d his flip-flops for a bicycle, riding to the university along the banks of the Seine River during the part-time residency program, which will see him commute between Paris and his home in Hong Kong for much of the next six months.  Esser leaves Alpargatas having built the company’s Asia-Pacific division from scratch and remains – for the time being – chairman of its Chinese subsidiary.  This year the Brazilian company will restructure its global business, bringing the Asia-Pacific and European businesses together into a single operating unit, led from Madrid. The team Esser built up remains in place and he believes it is “absolutely capable of continuing on the work that we started”. In just five years, that team opened 300 stores in the region.  “We have opened up a store every week for the past five years and we grew e-commerce from almost nothing to 25 per cent of total revenue over that same period of time. So, that was substantial. But I would say the story is not so much the result, but more of the structure that we had to put in place to enable that to happen,” he said.  “We rolled out 14 brand.com platforms all across the Asia Pacific – in Japan, China, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia, for example. So every one of these countries has its own brand.com, which is maintained in the local language and local currency, built by and operated jointly by ourselves and our local partners.” But while the Havaianas brand and retail network have flourished across the Asia Pacific, its parent company Alpargatas is suffering significant challenges back home, largely due to the ill-timed acquisition of sustainable footwear label Rothy’s. During the midst of the pandemic, in December 2021, Alpargatas spent US$200 million in cash and a further $275 million in shares for a 49.9 per cent stake in the California-based company, valuing Rothy’s at $1 billion.  Since then, however, valuations have plummeted and the company’s stock price has slumped.  “Alpargatas is at a bit of a crossroads,” said Esser, explaining why the time was right for him to step away. “If you look at the stock price of a lot of retail companies and direct-to-consumer businesses that had their beginnings during the past three, four or five years with IPOs, they are at very low valuations.”  A great example is Allbirds, (Rothy’s rival), which traded at $21 per share on debut after its IPO – and is now languishing at about $1.20.  Since Covid, Rothy’s has traded at a loss and its valuation has also plunged, which has tainted Alpartagas’ balance sheet, despite the strength of its 125-year-old core flip-flop business.   Alpartagas lost $4.2 million during the fourth quarter of the last trading year and its share price is languishing at around one-tenth of its peak, and about half the value when Esser joined in 2017. This calendar year, the share price had fallen 40 per cent before one of the controlling investors launched a bid to expand its holding, fuelling a 17 per cent surge.  The Mainland China challenge While sales in Asia Pacific and Europe achieved their targets last year, the all-important South American and US divisions are underperforming. And in Mainland China, ongoing lockdowns and trading restrictions saw sales well below expectations – not just for Havaianas, but across the entire apparel sector. If third-quarter figures are looking good now, that’s because they are against a poor comparative base for a year earlier.  “We had this idea that when China came out of its Covid difficulties we were going to have this rocket of revenge spending. But it is not really materialising for whatever cultural reasons, the Chinese have chosen to stay conservative. There’s a massive amount of pent-up savings in China – personal savings for Chinese consumers are at a historic high – but for whatever reason, they’re not spending it,” Esser said. Among the reasons he proffers is that while there may be 200 million mainland Chinese who want to travel now – similar to pre-pandemic figures in 2019 – they are finding it hard to get passports or paperwork to enable passage, and flight options remain limited. For example, in 2019 there were around 1800 flights per month between Chinese cities and Thai destinations but in February this year, there were just 50. The number is now up to about 250.  Academic life Esser was accepted into the program at DePaul University – one of France’s top four universities – in 2016 but deferred his enrollment due to the five-year term of the Alpartagas role. Finally commencing last autumn, he has already enjoyed about six months of residency programs and research and is now dedicating himself to the course full-time.  “This is something that I’ve always wanted to do. So with Alpartagas going through some difficult times and some organisational changes, I felt like this was a good opportunity,” he shared.  “For me, what’s uniquely interesting about the DBA is that it sits right at the edge of practice and academic theory. You have this whole universe of academia – which is largely unknown to people who are not academics – and then you have the whole parallel universe of practice and business and commerce, and there’s not that much intersection in the middle.” Those with the doctorate of business administration are uniquely qualified, he believes, to sit right at that junction, mixing practical business experience with academic scrutiny – “in my case with 25 years of commercial experience as a business executive building brands in emerging markets all over the world”.  The insights have been enlightening, to put it mildly: “When you go into academia, you have a series of ‘a-ha moments’ because this is not something that you’ve been thinking of for the past 25 years. The program teaches you to take a look at a business problem from a different perspective. When you get confronted with a business problem [in an executive role] the last thing you think about is not ‘Hey, let me go read up on Industrial Organisation Theory and see if that is pertinent to what I’m facing right now’. It’s not part of your thought process, but as a DBA, that becomes part of that process,” he said. “We have a tendency to look at things in a very structured way. When you encounter a problem in business rather than saying, Oh, wow, how do we put out the fire? The first thing that you ask as a DBA student is ‘Okay, what kind of fire is it? What’s the cause of the fire? How is the fire put together? And now that we know all of those things, we can figure out a way to put out the fire in a much more structured and systematic manner. And that’s really it. It’s just a thought process armed with a massive amount of tools to approach a problem.” Esser’s primary research interest right now is critical success factors for global brands in China and other emerging markets. During the past 20 to 25 years, most global brands have piled into China – some with great success, others with embarrassing failure and the majority falling somewhere in between. He will focus on three case studies as part of a complex final analysis.  “One of the most exciting things about this change – in addition to me taking on board all this new knowledge and learning – is my next role. Board appointments, or advisory or day-to-day commerce – which is what I would prefer to do – what is it going to be?  “There are so many interesting things happening right now, and you know, I’ve got a fairly clear idea of where I’d like to go, but I’m going to keep that to myself for a bit.” It’s likely to be an interesting retail project or brand, he said – “something innovative and exciting with good expansion capabilities”. Author’s note: While Esser said it is true that in theory he would become Dr Esser after he graduates, he said he is unlikely to use the honorific, except in an academic context: “I will also not put the letters after my name except in that same ecosystem.”