Navigating the Odds: David Meire’s Ambitious Eleven-Player Vision with a Five-Man Team

Although in his spare time the grass is not his favorite place (he prefers the mountains a thousand times over), soccer metaphors are a constant in David Meire’s conversation, as are Anglicisms, a reflection of his time at one of the most important American multinationals in the world. At the age of fifty, David Meire decided to become an entrepreneur and create, together with Javier Carrera, a company that today manages Hurley’s business in Europe and Reebok’s in Iberia. His biggest challenge today is to create a team, although he is aware that “in a small company you have to find the ideal eleven sometimes with only five players, so they all have to be strikers”.

On March 13th, 2020, David Meire turned fifty. That same day, the government announced the State of Alarm decree to contain the spread of Covid-19, just 24 hours after Meire became self-employed after a lifetime as a salaried employee. “I started because of two things: on the one hand, I thought who would pay me what I had been charging with all the biases I had acquired and, on the other hand, the blunt view that I would not find a job in a company I had been working for.ntical vision that I would not find a company that was another dream, like Nike, first, and then Desigual,“ he explains while sipping a latte first thing in the morning. Javier Carrera, also from the Nike quarry, was in a “similar vital moment”, so they pushed each other.

Born in Barcelona and trained at Esade, he believes in building good relationships, although he recognizes that his character is reserved. In fact, thanks to them he joined Nike and then Desigual, although his professional career began at Roca. “For time, Nike is the company that has marked me the most, but not the only one,“ says Meire, who spent almost twenty years at the swoosh giant. “The stage at Desigual was very intense and things have stuck with me, probably because I was not as successful as at Nike - she recalls -; at Roca I was lucky enough to meet the family and see how they gave up the limelight, something I do today.“

In the six years he has been an entrepreneur, he confesses that he has felt the loneliness of the manager more strongly than ever. “At Nike you didn’t feel it, because you didn’t make any decisions alone, and at Desigual I saw in the founder’s eyes what I now feel in my own skin,“ he says. “Now I appreciate much more what it’s like to create something from scratch, even though I learned it late in my career,“ he says; “you have a sense of urgency that is at odds with the long term. “But from urgency to urgency you can get small and stop thinking about drawing the canvas,“ he says, and immediately affirms that “I’m not going to give up on putting together a good team, I’m adamant about that.“

“In sports, even as an athlete, you live in four-year cycles and that influences how you approach strategy; in fashion the cycles are six months, I learned that from Thomas (Meyer),“ he says. “Fashion should learn a bit from sport, because if you go so fast you don’t think; sport maybe should be a bit more like fashion and step on solid ground,“ he reflects.

“In sport, even as an athlete, you live in four-year cycles and that influences how you approach strategy; in fashion the cycles are six months, I learned that from Thomas (Meyer),“ he says. “Fashion should learn a bit from sports, because if you go so fast you don’t think; sports should perhaps be a bit more like fashion and step on solid ground,“ he reflects. In a small company, he says, the “bias for action should be excellent, in a multinational maybe not so much.“