with Céline Del Genes
Global Chief Customer Officer of Decathlon
Céline Del Genes has built a career on challenge. After 22 years with one of the world’s most famous sports brands, adidas, she made a bold leap by leaving a secure, high-profile role to join Decathlon, the French multi-sport retailer, in the process becoming one of the driving forces that has helped it earn a justified place as a global multi-sport powerhouse.
Her story is a fascinating one, and Decathlon’s Chief Customer Officer spoke to MacGregor Black’s Product and Design Consultant, Tom Honeyman, about the motivations behind making such a bold career switch.
At adidas, Céline split her time almost equally between the brand with three stripes and Reebok, the one-time competitor that Adidas acquired in 2006, more recently moving the Reebok brand on again in 2022 to Authentic Brands Group.
“It was a very different setup, from a very international leadership environment to a much more French one.”
She explains of her move from Adidas to Decathlon in 2023.
“How do you set up a brand from a retailer that is so unique like Decathlon, in an environment that’s obviously very anchored and legitimately proud of its origin and history?”
That move, she says, was less about abandoning familiarity and far more about an opportunity to shape and design new growth. Not just for the business, but for herself too.
“When you’ve spent 20 years in the same relationship, you kind of know them. And then you start dating someone new and it’s an exciting phase of new discovery.”
Her leadership philosophy? She reveals it centres on embracing calculated risk. When asked what shaped her style, she reflects on her early career decisions: snapping up a six-month internship in Germany, despite not speaking any German, and then later moving to Hong Kong with even less certainty. Her mindset then, and still seems to be now, a healthy carefree attitude that effectively de-weaponises the risk factors: ‘what’s the worst that can happen?’
“That’s one of the foundational elements of my leadership style: try, fail fast, but do try. And always measure that the risk is not as high as what you think.”
As her coach once pointed out: It’s not that she’s entirely risk-averse… she just has a different threshold. That acceptance of risk, combined with a fast-learning attitude, has become a cornerstone of how she leads teams.
The Risk and Reward of the 120% Player
Asking her how she ‘shows up’ in any of her roles reveals the type of person Céline is. A lover of sport, she describes the typical ‘120% player’.
“My head runs like a little bicycle.”
She admits. And while that drive has powered her rise, she knows it’s double-edged, because without discipline, that kind of attitude can become a negative force.
So, what keeps the pedals turning without the threat of burning out? For Céline, the key is balance, but it is built through what she calls “conscious moments of reflection”. As a leader, she believes in giving her team space to breathe and celebrating their achievements, not just pushing hard all the time.
She gives a powerful example: she once admitted she had to have a gentle word with a colleague who’d had taken a call during a funeral.
“What you’re showing the team is that they always have to be on. As a leader, you need to role-model good behaviour. Whether it’s meditation in the day or stepping off for a time out, leaders need to validate recharging in whatever way works for each person.”
Global Teams, Local Voices: A Recipe for High Performance
Céline recognises that running customer organisations at companies like Adidas and Decathlon has taught her a lot about the balance between local insight and global impact. She builds teams not just for their technical expertise, but phrases like ‘resilience’, ‘curiosity’, and ‘energy’ pepper our chat. Traits that become powerful weapons in fast-moving, complex environments.
She emphasises two insightful points about how giving ‘locality’ a voice has the potential to create global impact.
“Firstly, giving local voices a stage, while staying close enough as a leader to those voices, brings a shared direction that is very powerful.”
She clearly wants to show teams who might perceive themselves not to be influential at the top table can, and must, carry weight in organisational decision-making.
She also outlines how decisiveness and clarity will ultimately win out, encouraging autonomy, but not fearing the need to step in and guide a way forward if decisions stall for any reason.
Empowering Women Through Action
Diversity underpins her approach, and not just in terms of gender or geography, but diversity of thought. For Céline, sport and lifestyle retail has the unique potential to be able to unite, and her clear thoughts on this show why some of the most successful campaigns for sports brands find ways to marry its appeal with the appeal of fashion and music.
She says:
“If you think about sport, the arena is where people come together, and fashion and music have that same power.”
