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Li Ning is a former Chinese gymnast and entrepreneur who founded the sportswear company Li-Ning. Photo: Simon Song

Chinese Olympian Li Ning on starting a sportswear empire – and the challenges of taking on Nike and Adidas

  • Li is an Olympic triple gold medallist who created sportswear brand Li-Ning three decades ago after retiring from gymnastics
  • He talks about the challenges of breaking into the global market and appealing to millennials
Fashion

When Olympic gymnast Li Ning founded his eponymous sportswear brand in 1990, he was a 26-year-old sportsman at a crossroads in his remarkable career. Li had won six medals at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles – the first games China had taken part in since 1952 – and had come to be known as the Prince of Gymnastics.

He didn’t win any medals at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. While it spelt the end of his career as a gymnast, it was also the beginning of a new chapter that would become as rewarding as his exploits in the fitness field.

It has become common for athletes to establish clothing lines or collaborate with sportswear giants for special collections, but three decades ago, when Li had the idea of starting a brand, it was a novel concept, especially in China.

In 1989 China’s leader Deng Xiaoping retired after initiating a number of groundbreaking economic reforms. It was also the year of the democracy movement, which ended with the bloody crackdown on protesters around Tiananmen Square.

China’s Olympic triple gold medallist, Li Ning, on the vaulting horse at an exhibition of the Chinese national gymnastic team’s gymnastic skills at the Hong Kong Coliseum. Photo: M. Chan

It was amid this charged political climate that Li decided to turn a new page and dip his toes in the business world.

“There was no concrete plan behind it, it was just timing,” says Li, 56, of his early days as an entrepreneur, speaking from his spacious Li-Ning Company headquarters office on the outskirts of Beijing.

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“After the 1988 Olympics, I felt that I didn’t have the perfect ending to my career, so it was time for me to think about the next step. At the time, the CEO of a very famous sports drink company [Jianlibao] asked me if I wanted to join them as an ambassador, and that’s how I entered the business world. I was the ambassador and I was also working in marketing inside the company.”

The Li-Ning campus, as the company refers to its headquarters, is a sprawling complex. It houses a state-of-the-art sports club with a 25-metre swimming pool, 400-metre running track, indoor sports halls and a gym.

Today, dozens of company employees, most of them millennials, are enjoying games of badminton and basketball during their lunch break.

Li-Ning shoes and jerseys. Photo: Simon Song

The interior of the complex is scattered with works of art that include calligraphy, ancient Chinese landscapes and sports-inspired pieces commissioned for the site. A hallway leading to Li’s office, where he keeps fitness machines for a quick workout, is lined with displays of some of Li-Ning’s most popular sneakers, dating back to the early 1990s.

Clad in casual clothes from his own label, Li doesn’t resemble your average high-flying executive, but as the chairman and acting CEO of Li-Ning, he’s one of China’s most influential and most admired entrepreneurs. It’s not unusual for people on the street to stop him to have their Li-Ning jerseys or caps signed, or to praise his achievements as an athlete and self-made businessman.

“I started the company at the same time that I started a gymnastic school in Foshan [in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong] because I wanted to inspire younger generations to exercise, not only for my Li-Ning products … [but because] I wanted them to learn the spirit of sport,” Li explains. “Everything was based on my experience as an athlete so everything should go back to the athletic DNA.”

Li-Ning Company headquarters office on the outskirts of Beijing. Photo: Simon Song

Li listed his company on the Hong Kong stock exchange in June 2004, raising US$70 million. Fifteen years later, the brand boasts more than 6,000 shops across China, and in the last two years has embarked on a revamp of its image that is starting to bear fruit.

It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, however. Li-Ning has had its fair share of ups and downs throughout its 30-year existence.

Known as a brand for basic sportswear and sneakers, Li-Ning has played second fiddle to giants such as Nike and Adidas. That’s in spite of a long-standing sponsorship of NBA athletes including Dwyane Wade and its marketing success during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where Li lit the cauldron at the opening ceremony.

Li flies towards the cauldron of the Beijing Olympic Games. Photo: Xinhua

In 2010 the company tried to expand outside China, opening a US office and store in Portland, the home turf of Nike. The project did not go as planned and the company eventually abandoned plans to enter the US market.

As someone who had no prior business or design experience when he started out, Li says “the most difficult part is when you have the product in your head and [you want] to bring that to life in an actual product and then sell it to your consumers”.

Li has experienced first-hand how those consumers have radically evolved from when he started making shoes in his late 20s.

A staff member shows a Li-Ning shoe tailor-made for former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal. Photo: Simon Song

“One of the biggest changes is that 30 years ago people didn’t really require [sportswear with specific] performance functions, so basic sportswear was worn in all occasions,” Li says. “But now, people who run wear running shoes, and [there are] basketball shoes for basketball, and badminton shoes and even ping-pong shoes.

“Look at the new generation. They wear sportswear not just for fitness but also for fun and going out, so they’re very sophisticated and know what they want.”

In spite of the competition from the US behemoths, Li says that in recent years consumers in China have come to embrace home-grown labels, which works in his favour.

Li-Ning socks are pictured at a showcase room at Li-Ning Company. Photo: Simon Song

“Foreign brands are still very popular but the younger generations are very different from people born in the ’50s or ’60s, who saw really hard days,” he says. “The new generations were born with smartphones and are very smart, and grew up with a new understanding of Chinese culture and Chinese brands and appreciate them because they’re linked to their origins.”

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Li himself is a fervent advocate of Chinese culture. Besides cycling and swimming, he devotes his down time to calligraphy (some of his works are displayed in the headquarters) because, he says, it gives him a better understanding of Chinese heritage and traditions.

In 2018, the company created a premium line, first unveiled during New York Fashion Week, which includes items such as sweatshirts and T-shirts adorned with traditional Chinese characters. The pieces have been a hit with young consumers, giving the brand a street credibility it never had before.

A Li-Ning sweatshirt shown at New York Fashion Week.

“It’s not just about pride in Chinese culture, but we want young people to know more about Chinese language … they don’t really know a lot about Chinese characters and calligraphy, so we use Chinese characters and combine them with the sports element and the fashion element, and that’s what consumers like,” Li explains.

The line has also gained a degree of popularity among international retailers, including Selfridges and Footpatrol in London, but Li says China continues to be the main focus.

“We do have a plan to expand globally, but for now the top priority is to do a good job in China … the brand expansion will mainly focus on Asia, and other countries, too, but a lot of our products are already sold internationally,” Li says.

Li has been in the sportswear industry for the last three decades. Photo: Simon Song

The company says it has plans to open a store for its premium line in Macau and eventually in Hong Kong.

Li is aware that the resurgence of his company is testament to a surge in Chinese pride and a new-found appreciation of Chinese brands, not just in his home country but also around the world.

With companies such as Huawei giving global giants like Apple a run for their money, Li-Ning could perhaps one day become a Chinese brand of global scope, something that no apparel company from China has so far managed to achieve.

A Li-Ning top shown at New York Fashion Week.

Li’s ambition to make Li-Ning a global brand is clear, but he would rather talk about the functionality of its sneakers and why “for a brand like Li-Ning, performance and function come first and then we also make the product look good”.

Asked for the best piece of advice he could give a young entrepreneur trying to make it big in today’s China, Li says: “When I started the company at 26 it was really learning by doing, but the most important thing is to have a dream and then the willingness to devote yourself to that dream.”

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