Dive Brief:
- As Birkenstock eyes expansion, the company named Evelyn Chua to the newly created position of managing director for Southeast Asia and Down Under, effective July 1, per a news release.
- Chua reports directly to Klaus Baumann, chief sales officer of Birkenstock Group. Based in Singapore, Chua will seek to enhance the brand’s retail positioning across all channels covering the region of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand.
- Chua most recently was chief commercial officer for Synagie Group, an e-commerce enabler in Southeast Asia. Synagie manages over 1,000 e-stores in the region for 600 brand partners, including Nike, Estée Lauder and L’Oréal.
Dive Insight:
Chua’s appointment is reflective of the brand’s plans for international growth, which include a major investment of almost $87 million in production capacity last year.
"Southeast Asia is a region with a huge growth potential,” Baumann said in a statement. “With the additional capacity that we can allocate since the go-live of our new plant in Pasewalk in September 2023, we are now able to meet the needs of the Asian customers for our products. With a very strong online and offline retail experience, I am convinced that Evelyn Chua is the perfect leader to manage our presence in this very important region."
Chua sports over 15 years experience in the retail industry. During her time at Synagie, Chua was responsible for six countries and the online business across multiple retail categories.
Chua envisions a strong hybrid approach to growing the Birkenstock business in the countries she now manages.
"While expanding our presence online, I want to maintain a strong relationship with our distributors, who have been instrumental in our growth,” Chua said in a statement. “We can help them to develop their assortment strategy, but we want, as well, to accelerate our own business by opening new stores. We also need to ensure that our stores offer the same experience to our clients. The devil often hides in the details, and we need to make sure that we propose the same level of service throughout the customer journey.”
Birkenstock, which was founded in Germany in 1774 and has its headquarters there, has been on a growth trajectory and became a publicly traded company last October with a valuation of $8.6 billion at its opening. The company reported record revenue in Q2, increasing of 22% year over year, with the Asia Pacific Middle East and Africa region growing by 39%.
