Who is Seth Berger? How is he related to AND1 and what is his net worth right now?
Seth Berger is one of the co-founders and former CEO of the American footwear and clothing company AND1. He is currently the managing director of the Sixers Innovation Lab.
Berger earned his Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, following which he became the Legislative Director for US Representative Harold Ford Sr. He earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business in 1993.
While no concrete sources for Berger's net worth are available, his net worth is estimated to be between $2 million and $3 million.
In 1993, along with co-founders Jay Coen Gilbert, Berger's childhood friend, and Tom Austin, whom Berger met while playing basketball at Wharton, the trio started selling trash-talk print T-Shirts out of the back of a car. It was then that they started flouting the norms of an apparel company.
UNTOLD Vol 2: The Rise and Fall of AND1. August 23rd, only on Netflix.
https://t.co/wFVb0iTr3N
This spurted the growth of the company that would later become known as AND1.
AND1 would go on to partner with Stephon Marbury, hoping to make it big in the sneaker business, but later shifted its focus to a market not yet capitalized on by its competitors, streetball. This gave rise to the AND1 streetball mixtapes and the AND1 Mixtape tour.
Over the next decade, AND1 reached new heights through several ingeniously marketed campaigns, selling its merchandise along with the popular mixtapes.
Foot Locker and Footaction, among other retailers, partenered with AND1, and sold its merchandise. The mixtapes and the streetball players featured in them became a key aspect of AND1, with the latter getting their own spot on ESPN.
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Seth Berger and Co.'s fall from grace
The eventual undoing of AND1 is multi-faceted.
For starters, Nike, AND1's primary competitor, already held a massive chunk of the market share. It exacerbated AND1's problems after coming out with "Nike Freestyle," a commercial that fed off what AND1 had built its core audience and consumers around: streetball.
Other aspects of AND1's downfall included disgruntled player-company relations, with players openly feuding and calling out AND1 for the obscurity around their paychecks. This, along with deteriorating inter-player relations due to selective marketing, led to AND1's fall from grace.
Berger and Co. sold the company to American Sporting Goods in 2005.
Apart from AND1, Seth Berger's other ventures include being the part-time CEO of Lightning Gaming, starting a mobile gaming company, Gravy Train, and being the head coach of the boys basketball team at the Westtown School in Westtown, Pennsylvania.
Seth Berger made a notable appearance in the Netflix documentary "UNTOLD Vol 2: The Rise and Fall of AND1."