# Patrick Olszowski

Patrick Olszowski writes and speaks about helping sporting-apparel and active-lifestyle brands build enduring products by finding and acting on consumers’ needs.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/patrick-olszowski/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickolszowski
- LinkedIn followers: 2,233
- Topics: product-management
- Based on 13 dated posts, latest 2026-10-07

## Summary

Helping sporting-apparel and active-lifestyle brands build enduring products by acting on consumer needs.

- Best for: A sporting apparel or active-lifestyle brand building a franchise product from consumer insight.
- Not for: Mass-market consumer brand seeking high-volume short-form reach to general shoppers.
- Check first: Ask for recent LinkedIn impressions, engagement, and audience survey on job function and seniority.

### Takeaways

- Franchise products come from enduring consumer needs, not product ideas.
- Treasure Hunters is a small cross-functional group that listens to and observes consumers.
- A beach blanket example shows bag too small, stakes fail, fabric soaks sand.

## Main ideas

- **Franchise products come from enduring consumer needs, not product ideas**: Patrick Olszowski argues that the hardest job in sporting apparel and active lifestyle is building franchise products: lines that serve a core group of consumers, evolve over a long period while retaining their core elements, and keep answering the same deep consumer needs profitably, year after year. The working definition is a product that has met the needs of a core group of consumers for fifteen years or more without losing what makes it itself. The sequence matters: research the market and the consumers first, then build. Brands that skip this step have pipelines on shaky foundations. The discipline is to address enduring pain points rather than chase launches.
- **What product leaders say the VP job is really like**: Patrick Olszowski distils twelve interviews with product vice presidents, representing hundreds of years of experience, into five lessons. The job is time-pressured: every decision costs time, and every meeting brings another sixty emails demanding action and input. It is also scrutinised: teams, other VPs, markets and boards all watch, and everyone thinks they know how a product should be brought in line. Start with a market and a set of consumers to serve, not with the product. Building great products is difficult. The best VPs spend their limited time on franchise products. One structural warning runs through the interviews: products initiated outside the chief product organisation tend to fail, leaving their originators wondering why.
- **The Treasure Hunters cadre: a small volunteer team tasked with finding what consumers care about**: The method here is organisational. Patrick Olszowski argues against building a large insights function, favouring a smaller cadre drawn from across the organisation. Members volunteer, apply and get sponsorship from their leaders. Their brief: go where consumers are, not where the brand wants them to be; spend time listening and observing; use AI to reduce administrative work, not to do the thinking; prioritise questions over answers; and get training that stretches rather than constrains. The cadre is tasked with uncovering consumers' most enduring questions, which means saying no to most things. The teams are recruited and given a mandate before the brand feels ready.
- **Check your brand against eighteen symptoms**: One post offers a self-diagnosis: eighteen signs that a sporting apparel or active lifestyle brand has stopped working as it used to. They include cash-generating products that no longer feel new; products that have lost their ability to wow consumers; more direct-to-consumer competition; uncertainty over whether the brand is premium or value; competing and collaborating with retailers who want margin; celebrity no longer connecting; too much inventory; thinking like a Savile Row tailor rather than a mass-market brand; broadcasting instead of listening; staff exhausted by too many SKUs and launches—or not tired enough and wanting more pace; the same consumer complaints recurring; and consumers asking for their favourite colourway back. Patrick Olszowski presents the list as the diagnosis and the cadre as the response.
- **Nail the basics: judge the product as a family on holiday would**: Patrick Olszowski takes one ordinary product, a beach mat or blanket bought from an outdoor shop under a generic brand, and names its failures one by one: the bag is too small, the stakes do not hold the blanket, do not fit in the bag and pierce its side, and the blanket is neither splash proof nor sand proof. This is called lazy design that says 'we hate the consumer', and the argument is that five minutes with a real family on holiday, or even in a closed sandpit, would have surfaced every problem. The priority drawn out is that active lifestyle brands do not need to deliver the world, but they should nail the basics, ideally with a touch of delight. Doing so stops 'profit vampire products' and stacks small wins that build a reputation for delivering.
- **Long, unedited interviews are Olszowski's research engine**: Much of this thinking comes from an interview series with product leaders. The format is deliberately unedited audio and video, supported by a rotating bench of co-hosts, with guests given uninterrupted time to tell their stories. Patrick Olszowski reports twelve interviews with product vice presidents representing hundreds of years of experience, and the first thousand audio downloads. The series supplies the practitioner views quoted in other posts.
- **Interested in manufacturing change, without treating technology as the answer**: One of the eighteen symptoms is 'technology is the answer. It is not the answer', setting the tone for the rest. Patrick Olszowski is curious about how new production methods change product teams' work, but does not present them as a cure. In a conversation with Cecily Schmidt, who now leads at Koobz, they discuss zero-inventory, ultra-rapid footwear manufacturing that can design and 3D print shoes in days rather than weeks or months. Olszowski describes the printed shoe as a breathable, almost knit upper morphing into a springy footbed in a single print, and says the pair sent to them has barely left their feet. Ask for evidence of the manufacturing model's performance and economics.
- **Consumer insight leaks before launch; protect it through the pipeline**: One post pitches a Consumer Delight Diagnostic to brands worried that their innovation pipeline is built on guesswork and consumer insight leaks before a product reaches market. The diagnostic is described as the first step in building franchise products and as a way to identify where insight is leaking. The premise is that finding consumer truth is not enough; the harder problem is keeping it intact as a product moves through development. Ask what the diagnostic includes, how it is run and what it costs.

