Angelica Suiza is not your typical successful woman in the corporate world who parades in posh high-heel shoes, attention-grabbing stylish bag or well-trimmed coat and skirt, though she can really throw a very elegant look if she has to.
This petite woman has a long history in the marketing and advertising industries. Her trainings were not just inside the four walls of corporate offices but she had her share of braving the streets of Divisoria to the reserved and critical European market just to get the firsthand perspective of the industry she is a part of. Suiza admits to be someone who likes to accomplish the things she lined up in her mind in her every waking moment.
“I don’t want to spend my time wasting on something that will not multiply…. I know what I want, and the only way to get the things you desire is to work hard for it,” she explains.
Suiza began her career in advertising and marketing with a local brand (Penshoppe), which also grew to be one of the strongest clothing lines at that time. She stayed in this company for 10 years. With her wit and passion for business, a rising global sports brand in Southeast Asia (SEA) and the Philippines approached her in 2002.
At the beginning of the new millennium, Filipinos were just beginning to have a good grasp of international sporting goods but Suiza was already at the forefront of the business, and she may be responsible for the strong interest and love for functional sporting goods of modern Filipinos.
Though she’s a part of a clothing apparel company for a decade, Suiza admits that she’s always been curious about sports. “I’ve been involved with product development, and I’ve seen a couple of technologies for Nike and Adidas. And this is what makes this industry interesting but it does not only talk about products that you wash and wear, these products serve some purpose,” Suiza narrates.
It was in 2002 when Suiza joined Adidas as its marketing director here in the country. Her tasks were to provide key strategies on product range and development, pricing and inventory management, distribution enhancement and brand building for implementation in the local market. She may be petite but she’s delivered and even exceeded what were expected from her.
Then barely after two years, Suiza became the first employed person of the Adidas Southeast Asia office. Learning the ins and outs, and the odds and beauty of the sports trade, she successfully led the growth of the brand in this region. Holding the post of sports style and strategic marketing director for almost six years, Suiza contributed to the development of the regional marketing plan for the sports style division and managed the SEA product marketing plan to deliver annual financial targets, as well as marketing/brand indicators and distribution strategies. She’s also responsible for the franchising of the brand in the region.
Her career growth didn’t stop in SEA, but she’s later on transferred to Germany and held the post of merchandising and product content-global e-commerce head. According to Suiza, even before the so-called digital marketing blew out of proportion, Adidas has been utilizing, maximizing and benefiting from it.
“Though I have always been in the mainstream marketing, e-commerce was a challenging avenue at that time but I have to embrace it,” she says. But despite these new puzzling and seemingly Herculean tasks—not just delivering the expectations of her job but the working environment she had to face as an expat, an Asian and as a woman in a man’s world—Suiza successfully handled the European and mega markets of the brand.
However, after 11 long years of being busy and away from her family, she’s decided to come back to the Philippines and eventually left the company, which grew with her. But Suiza’s passion not only for work but for the sports industry led her to another rising global brand, which she knows will become a phenomenon not only in the region but in the whole global market.
Last year Suiza, together with two partners from Germany and Singapore, Michael Binger and Adrian Chai, respectively, joined together in bringing the brand of the strong—Under Armour, and established Triple Pte. Ltd.
Under Armour is the one brand that caught her intense passion to be a part again of the industry, which she helped cultivate in the region. She says, though she’s been handling a different brand before, she had seen how the company, which Kevin Plank built in 1996 in the basement of his grandmother’s house in Baltimore, grew phenomenally.
Trusting her knowledge and the continuous increasing figures that Under Armour had shown in less than 20 years of its operations, Suiza surely knows where the brand is going.
In one of the interviews with Suiza, she shares the reason they brought Under Armour to SEA. “We see that consumers are looking for alternatives, and Under Armour, with its focus on innovation and performance, has the potential to make inroads to athletes and active sports people in Southeast Asia. From there we have created a strong and credible plan to launch and propel Under Armour; a plan and vision that is shared cohesively with Under Armour.”
Just like Under Armour, Suiza believes that to will what you want can bring you success, and by setting the SEA market to will what it wants, Suiza, together with her team, will stay humble and hungry to get to the place where she has set for Under Armour—the leader in the sporting industry.
For more information, log on to www.underarmour.com.ph.