In 1994, Quaker City Mercantile was contacted by a young team who said they were trying to relaunch the decrepit Puma sportswear brand. (Apparently the publisher of Ray Gun magazine had told them that Quaker City Mercantile was the place to help them out.) Puma had been plagued over the last decade by poor marketing and sagging sales, and was looking for a way to completely reinvent the brand in the face of imminent collapse. And completely reinvent the brand we did.

In a bold move, Quaker City Mercantile took Puma and repositioned it as a complete lifestyle brand instead of just a sportswear brand. Puma became a purveyor of style as well as sports performance. It was radical rethinking for the entire industry, and as Puma pulled itself out of the red and into the black, mega brands like Nike and Adidas took notice and similarly began repositioning themselves.

Quaker City Mercantile achieved this massive shift in brand positioning, personality and architecture through a regiment of completely non-traditional marketing. We were developing viral and guerilla marketing techniques before that stuff really even existed, and producing top-notch work with top talent for very little money. Our highly original Puma creative was supported by a mix of aggressive new product launches, strategic brand architecture, packaging innovations and a network of Puma stores.

All of our repositioning efforts were aimed at asserting Puma's underground cool in a perfect synergy of sport, lifestyle and fashion. We sought to bring Puma's definition of sport more inline with the times, transcending football and running to include bike messengers, urban gymnastics and skateboarders. With clean branding and unified color treatments, all of the new Puma stores were more informed by high-end fashion boutiques than sporting good stores. And instead of going with the same old, tired, glossy action shots of top athletes wearing Puma gear like every other brand was using, we chose instead to shoot documentary style stills and TV spots featuring top athletes in little vignettes living their real, private lives in their Pumas.

In the decade that Quaker City Mercantile served as Puma's global agency, we literally turned them around from certain extinction, taking it from $50 million dollars to $5 billion in sales. We changed the general attitude of the entire sportswear industry, and set the tone for the landscape of that industry today. Our partnership with the brand ended in 2004 when the brand was sold for $7.9 billion—a far cry from what it was worth when our relationship began—and we feel like a lot of the work we produced during those 10 years is still relevant today.