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The parent of the long-distance triathlon could partner with more luxury brands or resorts as it seeks to enhance the athlete experience.

Collaborations with luxury brands? A branded hotel? A luxury training vacation?

For Scott DeRue, chief executive officer of the Ironman Group, anything is possible.

That expression is also the motto of the sports company that organizes 225 events in 54 countries across the sports of triathlon, road running, trail running, road cycling and mountain biking. Its marquee event is the Ironman triathlon, a grueling race that consists of a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike and a 26.2-mile run.

About 10 months ago, the Ironman Group, which is owned by Advance, the privately held family-owned company behind Condé Nast and American City Business Journals, poached Equinox president DeRue to become its CEO. Since taking on the role, DeRue has immersed himself in the world of Ironman, even partaking in a half-Ironman race, called an Ironman 70.3 to indicate the total distance traveled by the athletes, in Wilmington, N.C., last month.

DeRue, a dedicated endurance athlete who has competed in ultramarathons and summited Everest, Denali and Kilimanjaro, among others, said the North Carolina race was his first triathlon. And like many other participants, he’s now hooked. He completed the 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike and 13.1-mile run in a highly respective time of 5:45.

“I had a blast,” he said. “I found out I can’t swim in a straight line, but I finished with a smile on my face. And I saw firsthand how engaged the community is. There are not many brands that people tattoo on their bodies.”

That passion is what DeRue intends to capitalize on as he lays out his strategy to grow the Ironman brand.

“The last 10 months have been incredibly inspiring to me,” he said. “There’s a highly engaged and passionate community built around our sport.”

While his primary goal is to better serve the athletes that compete at his races, that reach can be much wider, he believes.

Right now, Ironman has deals with performance brands including Roka, best known for its wetsuits and eyewear; Hoka, a favorite running shoe of endurance athletes; Santini, which manufactures its race kits; Lululemon, which makes Ironman-branded training apparel, and Timex, which has a long history making watches sporting the Ironman name. Starting next year, Zoot Sports will become the exclusive triathlon and cycling apparel partner for all owned Ironman and Ironman 70.3 events globally.

But DeRue sees opportunity to further increase the reach.

He pointed to the watch category as an example. While Timex has been making Ironman watches since 1986, Ironman made a deal with the luxury Swiss watchmaker Breitling in 2019 to create co-branded timepieces pegged to its World Championship events. While a Timex watch can cost under $100, a Breitling timepiece can easily retail for around $4,000.

At the Ironman women’s World Championship race in Nice, France, in September, DeRue said the company held an activation at the Breitling store there that was well-attended. “This has elevated the Ironman brand to a new level,” he said. “Breitling focuses on world-championship events and they sell out quickly. We’re extraordinarily happy with the brands we’ve curated for our community, but we’re always exploring what’s new and on the horizon, and looking for new verticals.”

That can include apparel. “We want the right performance wear, but we also want to build our ecosystem through fashion. That’s going to be a major investment for us this year.”

He said his primary focus is to “put the athlete at the center of everything we do.” That includes not only race days and race weekends, but “every day in between. It’s not only about a great swim, a great bike and a great run, but all the other touch points.”

In the men’s World Championship race in Kona, Hawaii, in October, DeRue said Ironman “enriched” the race experience by partnering with the local community to bring the Hawaiian culture to life. The company also worked with AG1, a health drink, to sponsor the coffee boat that is docked in Kailua Bay where participants and others swim out for a cup during their morning workouts.

“That’s just one of the iconic moments,” DeRue said. Experiences such as these, he said, allow the Ironman community to experience more than just a race course.

Because training for an Ironman is a months-long process, the company lines up partners such as TriDot, a triathlon training company, and Precision Fuel and Hydration, which offers personalized nutrition, and has also made a “big investment” by elevating the bags, T-shirts and medals that the participants receive as swag. “We’ve received extraordinary feedback around the elevated quality and design,” he said.

DeRue is also not opposed to following the lead of his former employer, Equinox, which has “done a great job elevating the brand beyond the gym,” he said. “They think of it as a luxury experience and they build a sense of community and connection. The same is true with Ironman.”

There is an Equinox hotel, high-end partnerships with other brands in fashion, travel, nutrition and entertainment such as the StockX resale site, the Bezel concierge service, the Oura smart ring, and others.

