Geox: Breathing Innovation Into Shoes

The footwear industry is in an established and intensely competitive industry. And GEOX is just like fresh blood in that stable industry. They demonstrated the power of innovation by introducing new product. The innovated products rapidly gain large amount of market share globally, but GEOX, like other innovative company, they had to fret about sustainability of its competitive advantage. Since GEOX has enlarged enough that becomes the world’s second –largest casual lifestyle footwear sector operator, I would believe they are in the maturity stage in the industry life cycle, not much innovation appear frequently but keep what they have already got and doing replacement or repeat purchases. GEOX’s innovation type was radical innovation which means they are in the existing footwear market with a new technology. And by focusing on radical innovation, GEOX found the only option in order to entered protected footwear industry which means that industry has a high entry barrier.

As a family owed business, GEOX did a very smart choice that concentrated on casual lifestyle footwear whereas their innovation strategy was highly focusing on one part of footwear industry rather than expand the company into all types of footwear. Like what mentioned in the case, GEOX may grow continuously by keeping high profitability from their tight discipline over operating cost and higher efficiency of production structure, keeping innovate beyond the imagination of customers , and keeping concentrating on footwear industry. To some circumstance, the vertical integration of the firm is desirable and horizontal integration might help the firm make further expansion as a whole. For international expansion, I would suggest GEOX to do decentralization in order to fit each diversified market under different culture and customs.