Minter Dialogue with Joe Middleton

Joe Middleton, former President of Levi’s EMEA and CEO of Canterbury, shares his journey from sports enthusiast to apparel industry veteran. We discuss his new venture, Pulco Studios, a premium padel apparel brand addressing the sport’s unique challenges. Joe reveals insights on crafting brand culture, innovating with fabrics, and navigating intergenerational markets. We explore Pulco’s global expansion strategy and the addictive nature of padel. Joe offers a fresh perspective on blending sports heritage with fashion-forward thinking, aiming to define padel’s distinct look and feel. The conversation touches on distribution strategies, product innovation, and the exciting frontier of this rapidly growing sport.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Joe Middleton and Pulco:

• Check out the Pulco site here
• Find/follow Joe Middleton on LinkedIn
• Pulco on Instagram

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Joe Middleton, lovely to have you on my podcast and to be part of the Bandeja article that we’re going to write up together. You and I met face to face in Barcelona at the Padel World Summit and we, we talked about what you’re up to, your initiative within padel By Gum, you’ve had a really wonderful career. Let’s. So, as I like to always begin, Joe, a little chat about. Who is Joe Middleton?

Joe Middleton: Well, good question and first, thanks for having me. Okay. Who is Joe Middleton? Joe Middleton grew up playing sports a lot at a high level.

Minter Dial: Can we add? Can we add?

Joe Middleton: Eventually it became quite high level. I played pretty decent cricket and, and also field hockey to sort of junior international level. And because of the sport, I went to Loughborough University, which is, anybody who knows it, is, you know, incredibly great for sport and I played both sports for the university and that led me to want to work in the sports industry. At the time, Adidas were the biggest name on the block and tried everything to find a way to do that, including learning to speak German as part of my course. In the end, through speaking to headhunters, I did end up in the apparel industry. And I ended up by accident, not in a sports company, but working for Levi’s Jeans, Levi Strauss and Company.

Minter Dial: Bunch of cowboys.

Joe Middleton: Bunch of cowboys. And absolutely not. They’re very different to that. They big cowboy heritage and gold rush miners heritage, but a very, A great product, great brand and great company and we’re years ahead of their time in terms of creating culture and creating values. And it all goes back to the owners, the Haas family, they, they were great. I did 25 years with them all up, joined in London. They moved me around from London to San Francisco, then to Auckland, New Zealand, Sweden, Stockholm, Amsterdam. And then finally my, my last job with them was in Brussels running EMEA. And so, that’s. They love a grand title in American companies. So, I was the president of Europe, Middle east and Africa. And then after that I, I left Levi’s because I got the chance to finally get back into sport and I became the CEO, the global CEO of Canterbury, of New Zealand, the rugby brand. And then I retired. So, that’s me in a nutshell.

Minter Dial: Love it, Joe. I wanted to stick with the Levi’s a second because this idea, I also got a chance to work for an organisation around the world in many countries. And you mentioned the power of the founders. The challenge, of course, is about having that culture being disseminated into other cultures, whether it’s an Asian culture or an Australian culture, which is different from the English culture and so on and so forth. And so, you who had this opportunity, especially with Levi’s, but also with Canterbury, we’ll get into that. How did you find the. Was the culture as homogeneous as it could be within the Levi’s organisation or. And how did you try to craft that in your various positions?

Joe Middleton: We had 100, 140 years of history and it was still owned by the same family and it had been passed down from generation to generation. And yet we did all the usual corporate things, we codified and. And put plaques on the wall with all the here’s the vision and the mission and. And the values didn’t really need to do that. We were, again, we were ahead of the game. And what was the most important thing was it. It comes from the leaders and flows down. And if you’ve got leaders, the owners in this case, then they hire leaders, senior management. And if you. It is the cliche of walk or the talk, good or bad culture comes from great leadership or bad leadership and the next level down to you will mimic what they want to please the boss, they want to keep the job, they want to get a pay rise, they want to get promoted, they want to be motivated at work. And by the way, if you’ve got the right values, is it makes work, the workplace, a more pleasant place to work. So, yeah, was. Was it. Did it manifest itself slightly differently in Asia versus a Europe or America? Yeah, possibly. Maybe the, you know, the way you would say thank you, the way you would present your business card in Asia is different. But the core values. No, there are probably half a dozen. And of course, the most important one of all is treat others as you wish to be treated yourself.

Minter Dial: The golden rule.

Joe Middleton: Yeah. And that guides a lot. A lot. And if you understand that and you behave that way and you lead that way, then the rest will follow.

Minter Dial: I suppose having the reality, those type of statements is that you also need to shine a light on when it’s not happening. The consequences of not following that need to happen as well, as opposed to just recommending, oh, look, he treated somebody else as he liked to be treated. But when it doesn’t happen, then that needs to be invoked so that there’s a feeling of it’s both sides.

