The Hippest Cat in France

By Bruce Crumley/ Paris

French businessman Malamine Kone is talking a big game. A very big game. The founder and CEO of sportswear maker Airness is explaining his goal of swiftly boosting his company's 2005 predominantly French sales of $150 million to rival those of global giant Nike's $14.7 billion in 2005. Sound a touch fanciful? Don't tell him that. "You know where Puma was five years ago? Deeply troubled," Kone says of the now surging German-American sportswear group, whose sales last year exceeded $2 billion. "And six years ago, Airness scarcely existed. We didn't get this far this fast worrying about what we supposedly can't do."

That might smack of excessive exuberance were it not for the gains he has made in the brief interval since he founded Airness, named after Him. Kone started in 1999, selling sweatshirts sporting the Airness name and slinking-panther logo around the northern Paris housing projects where he lived. He has since developed a clothing and sports line that has grown at least 100% annually.

Kone, 36, has built Airness around his own early street-level observation that kids determine what's hip, not the companies hawking togs to them. "By observing what people were buying or looking for, I could react faster to current trends and demand--and anticipate what would work next," he says.

Airness is imbued with the irresistible cool derived from celebrities the French love most: soccer stars. But how could he swing that when all the pros worth recruiting were already under contract to Nike, Adidas and Puma? "I came up with the concept of the extra sports contract"--getting players to wear Airness in their private life, once their on-field obligations were over." French-African roots were key to signing stars like Didier Drogba, an Ivorian who plays for the top English team, Chelsea. Those ties also allowed Kone to go to the next level, signing Airness as the official uniform supplier for several French pro clubs and half a dozen national squads in Africa. Next season London club Fulham will join that stable, with a bonus for Airness: club owner Mohammed al Fayed will place Airness products in another asset of his--Harrods.

Kone represents the all-too-rare success story of a young black man from one of France's blighted suburban housing projects using his smarts and business flair to come out on top. (Those banlieues erupted in riots earlier this year.) But Kone's dramatic tale goes deeper. Born in the southern Malian village of Niena, which even today has no electricity, Kone left for France at age 10 unable to speak French. He went on to obtain a prelaw degree in the hopes of becoming a police inspector. A talent for boxing earned him two French amateur titles, and he was selected to represent France in the 1996 Summer Games. But an auto accident in early 1995 shattered his left knee, requiring 12 operations and five years of rehabilitation.

The injury ended Kone's Olympic and career dreams. But it set the stage for what would later become Airness. "The long, forced immobility made me observe things in a way I hadn't before, including how fashion works," Kone recalls. Similar insights gained as he built Airness have convinced him that catching giants like Adidas and Nike is just as attainable as the dream of millions across France to make it out of the projects as he has. "I've seen that there are lots of preconceived ideas and prejudices out there to stop you from doing what you want if you give in to them," Kone says. "Perhaps my strength is that I don't accept those limits." Perhaps it is.