Metro Brands appoints Manoj Juneja as chief business officer for sports

MUMBAI: Metro Brands has gone shopping for a sneaker man, and landed one with a CV stitched together from nearly every big name on the high street. The footwear retailer has appointed Manoj Juneja as chief business officer for its sports division, handing him control of a portfolio that includes FILA, New Era, Foot Locker and the company’s own MetroActiv label, as it doubles down on its push into sports and athleisure.

Juneja brings more than 27 years across retail, footwear, fashion and consumer businesses to the job, a run that reads like a tour of the industry’s biggest sportswear names. He arrives from Crocs, where he has served as country manager for India and the SAARC region since September 2024, steering an $80 million profit-and-loss business and an 80-member team through what he describes as a pivot from two years of flat volumes into double-digit growth, while pushing direct-to-consumer sales past 30 per cent of revenue.

Before Crocs, Juneja spent over two years as chief operating officer for Reebok at Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail, where he was the brand’s first leadership hire in India and built a 90-person organisation from scratch to relaunch it commercially in the market. He says revenue doubled within 12 months of that relaunch, with the business turning profitable on an EBITDA basis ahead of schedule. Stints at Timex Group India and, earlier, seven and a half years at Adidas Group as senior director for sales and ecommerce, rounded out a career spent almost entirely inside the sportswear and consumer goods trenches, including a run managing a combined Adidas and Reebok business worth more than $140 million.

At Metro Brands, Juneja’s brief is to expand the sports business, deepen brand partnerships and sharpen consumer experience across retail and omnichannel platforms, as the company leans harder into a category it clearly believes still has plenty of room to run. The company framed the hire as the start of an exciting new chapter in growing its sports business and creating greater value for shoppers.

Metro Brands is betting that a man who has spent his career turning around sportswear businesses, from a near collapse in franchisee numbers at Adidas to a stagnant Crocs portfolio, can do the same trick one more time, only this time with four brands under one roof instead of one. If his track record is any guide, India’s sports retail shelf is about to get considerably more competitive.