Joe Middleton: Yeah. And. And in that era, Levis in that period, it was rare, but. And it was never made into a big deal. If there was a misdemeanour by a senior management person, I kind of hardly think of any, but, you know, they. They’d slowly not be Seen again or no, but it almost never needed to happen. And, and by the way, you know, we, we, we worked in all cultures, all around the world and I never sat in a meeting, external or internal, where, you know, any kind of bad stuff, you know, bribery and corruption with dodgy suppliers or bribing customers or whatever. Never, not once in any meeting. Just didn’t. And nobody sat around saying this is something we don’t do. It just was the way it was.

Minter Dial: There’s one other thing that you and I spoke about previously before we recorded, which is the price difference. And that is, that’s a tricky thing to have when you talk about having a consistent brand. For example, I was running Redken, the shampoos and haircutter for salons. And in the United States we are considered a sort of a, a little bit upscale but basically a more mid market type proposition. We went overseas and we would have two and a half, three times the price for the same bottle of shampoo, which put us in more of a luxury category. And that kind of speaks to a breakdown, the schizophrenia to your brand when you’re trying to be luxury in one hand and your main mothership is lower and not thinking about how to position for higher end. And that was certainly a challenge that I went through. And you were saying at Levi’s that was more the case because I know, I know we all know Levi’s great genes, the 501s and all that, but in the US it’s a very genie market, so to speak, much more common to have and whereas in the rest of the world, as you were telling me, it was higher end. How did you manage that?

Joe Middleton: So, if you’ve got, you know, very. Nowadays you have to have global pricing and it’s got closer and closer and it’s because it’s more visible through the Internet and E commerce shopping. You can see what the price is in different places back in those same times. Yeah, Levi’s had been around in the American market for 140 years and was being sold in mainstream and some low priced shops. And it was a utilitarian product in probably the Midwest, selling jeans for maybe 50 bucks in Paris, Tokyo and London, $100 plus. And it was a fashion garment worn by David Bowie and so on. So, how did you handle that? If you have more than a 15 discrepancy you will create a black market or a grey market. So, we sold you Levi’s Europe sold about 10 million pairs of 501s in Europe. We equally had coming into Europe either by the suitcase trade. Dad goes on a business trip, comes back with 10 pairs for the family or organised collecting products from lots of stores down in Texas and Stone, and then sending containers over. The true grey market we had against the 10 million we sold properly, if you like, from the European organisation. We. We saw. Just. Just a moment. I can’t believe it. My TV’s been on pause for a while and it’s. Come on. I’m sorry, we’re going to have to.

Minter Dial: We’re going to take a television break at this moment and talk about other things. But it’s interesting as. As you’re talking, Joe, just to fill in the gap, is the. The nature of that grey market. Because in l’ Oreal, or at least at Redken, anyway, this was a tremendous issue and we went. I was just saying how we went through an enormous effort at l’ Oreal to start tracing the product so that we could identify which market it came from. And that was, you know, the expense, sort of the expense of doing business to keep an eye on where the source was and then we could penalise. Because the key point in the United States is we had to have a contract that was broken in order for that to be punishable and to stop it at the source where it, you know, someone in the United States or in the North America who buying it in the us, pricing at distributor levels, then manages to trade it out and find a distribution channel out in Africa or wherever else.

Joe Middleton: Yeah. Spent a lot of time working on that with.

Minter Dial: I bet you did.

Joe Middleton: Expensive law firms. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, we. If. I don’t know if I finished, it was we. We sold 10 million directly and we had another further 5 million units coming in on the grain.

Minter Dial: You talk about dilution of market, deletion of brand. Let’s switch just before we finish, when you start getting into polka, which is the nature of what we want to talk about. But now talking about Canterbury, beautiful brand for any rugby player. They. They know it. How much you talked about the family impacting the culture of Levi’s. How much did rugby impact the culture of Canterbury? Were there things that were specifically rugby induced elements to the culture?

Joe Middleton: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And. And yes, it had started out way back when as a family business, but that it went away from the family, I don’t know, 50 years prior to when I got there, but, boy, did it have a culture. And it was absolutely rugby inspired. And the company had, you know, all our sponsorships were pro teams. We had about 20 pro teams all around the world, four or five international teams. Well, no more actually if you included the Fijis and Samos and so on. But so, we employed a lot of individual sponsorships. We employed a lot of ex rugby players. Sean Fitzpatrick was one of our ambassador. Ambassador in the UK.

Minter Dial: A good old Kiwi.

Joe Middleton: Yeah, he is. And absolutely it was inundated in the, in the culture of the place. Fair play, you know, you don’t argue with a ref. You play straight. No. And you give it, you give it your all, you know, rugby breeds good people, I believe.

Minter Dial: Oh, amen.

Joe Middleton: From a non rugby player.