She tells us she is a founding member of a movement called Global Game Shapers, a collective of leading operators from some of the world’s most influential brand houses and sports retailers that aims to connect and empower women leaders in the sporting goods industry. Launched earlier this year, Global Game Shapers has also been endorsed by the World Federation of the Sporting Goods Industry (WFSGI), and other founding members, including Decathlon’s Céline, include representatives from the likes of Pentland Brands (Berghaus, Canterbury, Speedo), O’Neill, Specialised and Frasers Group (Sports Direct, Everlast, Evans Cycles).
But this isn’t a closed, women-only club. At least not in the traditional sense.
“We welcome men as champions and collaborators because we believe change can only come together. Again, it’s not a ‘girl purple’ thing; it’s about making that change. And we believe that together we can nurture the next generation of leaders, really foster inclusivity, and build a more equitable, innovative, and thriving future for all.”
Is there a need for such groups in sport? Well, soon after our interview with Céline, Sky Sports were forced to withdraw its new TikTok account, Halo, after just two days. It was an attempt for them to engage with a younger, female audience, but posts featuring pink text, lovehearts and topics and language branded as sexist, misogynist and degrading forced Sky Sports into a humbling apology and pause on its content on the channel.
Global Game Shapers’ mission goes beyond individual success: they want collective leadership, structural change, and long-term visibility.
“We need role models in leadership, not just to mentor from the sidelines, but really open the doors and get them in.”
“So it’s not just about solidarity and being there for each other. There has to be structural change about how the industry is looking. And so for me, a key element of taking a leadership position in sport is about creating visibility.”
Tomorrow’s Trends and Leaders
Finally, we move on to Céline’s proverbial crystal ball, and we get into what trends might shape the sports retail world for the next decade and, in turn, what the future leaders might look like.
The first of her predictions leans back into how sport has now forged its position next to fashion and music as a cultural influence and how that influence gets used. She explains:
“Lewis Hamilton is as much a fashion icon as he is a sports icon. An activist even. In the next ten years, I don’t think that is going to part ways, because sport is closer to entertainment in that way, and that role of ‘sports icon’ is going to evolve.”
On the shop floor, Céline predicts that we will continue to see the big fashion houses get more and more involved in creating their own sports lines and have more visibility in the sports arena. As someone who was deeply involved in the groundbreaking move to introduce Stella McCartney to Adidas in 2004 for a collaboration that redefined the intersection of high fashion and sportswear, she points to LVMH, owners of the likes of Dior, Givenchy and Louis Vuitton, and their investments in Formula One, football, rugby and even swimming.
Céline then explains how the immovable onset of technology will have its impact on sports retail:
“Digital innovation is driving better data insights, product creation and personalisation, which is going to make sport more accessible and engaging, but we need to do that without losing the human connection, which is the joy of the sport – the joy of bringing people together.”
Céline returns to another theme for the final view on what success will look like in the future of sports retail, and that’s the wider pendulum swing of globalisation back to localisation.
“I think this is where sport, lifestyle and entertainment have a unique power that can unite communities. I struggle to understand how human beings can be so mean and destructive to each other, but I think sport, fashion, entertainment and culture can actually create communities and help people come together, hopefully shaping a more vibrant, connected, and peaceful world. That’s going to make a stronger industry platform.”
And those golden pieces of advice for the next generation of leaders? Stay close, stay curious and hold yourself and others to higher standards.
She expands:
“Be curious about the world, the people and what’s around you. Stay close to your teams, your people and your family. Listen, support, and empower them all. Finally, exigence – high standards. Push for excellence, because if you don’t, you will only get average. Challenge yourself. Don’t think you can’t do it – you can. And if you can’t, eventually you will be able to. It’s a bit like an athlete: you need to try to reach your highest potential.”
Céline Del Genes’s journey is not just one of leading on the globe’s great sports brands or building a global team. It’s about living a philosophy, one that prizes risk, reflection, resilience, and radical inclusion.
For anyone charting their own path in sport, retail or leadership, her story offers both strategy and a welcome and large dose of soul.