Breathing Shoes And Complementarities
Breathing Shoes and Complementarities:
How Geox has rejuvenated the footwear industry
Arnaldo Camuffo, Andrea Furlan,
Pietro Romano, and Andrea Vinelli
MIT-IPC-05-005
June 2005
Breathing Shoes and Complementarities:
How Geox has Rejuvenated the Footwear Industry
Arnaldo Camuffo, Andrea Furlan, Pietro Romano and Andrea Vinelli
MIT IPC Working Paper IPC-05-005
June 2005
We apply the related notions of complementarities and performance landscapes to study strategic positioning in
the footwear industry. We use this theoretical framework to analyze Geox, an Italian footwear manufacturer
that, in less than a decade, has grown to be one of the world largest brown shoe manufacturers, outperforming
the industry in terms of market and financial results. We describe Geox’s choices within four stages along its
value chain: product design, marketing and communication, production and supply chain, distribution and retail.
We show that, though grounded on product innovation (the Geox breathes® patented system which allows
ventilation in waterproof rubber sole shoes), Geox’s competitive advantage has not grown out of operational
excellence in single activities in the business, but, rather, derives from a unique and consistent configuration of
complementary activities. Such configuration represents an innovative strategic position and corresponds to a
high performance peak in the footwear industry performance landscape. The case study provides anecdotal
evidence in support of complementarity-based economic theory, showing how complementarities among
activities help understand increasing returns to scale, firm size and business growth even without the standard
assumptions about economies of scale. It also confirms that, in the presence of complementarities, rivals find
strategy imitation and reverse engineering...
Please login to view the full essay...