Minter Dial: I, I adore that and appreciate your words because it actually made my endorphins go fun in my head. You know that feeling of yeah, so sweet. All right Joe, you have this illustrious career, some great sporting achievements in field hockey and in cricket and then you retire and you go off and you sail ships, you play golf and you get a telephone call or something that must have sparked you out of retirement. How did that happen?

Joe Middleton: Yeah, funny story. I think so. I have three kids. They’re in the, the eldest mid-30s now and the eldest daughter Sophie married and has brought along a couple of grandkids. Now the whole family gets together every two weeks and for a Sunday lunch which my wife orchestrates and I am finding myself sitting next to my son in law married to Sophie and he turns and asks me over, over lunch. Hey Joe, do you mind if I ask you a favour? With a group of friends we’re founding a padel club. This is two years ago. padel was far less developed back in the UK Then of course we’re doing this padel club in, in central London and it’s going to be called padel Social Club and it’s going to be pretty cool. It’s going to be the Soho House of padel clubs. That’s what we want to do because we’ve all played padel on holiday and there’s nowhere to play back in London.

Minter Dial: And just for, just for people who don’t know, Soho House. What. How would you describe Soho House?

Joe Middleton: Soho House started in London as a, as a social drinking club and food. It’s pre premium, it’s younger than a sort of traditional old school English old boys club. It’s for age group target, late 20s to 39 or something. I would guess they’ve got younger and older but that’s the core and cool people, they, they don’t let you go in, in with a tie and a suit even if you’ve been in the city. You’ve got to take the jacket and tie off. It’s slightly more relaxed it’s, you know, it costs some money to be a member, so it’s not exclusive, but it’s pretty premium and more than anything, it’s just cool. In London and it became the club to join for this age group and now they’ve got, I don’t know, 50 to 100 of them in all the key places around the world. New York, Paris, Tokyo and so on with a similar profile. So, Soho House is a cool place. They’re going to service the same group of people and they’re doing a cool padel club. And I, I said, yeah, how, what’s the favour? And he said, well, do you think you could get some shirts for the bar staff, Joe? You know, I think, you know, you know the apparel industry, right? I said, well, yeah, Jamie, I think I can manage that for you. But padel, what’s padel? So, he sort of explained it. Okay, I thought, I’ll look at it afterwards. I started looking at padel online and of course you go to the YouTube and I mean padel now I see it differently. But then I was looking at it and yeah, it looks kind of interesting and cool and I love my sport, so. But I didn’t really follow and pay attention to the padel and the tactics and the, the fact the ball’s bouncing off the walls and so on. Given my background, all I can see is the clothing. First of all, what are the boys and girls wearing? And I was disappointed. I thought, well, wow, you know, they just seem to be wearing the stuff they would have worn to go to the gym and go jogging and, or wear casually and you know, usual suspects of the brands, Nike, Reebok, Puma, Adidas, whatever, or just T shirts. What a shame. You know, it’s, it’s missing something. Maybe it’s because it’s a brand new sport and I look a bit more into it and it was invented back in 1969 and there are 4 million players in Spain and it’s big in the rest of the world. I understand it’s nothing in my country yet, the UK or Germany or France, but after all this time, more than 20 years and it just looks like this. So, it’s quickly gone from, in my mind from surprise, bit let down thinking, you know, I thought it was going to be really cool. Soho House of padel Club.

Minter Dial: That’s funny.

Joe Middleton: And it’s not disappointed and it’s, it’s quickly given my personality turn from problem to opportunity. So, I said, you know what, I’ve looked at a few sports along the way over the last 30 years and a Lot of new sports have come along such as surfing, such as snowboarding, such as skateboarding. And boy have they developed a look in clothing. And the look is of course just a manifestation and a reflection of the culture of those sports. So, if you’re a surfer, you wear your hair long, you wear shorts without a T shirt most of the time to show off your tanned body. And of course it’s not going to be tight fitting shorts because it’s a laid back sport. So, it’s baggy shorts. Snowboarders, you’re not. Snowboarders look like big baggy pants and the hats with the dongles down the side and they look very different to tennis players. They’ve got and skateboarding produced streetwear which is the single biggest influence in the world of fashion over the last three or four, maybe five years. So, that’s got to look too. And padel doesn’t. I bet it will do in 10 years time. And somebody’s going to look back and say do you remember 10 years ago that brand, the equivalent of Quicksilver or Burton’s in snowboarding or whatever and supreme in streetwear. Can you believe it? That brand Pulco started back then around a dinner table and now they’re the world’s leading padel brand. So, we got to it the following few days and you know, two years later here we are.

Minter Dial: So, you have, you have products that are on sale so you actually have produced products, you got patented products for no less. Give us a, give us a little spill on what, what that looks like.

