Something interesting happened last week that's easy to miss if you're only looking at the performance end of outdoor.
Merrell — 45 years old, $649 million in revenue, quietly growing at 8.4% — launched its first-ever global brand platform. Not a campaign. Not a seasonal push. A platform: a unified creative identity, a point of view, a flag in the ground about who the brand is for.
They're calling it "It Starts Outside." And what makes it worth our attention isn't the tagline. It's the positioning choice underneath it.
At a moment when every major outdoor footwear brand is racing upmarket — chasing performance credibility, trail culture cred, or Olympic-scale spectacle — Merrell just went in the exact opposite direction. They're positioning down. Toward simplicity. Toward the person who hasn't stepped outside yet.
And here's what's interesting: the culture might actually be meeting them there.
Let's look at what everybody else is doing right now, because it makes Merrell's move that much more legible.
Hoka hit $1.8 billion in fiscal 2024, up 28%. They're differentiating their line between ultra-sized shoes for athletes and oversized shoes for the lifestyle consumer — a deliberate split between performance credibility and mainstream reach. The engine is growth, and the fuel is moving upmarket without losing the casual buyer who discovered them through a TikTok podiatrist video.
Salomon crossed $2 billion, up 35%. They're deepening their trail culture position through coaching programs — First Trail, First 100K — and launching an adaptive running prosthesis. It's accessibility through the performance lens: come join us on the trail, and we'll help you get there.
Nike ACG is doing what Nike does best — creating cultural moments at a scale nobody else can match. Olympic spectacle, branded trains through the Italian Alps, a $150,000 race purse at Broken Arrow. The play is to earn outdoor credibility through sheer force of presence, product investment, and grassroots infrastructure.
And then there's Merrell.
No Olympic activation. No carbon-plated race shoe. No attempt to out-Salomon Salomon or out-Hoka Hoka. Instead: a 30-second film about stepping through a doorway. An Olympian hiking with a visually impaired marathon runner. A tagline that says the hardest part of being outside is leaving the couch.
Merrell is the only brand in outdoor footwear right now that's positioning toward the lowest possible threshold of entry. Not the trail. Not the race. Not the summit. The door.
Here's where it gets interesting. When we first started kicking this idea around, the instinct was that there's something broader happening — a cultural shift toward softness, toward slowing down, toward being a little gentler with ourselves. The question was whether there was data behind the feeling.
There is.
Euromonitor named its #1 global consumer trend for 2026 "Comfort Zone." The finding: 58% of consumers are experiencing moderate to extreme daily stress, and it's reshaping what people want from brands. The trend is driving what they're calling a "less but better" mindset — demand for products that offer emotional reassurance rather than peak performance. Consumers want comfort and simplicity amid volatility, not another invitation to optimize.
The Global Wellness Summit went further. They named "The Over-Optimization Backlash" a top 2026 trend and described it as "a decisive cultural pivot away from peak wellness and toward something far more human." Their report specifically flags that brands like On and Nike are — and this is their language — "ditching performance language for campaigns about softness, presence and joy." The fastest-growing wellness spaces, they found, are prioritizing nervous-system safety and emotional repair over metrics. Meaning over measurement. Catharsis over clinical data.
Their consumer research found that people are overwhelmed by constant self-tracking — experiencing "analysis paralysis rather than clarity." The proliferation of health data, wearables, and biohacking content hasn't made people feel more in control. It's made many of them feel more anxious.
This is the backdrop that makes Merrell's move feel less like a marketing choice and more like a brand catching a cultural wave at exactly the right moment. The outdoor industry has been selling aspiration — bigger adventures, harder trails, faster times, more technical gear. And a meaningful chunk of the consumer market is saying: actually, I just want to go for a walk.
The origin story of "It Starts Outside" is the kind of thing our audience will appreciate, because it's a genuinely interesting piece of consumer research that reshaped a $649 million brand's creative direction.
Merrell surveyed consumers across multiple markets and found something the agency team — Uncommon Creative Studio, their new creative partner — described as a revelation. Desk workers talking about their lunchtime walks were using the same emotional language that avid hikers used to describe weekend trips on the trail. The vocabulary was almost identical. The feeling of clarity. The reset. The sense that something shifted just by being outside.
That insight reframed the entire strategic question. The outdoor industry has been operating on the assumption that the big payoff — the transformational experience — requires a big commitment. A summit. A thru-hike. A race. But the research said the emotional payoff is available at a much lower threshold than we've been selling. The door is enough. The patch of grass is enough. The parking lot between the office and the car is enough.
