that's it. That's the stable of brands that we're currently doing.

Bob: Great. Okay, so my first question in the 15-Minute Innovation Series here for you is, what's the biggest business-building idea that you're known for in the industry?

Chris: Well, for me it's not just a simple concept, but I think the fact that I'm a former professional athlete who is now a business person means a lot in this industry. It brings a lot of credibility to our brands.

But over the years, as an athlete, I experienced working with companies that didn't necessarily take the advice of some of the athletes that are out testing and doing R&D on the product. It seems like it would be an obvious solution for developing great products, but what happens in a lot of companies is they don't really have a system to accommodate that input.

So over the years, I've really developed processes that allow our companies to gather the feedback and information from the professional athletes and actually incorporate those ideas into the product design and the marketing of the brands. So consequently, our athletes that we sponsor are more than just endorsements. They really have shaped what the company is and who we are.

Bob: Excellent, and I know you kind of refer to that philosophy as "rider designed/rider influenced", where that direct input is coming in and you're designing things that you'd want to use as an athlete and that the athletes themselves want to use, instead of just the company coming in and saying, "Hey, here's this stuff we've developed, kids. It looks cool and you should buy it" and seeing if that floats or not.

Chris: And I think in our action-sports world, the market is driven by not only pros but also by the regional athletes who are out there doing it every day and who are performing at a top level. They're in the public eye, as a pro — maybe on a national level, things like the X Games and television and skateboard magazines — but you'll find them even on a local level, whether it's at a skateboard park or at local surf break or up on the mountain at a ski resort snowboarding.

And those kind of expert or professional-level people are using products day in and day out. You tend to get feedback from them that you just wouldn't get from your average consumer, and because of their position within their respective sports or lifestyles, they're very influential on the entire market.

It's really multi-faceted. It isn't just about products and it isn't just about performance, but it translates into marketing and lifestyle and brand image and all that helps shape an overall esthetic for the entire brand.

Bob: Now, if I understand this right then, the entire concept of athlete driven products primarily started out of your own experiences as a professional skater. You didn't feel that companies were creating the kind of clothing and shoes and things that you really wanted, and it was almost out of necessity that you decided to design your own. Is that correct?

Chris: Yeah, yeah, and early on, again, as an athlete, I was participating on an amateur level with skateboarding where I was literally a sponsored athlete and had contact with companies from 12 years old on. So as a young athlete, at first it was exciting to get some free stuff and have somebody ask you, "Hey, what do you think about this?"

But then eventually I started noticing that, for example, a company would come out with a skateboard-related product, but it was something that on a performance level just didn't work. I mean, it just really fell apart. Conceptually it was a neat idea, but there was no durability and it was going to be problematic.

And yet I watched that company, even though all of the athletes who tested it were reporting failure, I watched that company go ahead and launch the product and market it. And, of course, it ended up being a disaster. But it was early on and I thought, "Wow, I'm amazed that they did that anyway."

But what had happened is they were so far ahead in their development and product-launch cycle that even though I think they wanted the input from the athletes, and I think they would have liked to have reacted — it wasn't just that they ignored it completely — but things were already so far along that the opinions of the athletes were too late in the cycle to affect or prevent the products from coming out or making any improvement.

They did eventually adopt some of the recommendations we made for a second launch of the product but, of course, by then you've already kind of damaged the reputation of your product and really hurt its potential in the market.

That was years prior to me ever starting in business, but I think that experience really helped shape my direction as an entrepreneur and really helped determine what I wanted to do.

Also, when I did start Planet Earth, I was still a competing professional skateboarder and still using a lot of the products, so I had specific opinions about fit, function and durability and performance that, of course, I wanted to incorporate in. Those were all critical things in the launching of the Planet Earth products.

Bob: So in a way, your core idea almost fell on you out of necessity and experience. But now today, when you need to come up with a big idea to either solve a problem in your business or a new opportunity has come along that you want to take advantage of, what process do you use to come up with your ideas now?

Chris: Well, I think it's important to get all of the groups involved. As I said, in the beginning I think maybe I had a simplistic view of this, just as an athlete wanting a product to perform better or function better, but as a business owner, I understand that there's a lot of factors — price, esthetics, and of course all of the customer service and delivery and back-end functions of any company.

What I've seen is it's very important to assemble your team - your management team or your group that's involved in any process — and when you take a group and walk through what the process is or whatever the problem is that you're trying to improve or alter, many times your sales staff has one perspective, maybe your marketing staff has a different perspective, the design or development staff might have a different perspective, production, finance — so you wind up gaining many perspectives on it, rather than approaching it just from one angle, just from a product-development angle or just from a marketing angle.

By doing that, I think you're able to look at a problem or an issue or a process from many directions, and as a team, shape the direction that you ultimately go in or the changes that you make. I think it's critical that you have a specific goal in mind, as well, in order for that process to work.

Bob: Right, very much so. So then, is your preferred innovation style to work on an idea by yourself and then take it to the team, or work in a team format right from the beginning?

Chris: Well, there are kind of two answers to that. I do a lot of product design, and as a designer, from a creative perspective, I'm working by myself many times.

But as far as developing, for example, a design brief or what the design objective is, that usually comes out of a group forum, again with input from sales, marketing and finance, and that's how we determine a product-line plan.

But from there, it's up to an individual designer to create and interpret that information into a product that's sellable or creative in determining whatever it is — color or design or function — so it goes both ways.

But in business, I think approaching many of your processes of how things flow and whatever the problem is, I think many times I find it best and get the best results when we work as a team in that sense.

Bob: Great. We're just about to the end of our time, and I'm really taken by your process. It's really kind of multi-phased, that you bring in the team and you get the athlete input and input from your market and build that, but then it goes to a designer, and the designer has to take all that and bring it together.

But my one additional question is, after the designer does that, creates the design then does it go through scrutiny by the team again to make sure that it adhered to all the principles you wanted to be there in the first place?

Chris: Sure. It has to. In the end, we're a business. It's not just an art project or a personal expression, so I think you always have to have those kind of checks and balances, and that's how you're going to be most successful, in my business anyway.

Bob: Thanks. My final question for you today, Chris, is how do people find out more about Earth Products?

Chris: They can look us up on the web at www.earthproducts.com, and from there you can link to any one of our individual brands.

Bob: That's great. I really want to thank you for your time today, Chris. It's been a very informative 15 minutes. Your process is both organic and unique, and I appreciate you sharing it with us.

Chris: Thanks, Bob.