So I'm here with Heiko Schaefer and Sylvain Duranton.
Thank you both in advance for sharing your expertise.
So here we are in Davos.
Heiko, you are running a sports, a very famous sports apparel
company and Sylvain, you're at BCG X.
So what brings you together?
So Heiko is an alum and we are super proud of what he has been
doing.
Heiko, you've been turning around some of the most iconic
brands in the world.
Now you're turning around Mammut, which is super iconic
for us.
in X. We love the brand, we wear the swag.
We have lots of appetite for the for the coolness of the brand.
We're in Switzerland.
This is a Swiss company, a very successful Swiss company, which
is exporting in a super-challenging business.
You're strong in innovation, in sustainability, in AI.
There's a lot to learn from larger companies on the secret
sauce you're bringing to Mammut.
So looking forward to hear a bit from you on those things.
Well, secret sauce, So you mentioned three important
elements of why we've survived not only for 163 years, but also
really sort of, to some extent, maybe shaped the industry.
And as you said, innovation has always been at the core of what
we do, right?
We're a mountain performance company.
We keep people warm, safe, and dry under the harshest
conditions.
And over the last 160 years, we've really tried to pioneer in
many areas, right?
If you go back to the very beginning, launching the first
dynamic climbing rope, but today it's still, there's still a lot
around product innovation.
For instance, you know, launching safety products,
right, avalanche beacons that's evolved with every generation to
keep people safe in, in an avalanche situation, right?
And we just launched another product here, we are launching
our Pinnacle collection, which is for hardcore mountaineers
that go up to you know, seven, eight thousand meters of
altitude, reworked that for four years of the development cycle,
decarbonized the collection, but also made it lighter and keeping
people warmer.
So a lot of the innovation that we do is in product.
Of course that's where the core of the company is, but there is
a lot also around process innovation.
And you mentioned AI.
For us, AI is an enabler to become better in the way we work
everyday, not only to become more efficient, that is always
part of it, but also to be more effective, right?
So we use AI, for instance, in the early stages of our creation
and research process to just, you know, ideate and then come
up with new ideas, color detection, color-trend detection
and so on, and to have more targeted messages towards the
consumers.
So as you found, when you are working with a business leader
such as Heiko, what do you say?
OK, these are the best practices and I wish I saw more of them.
I think on super-important best practice that we hear a lot
about here in Davos is this notion of trust.
And especially working on AI, we know that trust is super
important.
Of course, there is regulation, which is super important to
build trust, but most companies, they would go beyond regulation
because regulation sometimes is following the agenda and the
innovation.
So I'd like to to insist on this one.
And maybe Heiko, you can share with us this trust and
responsibility culture that is so strong in Mammut, because as
you say, this is about the safety of, of the mountaineers.
How do you build that culture?
How do you keep it alive?
Well, there's a lot about, I would say, Swiss engineering
culture in a way that goes back to the early days of the
company, right?
We're obsessed with quality and longevity of the product and we
craft products that just must not fail because lives are
dependent on that.
I'd say in the context of AI, we spent a lot of efforts over the
last maybe 18 months on, on the one side, setting guardrails to
some extent.
You need to have a certain governance in place on what you
can use and how you work with publicly available tools, or
which tools you need to basically build internally and
which data are used.
But at the same point in time, we really actively build
capabilities within the organization and encourage
people to experiment.