Uncommon built the creative around this. Rather than showing what people do once they're outside, they dramatized the single moment of crossing the threshold — the door. The casting was deliberately unexpected: not the typical outdoor archetypes, but people reflecting the breadth of who actually benefits from stepping outside. Steve Zaroff, Uncommon's chief strategy officer, said the casting needed to include "people who may feel alienated by the traditional outdoor category."
And the hero story in the campaign — Merrell athlete Alexi Pappas hiking alongside visually impaired marathon runner Lisa Thompson — isn't about performance at all. It's about companionship. Two people sharing a trail. We'll have a lot more to say about Pappas, Thompson, and what their presence in this campaign signals about the athlete-creator model in Part 2 of this series.
So here's where we get to the debate, and it's a real one.
Is Merrell's move toward democratic accessibility a sign of strategic clarity — a brand that knows exactly who it's for and is willing to let the performance conversation happen without them? Or is it a concession? A tacit admission that Hoka, Salomon, and Nike have locked up the performance end of the market, and Merrell's best play is to own the space nobody else wants?
The business case says it's working. Revenue is up 8.4% to $649 million. The brand extended its market share gains in U.S. hiking. Retail is expanding — new locations planned for London and New York, adding to the Tokyo Harajuku flagship. Wolverine Worldwide, Merrell's parent company, has rebuilt its portfolio strategy around two engines: Merrell (democratic outdoor) and Saucony (cultural running). Those two brands now drive two-thirds of total revenue, up from 52% in 2023. The turnaround is real.
And the internal team driving this is worth paying attention to. CMO Richard McLeod — who joined from Champion last year — is framing the positioning with a clarity you don't always hear from someone in his seat. "Our job isn't to redefine the outdoors," he said. "It's to redefine who feels invited, and what better way to celebrate our anniversary milestone than intentionally making sure everyone knows they are invited to the celebration."
That framing does a lot of work. It sidesteps the performance debate entirely. It doesn't argue that Merrell makes the best trail shoe or the most technical boot. It argues that the outdoor industry has a participation problem — too many people don't feel like the outdoors is for them — and that solving that problem is a bigger business opportunity than winning the next shoe review.
Joanna Darst, Merrell's Global/Americas VP of Brand Marketing, put it even more simply in a LinkedIn post about the launch: by reframing "the outdoors" to simply say "outside," everyone can participate. That's the entire strategic move in one sentence. "The outdoors" is a place that requires gear, skills, and permission. "Outside" is just the other side of the door. The campaign isn't lowering the bar. It's removing the bar and replacing it with an open doorway.
And Darst flagged something else worth noting — the Futures Project that Merrell launched alongside the campaign, developed with the Virgil Abloh "Post-Modern" Scholarship Fund and Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design. Her read on it: "They're not just democratizing the outdoors, they're democratizing who designs for it." We'll dig deep into that in Part 2, but the fact that a VP of Brand Marketing is framing this as a design pipeline story — not just a media campaign — tells you something about how the team is thinking about this internally.
McLeod reinforced that framing himself: "Through a nature-driven creative curriculum which will lead to several apprenticeships, we're creating real pathways for the next generation."
What you're seeing is a leadership team that's aligned on a positioning that extends beyond the campaign — from the tagline, to the creative, to the talent pipeline. Whether that alignment holds over time is always the question with brand platforms. But the internal coherence at launch is notable.
Does the platform hold beyond the launch? Brand platforms are easy to announce. The question is whether "It Starts Outside" shows up consistently across product, retail, community, and talent strategy — not just in paid media. We'll be examining that in Part 2.
How does the competitive response play out? Merrell just claimed the most accessible positioning in outdoor footwear. If the over-optimization backlash continues to build, do other brands start moving toward simplicity too? Or does the market bifurcate — performance brands going harder on speed and technical credibility, Merrell owning the softer entry point?
The Wolverine Worldwide story underneath. Merrell and Saucony are running opposite plays — Merrell going wide and democratic, Saucony going cultural and lifestyle-forward. That portfolio strategy is the kind of thing that either looks brilliant or incoherent in 18 months. We'll be tracking both.
The over-optimization backlash as an industry trend. Merrell may be the first outdoor brand to explicitly position around simplicity and permission rather than performance and aspiration. If Euromonitor and the Global Wellness Summit are right about where the consumer is heading, they won't be the last.
Next week in Part 2: We zoom in on the people behind the platform — Alexi Pappas, the Virgil Abloh Scholarship Fund, Pensole Lewis College, and the Merrell Futures Project.
