MacNeill working on “major overhaul” product
Courtesy
Harris MacNeill of MacNeill Pride Group.
It's been a busy few months for the company formerly known as MacNeill Engineering. Over the summer, the Marlborough company supplied cleats for 85 percent of soccer competitors and athletes in other sports at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. And this year, it merged with Tennessee-based competitor PrideSports to combine forces in an increasingly competitive industry. The company is now known as MacNeill Pride Group.
Harris MacNeill spoke about the merger and a new project the company is working on he thinks will have a lasting impact for athletes.
What’s new at the company this year?
Last summer, I was in the middle of negotiating with my competitor -- Pride Sports -- to merge our companies, which we did successfully at the end of December.
Companies in our industry are combining forces, primarily because in the golf side of business, it's a stagnant market in the Western world, with minor growth throughout rest of the world. For many, it’s expensive to create thoughtful, innovative products -- it takes a lot.
By combining forces, we feel we can do a much better job. It also allows for diversity in terms of creating products for different sports markets, and for better access to global distribution in the retail, direct-to-consumer and original equipment markets.
Since the merger, we have been working on our biggest project -- on the sports side for non-golf. It’s for sports like football, soccer, and baseball.
What’s that project?
If you go to Dick’s Sporting Goods, you’ll see shoes that are molded in various configurations. Our goal is to make it more consumer friendly, for the shoes to last longer and be safer. For example, in soccer, a lot of players tear their ACLs and MCLs, or have a lot of knee problems because of slippage and turf fields on molded bottom shoes -- there’s too much traction, so people get stuck. A lot of injuries happen that way.
Globally in soccer, 90 percent of shoes cleats are molded in, and 10 percent are replaceable. We want to get that number up so the life of the shoe is longer. We want to have customized traction, so it’s replaceable and safer for the athlete. We’re working with one large, very recognizable sports brand on this project.
Is this a big departure from your other products?
Every five or so years, you do major overhauls, with cosmetic updates on a more day-to-day basis, but major product differences don’t change. This plan we’re working on now is a major overhaul for the industry. For instance, in football, we changed how fastenings in football shoes were made 35 years ago, and it's been the same since then. These are major changes -- kind of like going from a basic flip phone to smartphone.
It’s a major effort around between our combined engineering teams and manufacturing group to pull this together.
What’s next for the combined company?
We’re excited about where we’re at. We’re in acquisition mode in an industry that’s not investing money. There are good opportunities for smaller companies like ours to gain some critical mass -- to share product developing, systems, logistics and backroom manufacturing. We can offer some better products, but also the big retailers -- Amazon, Dick’s Sporting Goods -- they want somebody who is nimble, who can supply products on time. If you're not in that and haven't built systems to handle that, it's impossible to do.
What are the challenges of your industry?
If you look at the retail landscape in golf for the last year, or golf in sports -- Sports Authority is out of business, others are out of business. There are even mergers in retail -- look at Sears and Kmart and the struggles they're having. You're going to have to do things differently if you're going to survive, and we want to survive and thrive.
How many employees do you have?
In the 500 range spread around the world, and a lot more through contract manufacturing.
This interview was conducted and edited by Laura Finaldi, WBJ staff writer.
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