So while Ironman may not open a branded hotel in the near term, it already works with Club La Santa, an active holiday resort in Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, to sponsor the race it holds there every spring.

“The resort caters to endurance athletes and many people go there even when they’re not racing,” he said. “That’s a good example of what could be.”

While DeRue works to extend the Ironman reach, he better continue his triathlon training. He said the company is auctioning off a relay spot for the Ironman Lake Placid next July where he and former champion Michellie Jones will compete with the auction winner. And it’ll be up to the auction winner to decide which sport DeRue will do, which means it could be the swim, so he’s got eight months to work on his open-water sighting skills.

The CEO shared details on the record-breaking watch at the WWD Apparel & Retail CEO Summit in New York.

Bulgari won the WWD Honor for Watch Brand of the Year for its Finissimo Ultra COSC, a record-breaking timepiece that is the thinnest mechanical watch in the world, and quite a way for the Roman brand to mark its 140th anniversary this year.

Chief executive officer Jean-Christophe Babin joined WWD’s Milan bureau chief Luisa Zargani, first by holding up a 2mm Swiss coin to demonstrate the marvel of the 1.70mm timepiece. “The watch is thinner than a coin,” he said, acknowledging that Bulgari is famous across the globe “as one of the leading high jewelers, but not spontaneously a watchmaker.”

Nonetheless, the brand has a well-documented history in watchmaking, particularly the Serpenti Tubogas timepiece. But Babin pointed out that when he came to the brand more than 11 years ago, watches were trailing behind the jewelry.

“The question we immediately asked ourselves is what the benefit of Bulgari to ladies is. I would answer, ‘elegance,’” he said, then considering the question for the opposite sex.

“The Bulgari gentleman is living in a quite modern environment here in New York,” he offered as an example. “His main accessory for three centuries is the watch. We see what contemporary means in terms of architecture, art, style, design, and also in terms of personal style. And the watch cannot change across those three centuries. Not in style, not too much,” he said, elaborating that they then asked themselves what would the style be for a modern gentleman. “And obviously the answer was a slim watch,” he said.

He continued, “But to do a slim watch, you have to reinvent the watch. You cannot just squeeze a big watch into a small watch, hoping that the components will make it. You have to reinvent it.”

Introduced at the Watches and Wonders fair in Geneva in April, the watch’s groundbreaking thinness was a hot topic at the fair, setting a new record and solidifying the brand its ninth award in 10 years. In fact, the watch broke the brand’s previous record in the Octo Finissimo Ultra range achieved in 2022 with a 1.80mm-thick timepiece. “Nobody believed we could go thinner in watchmaking; it was truly revolutionary,” Babin said.

The Octo Finissimo’s unique thinness was the result of a collaboration with engineers at Concepto Watch Factory, a Swiss workshop that specializes in complex mechanisms. The Roman brand reworked the case by shaving off an extra 10th of a millimeter and engineers managed to embed the multitude of components making up the manually wound BVL180 manufacture caliber inside the two-material slim case, which is crafted from sandblasted titanium or platinum and an ultra-resistant and dense tungsten carbide for the back case and main plate, ensuring adequate resistance and strength.

Beyond its smaller-than-a-Swiss-coin thinness, “we make it beautiful,” he told the crowd. “Now with collectors, with retailers, Bulgari is seen not only as a high jeweler but also as a very innovative watchmaker.”

Babin came to the brand from Tag Heuer explaining that since Bulgari is “not a pure watch player, but a jeweler, it was easier to create a revolution in watchmaking than if we were a pure watch player.”

He contrasted his time at Tag Heuer saying that the artisans at Bulgari “are not skewed by centuries of watchmaking. We are influenced by centuries of Roman art and culture. It has managed to shape the West. So, Rome was very inclusive, grabbing from the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Persians. So yes, it has maybe an even stronger culture, an architectural and artistic culture, which has spread all across and so with watches, we did more of the same. We acted like Romans, we open our eyes, we try to integrate the best and create a new generation of watches, to which Octo Finissimo belongs.”

Finally, Babin was asked about the summit theme of resilience and how the watch speaks to it. “This is mix of resilience and determination,” he said. “Meaning that we always try and push a limit and when, typically at watch fairs with collectors and experts, [they] ask us, ‘But how can you go further?’ My answer is always, ‘I don’t know. I have no idea.’ In one year Bulgari will find new ideas but if you ask me right now I have no idea, but I’m already excited.