Joe Middleton: Well, you know, given the well behaved training I got in the in at Levi’s, which is a great clothing company but it’s also a great marketing company. And so, you know, you are Dr. Build in in that world just as if you were working for Coca Cola or Procter and Gamble or somebody. And you know, the starting point for building any product line is to speak to the consumers and listen and don’t tell them what they should have. And unless you’re Steve Jobs and you believe they don’t know what they want and foster horse dangerous game to, to start believing that you know better. And I certainly don’t subscribe to that. So, we listened, we listened to what padel players do, what they like and most importantly what problems they had and what problems needed solving. And it came back, it was all about sweat. And you know, it’s an aerobic game, it’s an energetic game. It’s largely played in hot climates or indoor where it’s equally warm and humid and you get this Thing in our industry that we call cling and it means the garments get wet with sweat and it clings to the body like a sort of wet T shirt. And you know, the best manifestation that everybody recognises is what happens with Rafa Nadal when he plays and he ends up. Yeah. Unclinging. Exactly. And. And it became such a habit and a pre shot routine. It’s, you know, I think you called it when I’ve spoken to you before, a tick. A very successful tip by the way. So. And not tick tock, not tick tock. And basically we looked into the way you innovate in sports clothing is not through shapes and pockets and collars and styling features. The products are fairly basic in that sense. The real magic happens with the fabrics and that’s where the innovation happens and the innovation therefore occurs at the mills and the suppliers of the mills with the yarn suppliers. And the most technically advanced in the world are in Taiwan and northern Italy. Now the Italian ones are quirk because so much of our industry’s moved away from Europe and America. But the, the quirk of northern Italy is that so technically advanced because they specialise these small, relatively small, often family owned mills. They specialise in supplying the very technical kit to the cycling industry where, you know, shaving a couple of seconds off can be done through fabric and so on. Drag.

Minter Dial: And you. And you sweat a lot.

Joe Middleton: And you sweat a lot. Exactly. Keeping them at the right temperature and keeping the drag down is important. So, these guys are the experts, but they’re very expensive. And so, the mass market sports brands, you know, go out and buy their product in low cost areas and with from low cost mills, even the really advanced companies, the big ones, do it. So, I invested a lot of time calling friends I hadn’t spoken to for 20 years.

Minter Dial: Surprise.

Joe Middleton: Hardly a hardship driving around northern Italy and having lunch with old friends suffering and you know, at one place who, a guy who, the current owner of the mill, who’s actually a very good tennis player, was, and it still plays a lot on his tennis court in overlooking some very nice countryside in northern Italy. Joe, you ought to see this. It’s a fabric we’ve developed and I’m now playing my tennis in it. And it, it’s then that turned out to be the best product I’ve seen in over 30 years to deal with. It’s called moisture management, which is a bit of a weird phrase in our industry. So, this problem of sweat and cling has never fully been addressed. It’s never been solved by hate to Name competitors but Nike Dry Fit, Adidas Clima Fit. Nah, it doesn’t, it’s never really worked and I looked at all this when I was at Speedo. Sorry, it’s not speed. That was another place I worked earlier with Canterbury in relation to solving the sweat problem under. Under body armour for, for rugby. We could, we couldn’t do it back then. There is a solution now and we’ve got it. And we call it the aircon fabric. And we can come on to that when we talk about the culture of the game of padel. Because the air con unit itself was a very infamous feature of the original padel court built by Enrico Corcuera, who also played in a very hot place in Acapulco.

Minter Dial: In Pulco.

Joe Middleton: Aca Pulco. Exactly. So, yeah, that was the. So, we, we basically developed our product line to solve that key product initially, but also to give them everything they needed to play padel. And our archetypal end consumer was a metropolitan person, guy or girl, who would probably be a professional, would go to work in a suit, would then. Or a female equivalent and we would then get changed in the toilets at work. Even in a fancy organisation like Goldman Sachs or something might not have a changing room. They might, they get changed in the toilet, then get on an E bike and cycle to the padel Club 15 minutes across the London and play their game. So, they needed to. To have a bag which we make, which carries all they need to play padel after work. It carries everything they’ve got left. They can roll up their suit and their shoes and all the rest of it, fit it all in with their padel rackets and their balls and cycle across the city now. So, everything you need for padel, I mean playing kit, training, top, track pants, etc, but of course because they’re on a bike in all weathers in New York, Paris, London maybe less so in some of the southern cities with more reliable weather. But you know, you need to have waterproof kit, lightweight, light to carry and in the winter you need a puffer jacket, of course. So, we. That’s our product range, simple. And the female equivalent is nearly, nearly there. But yes, that full product range is out. We’ve been trading now for over a year. It’s met a fantastic reception.

Minter Dial: What’s the website called?

