My Role

• Business Model Development

• Business Plan Creation

• Market Validation

• Marketing Strategy

• Business Strategy

• Branding

The Challenge 

To meet Anta’s growth goals, both within China and abroad, they recognized how important it was to launch a significant program in the United States.

Several Chinese athletic brands had recently failed to launch in the States so we knew that we had to do something different. Anta’s current track of relying on NBA athletes to promote the brand would be a failed strategy as it would be impossible to beat Nike at its own game. To approach the US market successfully would require a robust and novel strategy. 

The Solution

I helped to develop a Millennial focused brand road map that served a segment that was largely overlooked. 

To help create the initial business concept, I organized a multi day workshop with some of the top industry experts in attendance. During this process we were able to synthesize the market opportunities, design solutions to meet those needs, and develop a business model to deliver the value to our customers. 

After the initial meeting we had six weeks until we had to present our business model, brand strategy and marketing strategy to the CEO and founder of Anta. We had several critical constraints that highly influenced how I proceeded with this project: the cultural and language barrier. Knowing these constraints I felt it was imperative to create a presentation that could visually communicate these ideas. 

To help with this project I brought on a branding expert to help flush out some of the brand concepts and a video production company to help articulate the opportunity we saw and connect emotionally with the CEO. Additionally, I worked with an illustrator and architect to render some of the marketing concepts and of course invested in translation services to assure the presentation accurately conveyed our ideas in Chinese. 

I was responsible the the visual direction, managing the development of our presentation, managing our contractors and organizing our teams’ thoughts into a single cohesive story. By the end of the six weeks we had a beautiful presentation complete with a three minute video, business financials and strategy to make the business feasible.



Results

I traveled with the team to China to deliver and present our business model to the CEO. The CEO himself said that it was the most exciting opportunity he was ever presented.   

Before fully committing to the vision he wanted a flushed out business plan with more details and market validation. The result was a 80 page business plan that I was responsible for producing in a month and was assisted by the original team. The development of this plan coincided with a market validation program I oversaw with a team of marketing students from CAL Long Beach. They ran tests to help validate our initial assumptions of the market opportunity and presented various marketing tactics targeted toward Millennials.  

My efforts with the project concluded after the plan was delivered. It was disclosed to me that while the CEO was excited about the new business venture they were not ready to assume the risk at the time despite being the most innovative and robust plan their team had received.