Paul Nugent

The Story

A career built on a single, stubborn question

Paul Nugent has spent a working lifetime asking companies an awkward thing: what made you brilliant in the first place? It is a question that sounds simple and turns out to be the hardest in marketing. He has asked it of football boots and video games, of a Baltimore sportswear giant and a foam-shoe upstart, and now he is asking it, in a soft Raleigh drawl of cashmere and quarter-zips, of Peter Millar.

The starting point was not obvious. Nugent read Media Production at the University of Humberside, a course rather better suited to producing television than reviving trainers. But the storyteller's training stuck. Where some marketers see spreadsheets and sell-through, he tends to see narrative - the tale a brand is allowed to tell about itself, and the far greater number it is not.

He cut his teeth in the early 2000s at ellesse, running football, before a brief and cheerful detour into Codemasters, marketing football video games. It reads like a young man collecting the raw materials of a career: sport, culture, play, and the peculiar British art of making a heritage badge feel new again.

The Umbro years

Umbro is where the philosophy hardened into method. As brand director and later VP of global marketing, Nugent oversaw the double diamond's return to what it did best - honest football, made properly. He championed the relaunch of the Speciali boot, a piece of gear that traded on craft rather than gimmick, and framed the whole exercise, memorably, as “getting back to what made the brand brilliant.” It is the sort of line that could sit above his desk at every job since.

Umbro taught him that heritage is an asset only if you are brave enough to edit it. Nostalgia sells nothing; a well-told origin story sells plenty. The trick is knowing the difference, and Nugent turned out to have a good ear for it.

Under Armour and the American stage

From English football he crossed to the far louder theatre of American sport. At Under Armour he ran marketing for Europe and then rose to senior vice president of global brand marketing and category - a job that meant carrying a brand famous for its swagger into markets that had plenty of their own. It was a step up in scale and scrutiny, and it planted him firmly in the United States, where his story would take its most unexpected turn.

Making a comfort shoe cool

Comfort footwear was never supposed to be fashionable. Then Nugent took the CMO chair at HEYDUDE, the featherweight-shoe brand owned by Crocs, and set about proving that nothing is un-marketable - only under-marketed. He borrowed shrewdly from the Crocs playbook, an approach he was happy to dissect in public on Ad Age's Marketer's Brief podcast, and he pointed the brand squarely at culture.

The results were hard to miss. He put actor Sydney Sweeney at the centre of a “Fashion Crisis Hotline,” a campaign built on wit rather than earnestness, and rolled out an “Unlike Anything” global platform fronted by Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter. There was even a SpongeBob collaboration, because a brand whose DNA is “confidence, fun and style” is allowed to have a sense of humour. Under his watch HEYDUDE stopped apologising for being comfortable and started selling comfort as confidence.

The luxury pivot

In 2025 came the move few saw coming. Nugent left one of footwear's hottest brands not for a bigger sneaker, but for Peter Millar - the Raleigh luxury sportswear and golf label owned by Richemont, the Swiss group behind Cartier and Montblanc. On paper it is a swerve: from mass-market foam to fairway cashmere. In practice it is the same job he has always done, wearing a nicer sweater. Take a brand that people quietly love, work out what makes it brilliant, and say it louder than it has dared to before.

Peter Millar has long been an insider's label - beloved on the golf course, underestimated off it. Handing marketing to someone who made clogs culturally relevant is either a gamble or a very clever bet. Nugent, who has spent a career seeing value before the market does, is betting on the latter.