Joe Middleton: The website is called Pulco Studios. If you Google just Pulco you’ll. You’ll find it I think now. And you know, we don’t sell in too many high street stores, but we do want to be in a few for prestige and image building and endorsement and to test Ourselves properly. And we were about to start thinking about doing that a couple of months ago when we actually got a phone call from Harrods and Harrods want to get into padel, of course, and they had somehow found us and now they’ve ordered from us and we’ll be delivering that product to them in the next couple of weeks. So.

Minter Dial: Fabulous. Because when you have a brand like that, you do need to be attentive to the distribution on the one. And there’s the convenience factor because if it’s luxury or high end, I need to have it easily available. I don’t want it to be some sort of slog up to Doncaster or something to get my fitting. At the same time, you don’t want it to have it everywhere because it has this notion of exclusivity and. And you need to be able to sort of manage the beast of your culture, your display, your brand within someone else’s home.

Joe Middleton: Yeah, you’ve obviously lived this yourself, by the sound of it. It’s absolutely right, you know, your brand is defined by its product, it’s advertising and it’s. It’s channels of distribution and you have to be very careful with that. If you over distribute, you hurt your brand. And if you get into the wrong places, there are certain legal constraints where you can’t get out. So, you have to be very careful and not be greedy. If you grow a brand too quickly, the curve goes up quickly, but it’s on, not on firm routes and it can come down quickly. And there are plenty of examples if you take the time and build it slowly, with care, with nurturing. It’s a bit like sort of gardening or something, I guess, I don’t know. And the deeper the roots and the foundations, the more lasting it will be. And brands in our industry, because the fashion industry, as well as being a sports industry, do come and go and they go through cycles, but some have different lengths of cycles and there are certain role models and I do think somebody like Ralph Lauren, you know, for maintaining a premium position for so long and being so consistent with their marketing and brand positioning and control of channels, they’re to be admired. And there are other examples.

Minter Dial: Well, I want to go back to the product in a moment. But it does bring to mind the nature of ownership and governance because if you are run by or owned by private equity or some other speedo version of growth where it’s all about getting the quick buck in and being able to exit within three years, it’s very hard to sustain. So, surely I’M sure that’s a big thing. I imagine you are still privately owned but you have a binoculars on with regard to the financiers.

Joe Middleton: Yeah, yes. And so, you know, maybe one day we will take in. We are privately owned and we’ve got some friends and family and. And so, on involved as well. But the K own, you know, the majority ownership is within the family and you know, if they want to. I’d be delighted if it goes on to another generation. Would we want to take an institutional investment? You know, never say never but who knows where we’ll be in a couple of years time. But you’re right, it becomes you’re. Then it’s capitalism, you know, and they’re in it for a reason and.

Minter Dial: Right. Well, it’s, it’s the whole quandary that the LVMHs and carings of the world have and their ownership being still very strongly from the family allows them to keep it going. But it’s a hard thing to mix between growth, capitalism, profits and luxury brand and exclusivity.

Joe Middleton: So, the most. Can I just. This. I. I’ve learned. Only learned this in the last year or so. So, first of all, the most profitable company in the apparel industry at all levels is Hermes in terms of percentages and by the way, they’re not just percentages on small numbers I think they’re about 13 billion in sales. Family owned, I don’t know which generation. Six, eighth generation. And they’ve avoided becoming slaves to external financing and they’re a wonderful company in terms of ethics, morals, looking after the environment and, and success basically. So, it can be done.

Minter Dial: I will share something with you after the podcast with regard to the lovely folks at Hermes, but I want to get back to the product thing because yeah. In the observations that I have and I’d love your. Your feedback. So, when I look at Padel and not only do I see no uniformity in the padel, there is no sort of Izod or Lacoste element to. It pairs very frequently, especially amongst the men. They never even match up and you might have on A padel Court 4 players wearing black because it’s whatever that decided, which I don’t know how you do in a very hot environment. And so, I was shocked. For example, at the Hexagon cup in Madrid, the teams didn’t have uniforms and they didn’t correspond to the colours of the people on the bench. It was hodgepodge. So, I think this is one area and then just more like a technical piece. You talk about sweat and I think there are many sports where you sweat. Certainly in tennis then. But one thing that I found is that I, especially if I’m in a hot environment, I sweat a lot is the balls in my pocket. And so, if I’m sweating too much, I only carry one ball in my hand to serve and the other ball I ask my partner to hold or it’s at the net because having, when, when I sweat so much, I would, I don’t want to put the ball in my pocket because it’ll become heavy, it’ll become wet and, and then we’re not playing padel and we’re ruining good balls, by the way. So, I, I, that I feel is a specific element that padel could do with. I mean, presumably tennis as well.

Joe Middleton: Do you know what? That’s a. I’ve never heard that one. I’m now going to spend the next week investigating and solving that problem.

