Jamie Salter, CEO of Authentic Brands Group, says the company’s new acquisition, Reebok, is hitting the ground running

When we sat down with Jamie Salter at ShopTalk in Las Vegas the other day, along with jeans, an untucked white button-down shirt, and a black sweater, he wore a pair of white Reebok classics, the kind that were big in the brand’s heyday in the ’80s. They looked like he just took them out of the box that morning. But Salter doesn’t just own Reeboks. He owns Reebok.

Or at least partly owns it. Salter is chairman and CEO of Authentic Brands Group, which he founded in 2010. ABG owns or co-owns dozens of brands, many acquired after filing for bankruptcy, like Forever 21, Brooks Brothers, and Aéropostale.

In August, ABG announced the purchase of Reebok from Adidas for a reported $2.46 billion, considerably less than the $3.8 billion Adidas paid for the brand in 2006. The deal, which closed in February, makes Reebok the biggest asset in ABG’s portfolio, according to Salter. And it comes at a fortuitous time: With Nike pursuing more of a DTC strategy and pulling many shoes out of Foot Locker and other retailers, Reebok and other brands are hoping to, ahem, shoehorn their way in.

There’s much crystal-balling about when ABG will go public, having come close in 2021, when the company filed paperwork with regulators, but instead ended up taking in $3.5 billion in capital from CVC Capital Partners and HPS Investment Partners. Salter told us he currently plans for the company to “go public sometime in ’23.”

But when we sat down with him, we focused mostly on the retail strategy for Reebok. Because while the pair Salter laced up that morning looked like they had plenty of traction, the big question is: How much traction is there for Reebok itself?

As you were acquiring Reebok, you said you wanted to “let Reebok be Reebok.” Can you talk about what you meant?

Reebok’s got incredible history and heritage and silhouettes. And if you look at Adidas, they buy Reebok really to understand what was going on in the US because Reebok was in the pole position and doing much better than Adidas at the time.

So if I was running Adidas, I would have done exactly sort of what Adidas did, which was they looked at lots of information. And when it came to basketball, they wanted Adidas to be in the basketball business. They didn’t want Reebok to necessarily be in the basketball business. And Reebok had great endorsements. They switch those endorsements over to Adidas. When they had great league deals or team deals, they switch those over to Adidas.

We need Reebok to be Reebok and let Reebok bring back the Iverson [shoe model] in a big way, bring back the Shaq [shoe model] in a big way. And really focus on what Reebok was good at, which was product.

So if you’d been Adidas at the time, you would have done the same thing?

Look at Adidas’s business today. It’s doing pretty good, right?

But you also were saying Adidas was kind of pillaging Reebok.

So, for sure, they borrowed the best of the best from Reebok. But they did it to build the Adidas company much bigger than it was at the time. So net-net, it was a very smart investment.

We bought the business in August, we closed in February. But we’re up 20%. The reason why I believe Reebok is up 20% is letting Reebok do what they want. Whereas the management team [under Germany-based Adidas] had a lot of guardrails. And I see, right? I’m sort of living it. Now I go, “Why aren’t you making a lot of sandals?” They don’t have a good answer, other than Germany didn’t approve.

Because Adidas did so many slides that they didn’t want Reebok to do slides?

Yeah, but it’s not that Adidas said no. You’re an Adidas salesman, you’re also the Reebok salesman. So you go into the store and you sell to JD [Sports]. They only buy so much from a vendor. And I’m the salesman selling, you’re the vendor, and the salesman sells you nine pairs of Adidas and one pair of Reebok. They spent 55 minutes of the hour meeting on Adidas, and five minutes on Reebok.

And that’s the reality of how that was? Those guys were repping both brands when they were talking to retailers?

100%.

And that’s not happening with you? In a meeting with a retailer, your person’s not repping Reebok along with Tretorn, since that’s also an ABG shoe brand?

We went and partnered with a number of best-in-class partners globally. So [SPARC Group, Reebok’s new core operating partner in the US, doesn’t] have another brand in their portfolio that they’re selling, right? They’re only selling Reebok. So they get an hour meeting with JD, and we’re gonna sell you for one hour. We’re gonna speak to you about Rebook and not speak with you about anything else.

You’ve worked with Shaquille O’Neal for a long time. Was he a big advocate for this acquisition and how is he involved with the brand going forward?

First of all, Shaq is my partner. Shaq and I are 50-50 partners on the Shaq brand, from A to Z. And we did that deal in 2015. So he’s actually next to me, and he’s also the second largest independent shareholder of ABG. Now, obviously, the private-equity guys own more than we do. But he is the second-largest independent shareholder. And Shaq gets, you know, something in his head: “I want to buy Reebok.” That was six years ago. And every week, he would call me and say, “Did we buy Reebok?” And I would say, “If we bought Reebok, you would know.”

And the funny thing is, Shaq’s been with Reebok since day one. And that’s an asset that he just loves, and is very close to. And he really wanted to buy Reebok. So he was for sure pushing me. We didn’t buy it just because Shaq wanted to buy it, we bought it because we thought it was one of the best assets, you know, really, on the globe. And to this day, it’s the biggest asset ABG owns.

And how involved will Shaq be going forward?

He will be involved from an endorsement standpoint, like he has been—but much bigger. We’re gonna really take the Shaq and the Iverson [Reebok shoe models] in the basketball world in a big way. So we’ll have a bunch of exclusives at Foot Locker, which will be very, very cool.

With Foot Locker, the big news has been Nike withdrawing so many products to focus on more of a DTC strategy. How important is that development for Reebok?

Look, timing’s everything. Nike pulling back is definitely good for us. Nike has made a decision that they think that they’re being overdistributed. And the way that Nike will increase their e-commerce business would be by cutting off more wholesalers. So we are taking advantage of that, where, you know, they’re only gonna buy so much on the Adidas side, they’re only gonna buy so much Skechers, or Hoka, or Crocs. So at the end of the day, by Nike doing what they’re doing, you know, Reebok is definitely getting their fair share of that business. Foot Locker is going with a lot more SKUs.

How important is just the visibility alone of being on the wall at Foot Locker?

I think whether it’s Foot Locker, it’s Shoe Palace, it’s JD, it’s StockX—they're important retailers, and they’re trendsetters. So being in those particular retailers is very important. For the brands, it’s not the end all, do all, right? I mean, you can still live without having those retailers, but having those retailers is a big bonus. It’s no different than Macy’s, right? When you’re selling to other retailers, the first question they ask you is, “Are you in Macy’s?” You can live without Macy’s. But it’s a lot easier to live with them.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.