“To be resilient is to be optimistic. I always tell the teams, we’ll find a solution, I think it’s very Italian,” he said to a laugh. “I’ve worked in many countries. In some countries, people are always complaining. In Italy, people are always saying, ‘OK, there is a problem. Let’s go have a dinner and talk about it tomorrow morning.’ And doing that, you create a mental break, which, instead of getting deeper into the cynicism you wake up the next morning after a good dinner with a friend or with your colleague and you’re fresh with optimism. It’s a philosophy.”

FTX sues Binance and former chief Zhao for $1.8bn

Estate of collapsed crypto exchange lawsuit alleging 2021 share deal was ‘fraudulent’

Collapsed crypto exchange FTX is suing Binance and its former chief executive Changpeng Zhao for $1.8bn, over an allegedly “fraudulent” share deal.

The dispute relates to a July 2021 deal in which Binance, Zhao and other executives sold their roughly 20 per cent stake in FTX back to the company in exchange for crypto tokens valued at $1.76bn.

The transaction, part of a repurchase deal agreed with founder Sam Bankman-Fried, should not have taken place, according to the lawsuit, which seeks to claw back the tokens for the FTX bankruptcy estate.

In a lawsuit filed in Delaware on Sunday, the administrators of the FTX estate said that the exchange and its sister trading house Alameda Research “may have been insolvent from inception and certainly were balance-sheet insolvent by early 2021”, and so the deal should not have been allowed to proceed.

The transfer of cryptocurrency to Binance and some executives at the company “was a constructive fraudulent transaction”, the lawsuit said.

Bankman-Fried is in prison, having earlier this year been sentenced to 25 years for fraud. Zhao stepped down from Binance in April and spent four months in jail after pleading guilty to failing to establish adequate money laundering controls.

The dispute marks the latest chapter in the tensions between two of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world, as FTX seeks to repay its debts following its dramatic collapse in 2022, which sparked a crash in the price of crypto tokens and pushed other companies into bankruptcy.

“The claims are meritless, and we will vigorously defend ourselves,” Binance said in a statement. Zhao did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Demand for residential batteries is set to surge

Japan’s drivers have been wary of making the switch to electric vehicles. Its EV market share is about a 10th of China’s, and EVs account for less than 1 per cent of all cars in use. But sluggish EV sales do not necessarily spell bad news for battery makers. The rise of solar power could give them a new source of growth.

Solar power has become the largest source of clean energy in Japan this year. Interest among households has been strong, with more than 3mn residential solar systems installed last year. Demand for a similar number of residential batteries should follow soon. Government measures, including Tokyo requiring all new homes built by large-scale homebuilders from 2025 to have solar panels, are expected to turbocharge sales starting next year.

An even bigger boost is expected from virtual power plants, another area of government focus, that will provide further incentive to install residential batteries. Virtual power plants bring together a large number of interconnected home batteries which are linked through a cloud platform and controlled remotely. That allows operators to sell surplus energy from each of the home batteries during power demand spikes, which generates revenue for homeowners participating in the programme. Starting in fiscal 2026, the trade of this type of electricity stored in residential storage batteries will be facilitated in a dedicated market.

Tesla has a head start here. It started building virtual power plant in Japan with its Powerwall batteries in 2021. It is positioned to benefit from a push into local retail chains, by selling its home battery system through Yamada Denki, Japan’s largest electronics store chain, in a partnership with the chain’s operator Yamada Holdings. Yamada has about 1,000 stores nationwide that already sell residential solar systems. Tesla’s battery will be priced at $13,700, which includes installation costs, making it competitive with local rivals such as Panasonic.

During normal times, household power outages in Japan are extremely rare. But it is not unusual for earthquakes and other disasters to cause widespread outages. The Powerwall home battery, for example, stores 13.5 kilowatt-hours of electricity, which is nearly equivalent to the daily power consumption of an average household. Local companies Toshiba, Itochu and Hitachi are among those betting on energy storage systems for growth.

There is much potential in this relatively overlooked sector: the global battery energy storage market will reach as much as $150bn by 2030, estimates McKinsey. Falling prices of battery cells should help wider adoption of home batteries. As EV sales growth slows this year, energy storage will become increasingly important to the top lines of EV and battery makers.