Salomon sneakers weren’t always cool. Just ask creative director Heikki Salonen, who wants to restore the very geekiness that first attracted a trendier customer set to the French outdoors label.

“When I started, I was adamant about the idea that Salomon should not be a fashion brand,” says the Finnish designer, video calling from Salomon HQ in Annecy, southeastern France. “We should keep on doing what we do the best, which is performance-driven — but performance in a non-traditional way.”

Salonen joined in January as the brand’s first official creative director, following a six-year stint as the anonymous creative director of Maison Margiela’s legacy diffusion line, MM6. Before that, he’d worked as collection director — leading on clothing — from around 2013. During his time at MM6, he oversaw several collaborations with Salomon, quickly recognizing a market for fashion-forward performance shoes.

By the time Salonen arrived at Salomon, it had broken the fashion market. Before that, the brand was in a very different place.

It spoke almost entirely to an audience of committed outdoors and alpine enthusiasts. Gorpcore and a Covid-induced boom in hiking and trail running changed everything, and through latter half of the 2010s, Salomon went from a dad brand to hypebeast fodder — supported by collabs with Parisian boutique The Broken Arm, Beams, and Palace — before finally cracking the mainstream.

As part of this turn toward broader lifestyle, wellness and fashion categories, Salomon has grown a younger, increasingly female audience, resonating more with women through launches such as the XT-Whisper’s — fronted by TikTok-breakthrough rapper Dina Ayada. Looking ahead, the company believes innovations in apparel will support this momentum.

Strategically, Salonen’s hire is wise, given his womenswear experience: MM6; Diesel, where he was head of womenswear from 2011; and his eponymous, Fashion East-supported label, aired during London Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2010.

Over five years ago, the gender split was roughly 35% women and 65% men, says Salomon CEO Guillaume Meyzenq, on a call shortly after. Today, the divide is 45% women and 55% men.

“It’s a journey,” affirms Meyzenq, who started at Salomon as an intern in 1994. He notes the brand’s almost-80-year transformation from a family-owned winter sports equipment specialist — often “technical and male-driven”— to a broader outdoors brand, which now spans everyday commuters through hardened ultramarathon runners and Nordic skiers.

This shift has driven growth. Parent company Amer Sports — which also owns Wilson and Arc’teryx, among others — reached revenues of $6.57 billion in 2025, a 26% year-on-year increase.

Salomon was a standout, accounting for more than $2 billion in sales during fiscal 2025’s fourth quarter. For Q1 2026, Amer Sports grew 26% year-on-year to $1.95 billion, with growth in outdoor performance driven by Salomon’s soft goods (footwear, apparel, bags).

For Q2, revenues reached $1.63 billion, up 30%, with Salomon’s soft goods carrying outdoor performance growth once again.

Salomon is pleased with the results and the effect of its fashion-ification, but is also keen to rebalance the image, growing across categories while bolstering the core in niche technical gear. For context, Salomon’s lifestyle range of footwear, known as Sportstyle, is growing fast — the bestselling XT-6 design became a meme-able byword for contemporary yuppies across the US and Europe — despite the brand’s small (low-single-digit) market shares in both global sneakers and the global running shoes.

As for the niche markets of winter sports, outdoor footwear and trail running, Salomon has a double-digit share in each. So, what’s the plan?

One Salomon

Continuing growth won’t be as simple as doubling down on the lifestyle strategy. Instead, Salonen and Meyzenq have focused on unifying the distinct wings of the business, a shift that’s been underway for a few years now.

Before Salonen’s appointment, he worked as a consultant on the brand’s Advanced line — a more fashion-led offering inspired by the brand’s classic products. Even then, he questioned the siloing of fashion, lifestyle, and the original outdoors categories.

“I think we can segment things differently [rather] than just having a sub-brand of a sub-brand of a sub-brand,” he says. “I think there’s great value in the idea of just being Salomon.”

Salonen goes as far to suggest that, perhaps, more fashion-led designs produced in-house should be scrapped entirely, reserving this wing for collaborations. In some ways, it goes back to the recognition that what enticed fashion brands to engage with Salomon in the first place was its technical excellence, not its fashion nous.

