Le destin de Babolat

[jace112]

Buy It and Be Great

By JOE NOCERA, Published: August 19, 2007

“Psychology is very strong in tennis,” Eric Babolat was saying. He was speaking to me from France, where his family-owned company, Babolat, has its headquarters; at age 37, Eric is from the fifth generation of Babolats to run it.

How did Babolat become such a hot racket company so quickly? Luck, and some brilliant fantasy tennis.

True enough, psychology is important in any tennis match. But that's not really what Babolat was referring to. Rather, he was talking about the relationship between a player and his racket, how the right racket can bring to mind that line from “Sweeney Todd”: “At last, my right arm is complete!” And from a commercial point of view, he was talking about another kind of psychology, the kind that can cause a piece of sports equipment to become the “it” racket.

Eric should know. Though his company has been around since the dawn of modern tennis itself — his great-great-grandfather, who sold strings for musical instruments, created the first natural gut string in 1877 — it was only 13 years ago that his father, the late Pierre Babolat, made the decision to manufacture a racket. Six years later, in 2000, the company began selling its Pure Drive line of rackets in the United States.

In retrospect, this surely ranks as one of those Harvard Business School case-study moments. With the tennis industry in the dumps, and the racket business dominated by Head, Prince and Wilson, most people thought Pierre Babolat was nuts to get into rackets. Now he looks like a genius. From a standing start, the company has reached about 16 percent market share, and it is closing fast on Head. (Wilson is the leader, with just under 30 percent of the market, but it sells to big-box stores like WalMart, which Babolat refuses to do.) Since it introduced rackets, Babolat's revenue has more than tripled, to $117 million in 2006 sales. “They have taken tennis by storm,” says Mark Mason, the longtime proprietor of Mason's Tennis Mart in Manhattan. “I've never seen anything like it.”

If you play tennis, or even just watch the pros, you've surely noticed the Babolat phenomenon. The rackets are everywhere — at your local courts, and at this year's United States Open, where a huge number of players will be using them.

Babolat will tell you that its secret sauce is its patented Woofer technology, which it says keeps the ball on the strings a split-second longer, imparting a trampoline-like rebound. Others note the rackets' “good looks,” with their clean and distinctive colored lines (depending on the model). But if I were writing the Harvard case study, I would stress something else: pure dumb luck. Sometimes, as the old saying goes, it's better to be lucky than good.

Do you know about James Blake and Dunlop? Years ago, Blake began using Dunlop rackets, eventually signing an endorsement deal with the company. But in 2004 he had his annus horribilis — the broken neck, the death of his father, the shingles — and Dunlop dropped him. The following year, when Blake staged his remarkable resurgence, he signed with Prince. The problem was that Blake could never get comfortable with his Prince racket. There were even rumors that Blake was painting Dunlop rackets to make them look like Prince rackets. Finally, this past May, psychology won: he officially returned to Dunlop.

The moral of the story should be obvious: when a player finds a “stick” he really likes, he is loath to switch — even when someone will pay him millions to do so. For racket companies, there is another moral: the earlier you can get your racket into the hands of young, promising players, the more likely they are to keep using it as they rise through the ranks.

Each of the four big racket manufacturers, including Babolat, has a grass-roots program for getting promising juniors to use its rackets. Golf and ski companies have their own junior programs, but only the elite of the elites get free equipment; in tennis, the companies compete to distribute rackets to not only the top 20 juniors in every country, who usually get them free, but the top 100, who can buy rackets at a reduced price.

Why? Because tennis marketers are convinced that when people watch good players, they want to try their rackets. “A player who is ranked 80th nationally could be the best player in some city or some big tennis club,” says Max Brownlee, who started up Babolat's United States operation in 2000. And when juniors see higher-ranked juniors using a racket, they often want to try it, to see if it raises their game as well.

Most juniors eventually flame out, but some turn pro — and thus create another marketing opportunity. While companies build ad campaigns around top players like Andre Agassi (Head) or Roger Federer (Wilson), club players also notice what racket their favorite player is using and often buy an amateur version of it. (The pros' rackets are rarely identical to those sold at retail; pros usually customize their rackets.) Which brings us back to Babolat.

Babolat came to the racket business with a big advantage: it had a lock on the market for natural gut strings, which are what most serious players want to use. Babolat strings are in such demand that the company has never needed to offer endorsement deals and has given them away only in the rarest of circumstances. (Pete Sampras was one of the few players who received free strings.) So when Babolat started its grass-roots program, it had the lure of free or reduced-price strings to get juniors to use its rackets.