Minter Dial: Well, I, I truly think. Great insight, super coming from the players world. And then. So, what I want you to talk about for the last part of our chat here is, is crafting out the Pulco brand. You have the Soho, the vibe, the cool elements, the premium component. You got the Harrods listing, which is brilliant. How can you go and craft out a different look than tennis? Because I think that’s the big brother of Padel, as in the overseer, especially in Britain where it’s part of the LTA. How, how are you going to go about crafting out something that people aren’t going to be using? Pulco for tennis as opposed to Pulco for padel? Is there a way to separate that out?

Joe Middleton: Yeah, we’ve spent a lot of hours with lots of bottles of wine discussing this one.

Minter Dial: I’d be, I’m happy to join the next one. I mean, I suffer with you.

Joe Middleton: You would be more than welcome. And. Okay, so we have to move here one step backwards to the marketing stuff. Brands have brand values and brand characteristics just like people. And you have physical, functional values and you have emotional values. Functional means this pair of jeans is, fits well, it’s strong denim, it’s at a good price, blah, blah, blah, important. But it’s only the ticket to entry, the thing that really makes the difference. Anyone can make those jeans and anyone did. But why could we sell for twice the price and almost twice the margin? It’s the emotional values. And the emotional values of a pair of jeans from Levi’s carried with it the fact that they were worn by young people who wanted to do different things to the previous generation. Rebellious. So, the whole emotional Stuff was all about sex, drugs and rock and roll and advertising that consistently and in an amusing and entertaining way, with great Motown music behind it. Back to padel. To understand how it should look, you need to understand the culture and what people are feeling about Padel. And it’s extraordinary, it is extraordinary, this sport. And I’ve played them all along the way and tried them all. This has got something special and it’s. It’s symbolised by the fact that it’s the only sport that I can remember that people have consistently. There’s odd. People said it about other sports at odd times. They’ve used the word addicted.

Minter Dial: I knew you’re going to say that 100%.

Joe Middleton: It’s amazing. And now I’ve become addicted. I can’t play often enough and I haven’t done. I’m not as good as I should be yet. Yeah, maybe, probably never will be.

Minter Dial: But there you go. I love the ambition anyway.

Joe Middleton: I’m addicted. So, what is it that’s different about it? And I do believe it’s not unusual and it’s similar to surfing, snowboarding and skateboarding. Young people wanting to be different, look different. So, therefore you start by saying, what should it not be? Before we decide what it should be. And what it should not be is it’s not tennis. And we use that tagline quite a lot, actually. And what it means by that is it’s not for men, white collars on a polo type shirt, like a Fred Perry or a La Cost or a Ralph Lauren tennis shirt. It’s not white pleated skirts for the. For the ladies, a certain type of white pleated skirts, you know, and. And these are the sort of uniforms of the classic American country club and one or two country clubs in central London.

Minter Dial: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Joe Middleton: And so, once you’ve decided that you know what not to do. So, we decided we will not do those products. We will do crew neck playing shirts for men. We lead with leggings for women, although I do think there’s room for skirts, but slightly different to the traditional country club style. And we put hoods on lots of product. All our training stuff, different manifestations is a hoodie through from a classic cotton fleece hoodie down to very technical fabric from Italy, again which offers thermal quality with very thin product, but is also shower proof. It’s got a hood. And I’m on a crusade now. I’m going to make it commonplace for people to play, to have a playing shirt with a hood, which sounds most people reject at this moment in time. But when you look at a lot of great brands, some very unconventional looks out there that get very successful all the way from button fly jeans which are look weird and are a bit odd in this modern day and age, through Doc Marten shoes, through on runnings footwear with those crazy looking holes that I swore I’d never wear to my kids when they started buying. Just bought my last pair last week, my first pair last week.

Minter Dial: Never say never.

Joe Middleton: So, yeah, we, we look, we look, we’re going to look distinctive and different. Now if somebody wants to buy a crew neck shirt because they’re a bit, it’s a bit advanced for them to play in a, in a hoodie but. And you’re probably thinking that at the moment, but let’s talk again in six months’ time.

Minter Dial: Well, well actually I, the, the little thought that I have is on my Joy of panel podcast, I, I just interviewed a woman called Najwa Salhab who is the number one woman Saudi player. Oh, I’m thinking that would be a very appropriate positioning in that market.

Joe Middleton: Absolutely. Thank you again.

Minter Dial: Just as a two, two bottles of.

Joe Middleton: Wine I owe you.

Minter Dial: There you go. I do actually have a third, but I’m going to say that one. Let’s talk just a little bit more then around the. What you’re trying to create. And, and this is the idea in if we’re having listening. Someone’s listening. They are either working in a big company, of course they could be retired or they are working in a small company. And the, the question I have for you at this juncture of this creation of Pulco is culture. The culture of Pulco. When does one push in culture? We all know it’s important, but does it, is it something that you think is something you inject from the beginning? Friends and family, the family is running it. You all are. You’re talking about the culture of Pulco. There’s the culture of padel, of course, but when does one sort of crystallise who and how and why you are?