His argument is that by innovating in the technical space, new icon designs come to the fore, and with time, they can eventually retire from the performance space and enter the lifestyle segment. “I think that’s what people expect from us — not just ticking the boxes that are already there, but inventing some other boxes to tick,” he explains.

To Salonen’s point, Salomon has made its name by specializing in technical geekery, producing everything from hydration vests and ski poles through to merino ski socks and — in years gone by — squirrel suits for ski-diving. “I think that’s the great thing about us.

We are not shying away from being weird,” he says. With this comes risk, but in the long run, it will be essential to ensuring Salomon remains a best-in-class performance brand, not just a heritage label.

His thinking? Salomon should play with consumers and trial products, rather than expecting immediate adoption.

After all, Salomon caught on with a wider pool of consumers circa 2016 almost by accident. At that point, there was no fully fledged lifestyle side to the business.

The brand had to build it, responding to a wellness boom and a newfound consumer demand for functional footwear that could be used by everyday urbanites. “The way people were using the city was different,” says Meyzenq, citing the uptake in bike rentals and smartwatches.

“People suddenly discovered that the city could be a space of activity as well, and not always sports activity — just moving,” he adds.

The brand leant into storytelling, engaging with fashion weeks, content creators, and select collaborations. “We were in startup mode in the market,” Salonen says.

In practice, this split the brand messaging, creating two de facto sub-labels, each one tapped into a separate cultural calendar. For the performance products, that could mean activations at Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc; for the Sportstyle offering, a Comme des Garçons runway collaboration.

Eventually, the Sportstyle segment was “big enough not to fail” — a viable business in itself — and so the consolidation process could begin.

Scaling the vision

The process of aligning the brand’s many parts is no mean feat, nor will it happen overnight. Success will rely on a global but localized approach, as well as some reflection time for Salonen, who is using his first year to listen and learn, crystalizing the brand’s essence.

Salonen — who comes from a more traditional atelier-style workplace where every design is scrutinized with a fine-tooth comb — is acclimatizing to the sheer size of his current employer, learning to communicate a vision at scale and accept some loss of control. What he doesn’t want to lose from his “big bad fashion” days is the more emotive side of product innovation, pursuing elements of excitement in the products, even for carryover designs.

“Like Alexander McQueen, I’m a big believer in being with the wearer on their journey, having this conversation and surprising each other,” Salonen says.

Ultimately, Salonen’s goal is to elevate what’s already there. In this vein, the brand is developing the outerwear and apparel range, using the core outdoor and trail running footwear as a springboard to build silhouettes. Salomon is testing the line first in China, and will use the results to gauge its investment in apparel for the rest of the world.

Indeed, Meyzenq has been watching territory traction closely. Historically, Salomon has resonated in Asia — especially Japan, where it’s a leader in the snowboard and alpine ski market.

More recently, in the last five to six years, Asia has become Salomon’s fastest-growing market, with China driving particular growth. The brand has also benefited from a momentous shareholder switchup in 2019, when China-based Anta Sports Products acquired a majority stake in Amer Sports, which helped Salomon optimize its strategy in Asia, developing the retail footprint.

Salomon’s evolution has brought more physical direct-to-consumer stores — five in both Paris and New York, three in London, for example — with investment across the US, Asia, and Europe. Equally, the brand has leveraged its digital presence, particularly in the US, where physical stores have a lower density due to its geographic size.

This demand-driven approach to international expansion is a far cry from the brand’s distribution model five to six years ago; it would send out stock dependent on what business-to-business partners selected from an order book. Salomon, Meyzenq admits, is still a relatively small brand, but it’s developing fast.

If it can maintain local relevancy in its core regions, while presenting Salomon as one brand, he will be happy. “I think that attracting more consumers but remaining true to who we are is the backbone of our strategy for the next five years,” says Meyzenq.

Salone concurs: “To me, it’s important to keep Salomon as Salomon.”