And it had luck. In 1999, a year before Babolat came to the United States and began signing up juniors, a Babolat executive named Luca Appino started talking to a tennis coach named Tarik Benhabiles about having his 17-year-old player use Babolat. Appino, who no longer works for the company, and Benhabiles, who no longer coaches the player, were old friends. At the time, the only pro using Babolat was the Spaniard Carlos Moya, from Majorca. He was “a good-looking, flamboyant dude,” in the words of tennis agent Ken Meyerson, but not someone who was going to move a lot of product outside Europe.

Benhabiles's player was an American junior almost no one had heard of, Andy Roddick. “I didn't know much about him,” concedes Brownlee, who at the time was working for Prince. Back then, Roddick didn't have a big reputation; in 1999, he lost in the first round of two of the junior grand slam tournaments. Volkl was the only other company willing to give Roddick a racket, but he chose Babolat because of his coach's relationship with Appino.

A year later everything changed. Roddick won three out of the four boys' majors and became the No. 1 junior in the world. Other juniors took notice, especially of his monster serve. Some actually phoned Babolat in France, to see if they too could get “Andy's racket.” “If he had been out there with a broomstick,” says Rick Macci, who coached Roddick between ages 9 and 14, “I think people would have wanted to try a broomstick.”

Over the next three years, Roddick was the hottest thing in tennis, an electrifying player with a crowd-pleasing personality. And — how blessed can Babolat be? — he was American. If you are going to sell rackets in America, you need an American star.

Needless to say, it wasn't long before Babolat was doing something it doesn't often do: paying Roddick to endorse its rackets. His agent, Meyerson, negotiated a small six-figure deal in 2000, shortly after Roddick turned pro, and then a much larger deal in 2003, right around the time Roddick won the United States Open. That deal nets him millions a year. Would Roddick have changed rackets had Babolat low-balled him? Probably not. But the company decided not to take that risk. A happy endorser is always better than a grouchy one.

Eric Babolat was running the company by then. His father, Pierre, had died in 1998, in a plane crash returning from the United States Open. Pierre got to see Carlos Moya win the French Open in 1998 with a Babolat racket, but he died well before Babolat took tennis by storm. “I regret the most for my father that he never got to see the success,” Eric Babolat says. “He was vindicated after his death.”

Roddick is still a hugely important endorser for Babolat, even as he has slipped in the rankings and Federer and Rafael Nadal have come to dominate the men's tour. He has a signature racket, called Pure Drive Roddick, which earns him royalties. When Eric Babolat decided to get into the highly competitive tennis shoe business a few years ago, he quickly got Roddick to agree to wear the shoes and signed him up as an endorser. Today, if you go to the Babolat display in any tennis store in the United States, you'll see ads for Roddick and his racket and shoes.

But you'll also see ads for someone else: Rafael Nadal. And here you can only shake your head in wonder. Nadal was missed by the grass-roots programs of the big racket makers, yet wound up with Babolat.

Why? Because he comes from Majorca. His idol is none other than the original Babolat man, Carlos Moya. Is it any surprise, then, that Nadal would use the same racket as Moya? Not to anyone who markets tennis rackets.

Today, at age 21, Nadal is one of the great forces in tennis, the one true rival to Federer. The pace and spin with which he hits the ball generate the same kind of awe as Roddick's service. That in turn leads juniors — and lots of club players — to the Babolat Aeropro, which is Nadal's racket. Not long ago, Babolat locked up Nadal with a 10-year deal, for a multimillion-dollar sum that makes him among the top racket endorsers (obviously Roddick is in the same category).

Sales of the Babolat Aeropro, Brownlee told me, are 18 months ahead of projections. Then he let out a small chuckle and added, “What can you say?”

Harvard Business School couldn't have put it better.

[fabiana]

Pas mal comme article.

Ils ont eu de la chatte un peu quand même (il en faut), mais ont bien su saisir les opportunités (c'est plus difficile).

Et si Roddick était parti chez Volkl???

[Ambitious]

est ce que quelqu'un aurrait la gentillesse de faire un rapide topo en français svp

on va dire que l'anglais n'est pas mon point fort

[unrienamamuse]

est ce que quelqu'un aurrait la gentillesse de faire un rapide topo en français svp

on va dire que l'anglais n'est pas mon point fort

+1, siouplait

[joanaschop]

Pas mal comme article.

Ils ont eu de la chatte un peu quand même (il en faut), mais ont bien su saisir les opportunités (c'est plus difficile).

Et si Roddick était parti chez Volkl???

moi je dirais plutot : et si Carlos Moya n'avait pas joué en babolat ? (alors pas de Nadal jouant en Babolat, rien que ça c'est enorme)

[Ambitious]

moi je dirais plutot : et si Carlos Moya n'avait pas joué en babolat ? (alors pas de Nadal jouant en Babolat, rien que ça c'est enorme)

en fait Roddick va faire l'inverse d'Henri (Leconte ) : il fait sa carrière en Babolat et ensuite pour son après "pro" , pour le circuit des vieux quoi il passera ches Voelkl