Joe Middleton: Well, the culture of the company internally from day one. Before day one, before day one I had to go and talk to suppliers and they ultimately they all return the call some after 20 years. Why? Because they dealt with me as an individual. But. And the company that I work for and they had a good experience and.

Minter Dial: You know they solid pair of hands as we say.

Joe Middleton: Yeah. And then, and you know they can trust and they will be treated as that we would like to be treated ourselves. So. And then from there on in, you don’t need to have a meeting and say, right, we’re starting now. Let’s talk about the culture from the. From the very first phone call of recruitment of anybody that joins. If we behave in a certain way, when we’re talking to the new employees, they will pick it up and we won’t hire people. When I interview people, I only spend the first 15% of the time talking about, you know, why are you qualified for this job? Oh, I’ve got a university degree. I’ve got five years training in the big textile company. Yeah, well, loads of people have got that. Yeah. But tell me about your family, tell me about what your parents did, tell me what you do in your spare time and those conversations, you know, you know, within 20 minutes in a bar or in a business situation, if this is the right person to be talking to more. So, the culture internally starts from there now. It absolutely has to reflect the sport in our case. And again, this is fortunate. So, again, I. The spirit of Canterbury, I said it before, how did rugby feel about it? We’ve got to have a padel feel about. And we do. We all play padel, you know, Alex. Yeah. You know, addicts absolutely everywhere. And. And, you know, the people we deal with, you know, padel social club and other clubs, we, you know, we talk, talk about padel, we play at all the clubs and we hopefully reflect what goes on in Padel, which is there’s a really good sense of fair play. I think you said another really interesting thing earlier about the sport, making sure it embeds these little things that make it so important in cricket, if a guy’s going to steal, taking a run and a fielder accidentally obstructs him, and just like in baseball, he gets in the way, you would be run out, you’d be out as the batsman. But in. In cricket, they take the ball and don’t run you out. They forego that opportunity because it’s just not the done thing. It’s not cricket.

Minter Dial: So, fair.

Joe Middleton: And. And so, yes, when the ball hits the. Let the net in tennis, it’s a tradition.

Minter Dial: It.

Joe Middleton: So, far, I found it is the same tradition in. In padel. Although there’s probably a few people who’ve never played tennis actually, as I think about it, and are beginners in padel who maybe don’t know that tradition. They’re not rude people, they just don’t know that that’s the done thing. Yeah. We should inculcate that into the whole culture. And the bandeja and the Spanish language. Oh, we use that all the time. Our Products are named in by Spanish names most of the time.

Minter Dial: That’s great keeping the Spanish flair. So, una caña one little beer after it’s everywhere. You might have to have a little polka Kenya cup. So, creating this culture, bringing in the, the padel elements to it, you also within your family operation you are intergenerational. So, you’re dealing with Gen Z and let’s say the, the more experienced of us. And in terms of the players of course it’s in Britain anyway it seems to sway older with the majority of players. When you look at everything that’s happened during the day, the retirees and everything that’s there’s a larger component sort of in the 40 to 60, maybe even older and then you have the younger folks so you’re really having to interplay with the generations, the different tastes and presumably budgets. So, how do you craft your. You have used talk to your city cityscaper going cycling across. But how do you face and deal with the challenges of intergenerational work? Because I think that’s a big challenge for many people in businesses is how to handle the intergenerational in your case much less family.

Joe Middleton: So, again quite simple in, in my background you have target markets and you have a creative target and a consumption target. So, in our case our creative Target is a 28, 29, 30-year-old person I described earlier, young professional probably and you do you create all your cons or your advertising or your social media or your communications or your packaging and, and, and most of your, most of your product development for that age group. Now we recognise that we have consumption target much broader all the way through to people are playing padel through to in this into their 60s, right and beyond.

Minter Dial: My father played at 80.

Joe Middleton: There you go. I mean it’s that kind of sport. You know, it’s not boxing or rugby. You can, you can do this and, and even more than, well certainly more than big field sports like running around a soccer field or something. Although vets hockey and soccer is big now but so you’ve got to account for that. So, whereas we will have product design for somebody who’s 39 and 30 rather with an athletic body and wants to have it relatively fitted to show off their athletic physique, whether male or female. But for men, you know, you might want to make sure you’ve got a couple of products with a bit more forgiving, relaxed fit for the, for the older, more mature male body. And for the women, you know a lot of the, a lot of the women now padel clubs along with running clubs, have been great places to meet partners. Whether.

Minter Dial: Holy smokes, I love the fact you’re talking about this.

Joe Middleton: Right. Whether it’s the opposite gender or, you know, the same gender, but partners.

Minter Dial: We’re talking about partners.

