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Footwear and lifestyle brand industry veteran Bruce Pettet is President and CEO of Collective Licensing International LLC (Collective) a Denver CO-based leading youth lifestyle marketing and global licensing firm. Pettet founded Collective in January 2004 and together with his executive team he has created and executed the strategic architecture for a growing portfolio of some of the world’s most recognized and authentic youth lifestyle and board-sports inspired brands including Airwalk® Vision Street Wear® Sims® Lamar® LTD® genetic® Dukes Rage® Ultra-Wheels® and Skate Attack® brands. Collective’s brand portfolio has grown and the company is now represented through licensing agreements in more than 100 countries across the world.
In March 2007 Collective announced its $91 million acquisition by Payless ShoeSource (Payless) the largest specialty family footwear retailer in the Western Hemisphere. Collective now functions as a wholly owned subsidiary of Payless under the leadership of Pettet.
Prior to forming Collective Pettet served as president and CEO of Airwalk International. There he successfully rebuilt and energized the entire global organization from product creation to sales resulting in a dramatic improvement in every financial metric of the business. Pettet’s vision created an award-winning company culture. The company was voted one of Denver’s top companies to work for by 5280 magazine in 2002 and continued to attract outstanding employees from other industry leaders such as Nike New Balance Brooks ASICS and Timberland. Airwalk was nominated in both 2001 and 2002 for the Footwear Plus Award for Design Excellence and was ranked as the #2 Skate Shoe Brand and as the #8 Trendsetting Brand in Male Teens’ Top 20 Footwear Brands in Footwear News.
Previous to Airwalk Pettet held a long tenure at Seattle WA-based Brooks Sports Inc. from 1995-2000 ultimately serving as the company’s president and CEO of Brooks Sports Inc. where he led the brand’s dramatic turnaround to recover its position as a leading technical footwear and apparel brand. He achieved record revenue growth and profits at a time when that industry experienced flat or lower sales growth. Prior to joining Brooks Pettet was a principal/partner for eight years for a Southern CA -based lifestyle and performance brand sales agency Performance Sales West. His company grew to be one of the top sales agencies in the industry and ultimately the leading US sales agency for Brooks.
In 1999 Pettet was named one of the Marketing 100 by Advertising Age magazine a designation of the top marketers in the country which included other well-known executives such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computer Sam Shahid of Abercrombie & Fitch and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com. When Sporting Goods Business named Pettet an Industry Pacesetter as an executive that will shape the future of the sporting goods industry that publication recognized his unique ability to not only lead a brand and company but to establish a new vision and strategic architecture that creates long-term sustainability.
Most recently the Denver Business Journal awarded him as one of the Forty Under 40 for Denver’s Up-and-Coming Business Leaders in 2002 for business leadership recognition of accomplishments and community involvement. He was also recognized as a Next Wave top footwear industry executive in the October 2004 Power 50 issue of Footwear News.
An avid outdoor sports enthusiast Pettet holds a B.S. in Management from Pepperdine University a certificate degree in entrepreneurship from California State University at Fullerton and he has completed Executive Education in Business Strategy at Dartmouth University. He has been a featured speaker at events sponsored by the National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA) American Marketing Association (AMA) the Daniels College of Business at the University of Denver and other prominent organization. | 