## Work to read

- [Lessons from 12 Product VPs on building franchise products](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/patrickolszowski_12-interviews-with-product-vps-representing-activity-7496235889845776384-VFkr)
- [Shawn LaRowe on stepping up before you feel ready](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/patrickolszowski_productmanagement-insight-earndelight-activity-7488612798365782016-DJdy)
- [18 signs your brand is losing its way — and the Treasure Hunters who can fix it](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/patrickolszowski_consumerinsight-treasurehunters-activity-7493197315583729664-d8Ou)
- [A mat that says 'we hate the consumer'](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/patrickolszowski_consumerinsight-outdoor-activity-7491410397875412994-PGJ4)
- [Cecily Schmidt on 3D-printed footwear and the sport of kings](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/patrickolszowski_lightthefuse-activity-7496466532940746752-EZAT)
- [The Consumer Delight Diagnostic, introduced with a toilet roll holder](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/patrickolszowski_nolimits-earndelight-activity-7483214556320899073-_WSI)

## Brand relationships

- **Pelican** (mention)
- **Dynafit** (mention)
- **Berghaus** (mention)
- **Vans** (mention)
- **The North Face** (mention)
- **Koobz** (mention)
- **The Consumer Delight Diagnostic** (disclosed_partnership)

## Partnerships

The posts here contain no sponsorship policy, rate card, media kit, or stated partnership terms. Patrick Olszowski writes about consumer insight and franchise-product building for sporting-apparel and active-lifestyle brands. Several posts close with an open invitation to contact them; one points to the Consumer Delight Diagnostic as a first step for teams whose innovation pipeline rests on guesswork. That is a service offer, not a documented brand-partnership format: none of the posts describes deliverables, pricing, exclusivity, usage rights, or an approval process. Buyers planning a paid collaboration should ask directly for terms and a media kit before committing.

## Alternatives

- Katie Shaw: Katie Shaw is the stronger choice when a sporting-apparel campaign makes supply-chain transparency, responsible sourcing or forced-labour risk a condition of the franchise product decision. Two posts document open-access platforms — Open Supply Hub (2022) and Supply Trace (2024) — that map apparel suppliers and links between forced-labour risk in the Uyghur Region and shipments to the US. If the brand needs to show or investigate where its materials come from before scaling a product, that work is directly on point.
- Jordan Byrd: Jordan Byrd is the better choice when a campaign needs product marketing for enterprise AI or data products, or career development and mentoring for the internal team. The posts cover IBM AI model launches — a defence AI model built on Granite and trained on Janes data, and Granite 4.0 hybrid models — plus a new-grad coaching offer drawing on a career spanning environmental consulting, civil engineering, an MBA and tech product marketing. If the sporting-apparel brand is building an AI-driven insight tool and needs someone who can explain model launches to enterprise buyers, Byrd is closer than the other alternatives.
- Sandy W.: Sandy W. is the better choice when the decision concerns owning or operating multiple franchise businesses — for example, if the sporting-apparel brand’s route to market involves franchisees or multi-unit operators and the question is what those owners need to succeed. The posts address leverage between businesses, shared management and administrative support, and transferring corporate skills such as leading people and managing budgets into franchise ownership.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/