Joe Middleton: Partners, exactly. And, and you know, in the female product, the women want to wear something.

Minter Dial: That’s attractive, a little beguiling. Why not?

Joe Middleton: Yeah. Thank you. A great word. And now maybe some of the more mature women also want to look wonderful and do look wonderful and are beguiling, but they may want to as older men, like some of us, you want to probably maybe just cover up a little bit more than, or leave a bit more to the imagination. So, we will do that. And you know, they don’t want to be playing in biker shorts or cycling shorts and even if they’re playing in leggings, they may want a score over it. So. But the important thing is you market to your creative target and there’s a golden rule and people won’t mind me saying this, bottom line is if you want to talk to people from 15 through to 70, you’re better off to talk to the younger generation because the older one, the older and younger. Older always aspires to be younger. Younger rarely aspires to be older unless you’re about seven years old. So.

Minter Dial: So, picking up on one comment, you made the bottom line. I thought that that was cute. Double entendre being what it is.

Joe Middleton: Yeah.

Minter Dial: And. And this idea of, of dating is, is absolutely phenomenal. Also wanted to give a little hat tip to our friend Christian at Padel Social Club. A lovely, a lovely spot, lovely ambiance and indeed very Soho, Soho esque inversion. But the, this notion of being elegant, it reminded me of another story which is for the Renault Twingo. And so, the Renault Twingo is this French company wanted to make one of the crack open, the new consumer, the younger consumer. So, they made the Twingo, which is designed for the youngsters. They modelled it for the young at heart. The youngsters. Well, the biggest buyers were 70 years old, 16, 70 years old or wanted to channel their youth. So, to your point. Anyway, let’s, let’s just finish with. We got 2032 as a potential site for an Olympic bid. To what extent? So, that’d be a worldwide hopefully by then. How are you approaching growth internationally? I assume the UK is your primary market. What are you looking at when it comes to overseas?

Joe Middleton: Well, the UK isn’t our primary market.

Minter Dial: Ah, I stand. I said corrected.

Joe Middleton: You know, we, we’ve gone global from day One So, very, very early in the piece, we signed up distributorship deals in North America, across Europe, India and most recently China. Anybody out there is interested, we’d love to find somebody in Japan. Yeah, this, this is, you know, it’s a, it’s a frontier market, it’s the wild west. And first mover advantage is going to be huge. So, the notion of the sort of more financially efficient way of build it in your home market and then a few years later move to the adjacent market and then the one after that, well, the opportunity will be gone in five years’ time. No, we’re, we’re putting a marker down everywhere in all of those markets. And so, we use a city strategy rather than a country strategy. And we, you know, it’s quite obvious the places which, with the early adopting of new trends, you know, London, Paris, Miami, Miami, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore. Yeah, from day one. Oh, Mumbai. Mumbai’s got the hots for padel. And the other interesting thing is about padel, it’s in terms of your. How you promote and how you grow. It’s, it’s becoming every professional sports person’s second favourite sport, whether you’re a rugby player, a soccer player, a cricketer. And in India, of course, the cricketers are, they’re gods. So, yeah, you know, we’re going for it globally and stretching ourselves beyond our means in terms of time and effort.

Minter Dial: And so, if someone’s listening, what sort of call to action would you like for them? And what sort of people are you looking for to contact you, Joe?

Joe Middleton: As in distributors and so on?

Minter Dial: Could be, you know, as people who are interested in buying your stuff. Where should they go?

Joe Middleton: Oh, right, well, if I’m interested in buying, yeah, absolutely. And it’s on the website. Pulcostudios.com Just Google Pulco. If we’re looking for ambassadors.

Minter Dial: And how can they get in touch with you? How can they get in touch with you? Distributors and ambassadors.

Joe Middleton: DM on. On. They can through the website. There’s an info at. On the website through Instagram direct DM us, as they say. Oh, they’ll find. Oh, LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn. Of course, yeah. We welcome all sorts of inquiries and the first thing we’ll do with people who are the right people is they will. We’ll send them an aircon shirt and once they’ve tried this, there will be no going back.

Minter Dial: I do love that. Phenomenal. Great to have you on. Thanks for spending a portion of your weekend to chat with me about this. I’m delighted for you. I’M excited for you. I’m excited for the prospect. I think it’s a really appropriate thing to be bringing into padel to Crystallise this beautiful culture, this addictive game, and for many, the second sport. But I think it’s fun to watch how the tennis players, once they sort of start tasting this old sport, they’re like, this is actually a lot more fun, too. Yeah, but not for everybody. Hey, listen, it’s okay. You don’t have to, like, padel. There are other things out the world, but, you know, once you’ve tasted good luck. All right, Joe will be in touch.

Joe Middleton: Yeah.

Minter Dial: Thank you so much.

Joe Middleton: Cheers. Bye. Bye.