In the past 18 months, On replaced its CEO with its own co-founders. REI hired its first leader from outside the outdoor industry. Rapha brought in a Team Sky executive to run a clothing company. Nike brought back a 32-year veteran to fix the mess his predecessors made. The North Face burned through two presidents in under three years. Columbia elevated the founder's son. Cotopaxi promoted its CFO over its founder. Deckers handed the keys from a lifer to the commercial chief. Vuori created an entirely new role — Global President — and filled it with a Fabletics executive. And Salomon promoted its Chief Product Officer to the top job as the brand crossed $2 billion.
That's ten major leadership changes across the brands we track. Not over a decade. In a year and a half.
Any one of these would be a story on its own. Together, they're a signal. The outdoor and sport industry isn't just swapping executives. It's renegotiating — brand by brand — what kind of leader these companies actually need right now.
And the pattern that emerges when you line these moves up isn't random. It's five distinct archetypes, each one a tell about where the brand thinks it is in its own lifecycle. The choices reveal more about these companies' strategies than any earnings call.
The most useful thing about a leadership change isn't the press release announcing it. It's the gap between what the brand says it's doing and what the hire actually signals.
Every new leader walks in with a set of instincts shaped by wherever they came from. Those instincts reshape the culture within months — who gets promoted, what gets funded, what gets cut, and how the company talks about itself. When you know where the leader came from, you can read the culture shift before it happens.
Here's what's actually playing out across five archetypes. (A note: these categories aren't perfectly clean. Some brands could sit in more than one. On was operator-led before its founders came back. Columbia's generational transition also involves building institutional infrastructure. But the primary archetype for each brand tells you the board's dominant diagnosis — and that's what matters.)
On Running — March 25, 2026
On's co-founders David Allemann and Caspar Coppetti will take over as co-CEOs on May 1, replacing Martin Hoffmann, who led the company for 13 years — first as CFO, then as CEO for the past five. Scott Maguire, previously the Chief Commercial Officer, was promoted to President and COO. On framed Hoffmann's exit as a "planned hiatus" — and it may well have been planned internally. But the market didn't see it coming. Retail Dive called it a "surprise," and the stock reaction confirmed as much.
The stock tells one story: On (ONON) sits around $35, well below a median analyst target of $62. But the co-founder return tells a different one. Allemann and Coppetti aren't operators. They're the brand's original storytellers — the people who built On's identity around the Swiss engineering ethos, the CloudTec aesthetic, and the idea that a running shoe company could feel like a design house. Bringing them back says: the brand's competitive advantage is its culture, and the founders believe only they can protect it.
The culture signal to the organization is unmistakable: we overindexed on systems and scale, and we need to get back to what made people care about us in the first place. The thing to watch is whether On's product narrative sharpens, its marketing gets weirder and more distinctive, and the internal culture re-centers around brand conviction over commercial optimization. That's what founder-returns typically produce — but at On's current scale, it's not guaranteed.
The risk is equally clear. Co-founder CEOs often struggle with the institutional demands of a public company. The last time founders ran On, it was a fraction of this size. And Hoffmann's Class B voting shares — 16.25 million of them — will convert to Class A at the May AGM, fundamentally reshaping the governance structure. This isn't just a leadership change. It's a structural one.
Nike — CEO since October 2024
REI — CEO since March 2025
Rapha — CEO since September 2024
The North Face — New president announced March 2026
Four brands. Four leaders hired — or recalled — explicitly to fix something broken. And the hiring patterns reveal how each board diagnosed the problem.
Nike's version is the most high-profile and the most instructive. The board brought back Elliott Hill — a 32-year Nike veteran who had retired — to replace the innovation-focused leadership that had presided over marketplace erosion and a cratering stock. Hill's "Win Now" turnaround strategy has been running for 18 months now. The early results are mixed at best: North America wholesale revenue grew 8% and the company rejoined Amazon, but gross margins contracted 300 basis points in Q2 fiscal 2026 amid $1.5 billion in annualized tariff costs, and Greater China continues to slide. This week, more than 20 analysts cut their Nike price targets following Q3 earnings. The stock closed at $44.19 on Tuesday, trading at 220% above its three-month average volume. Nike also announced 775 layoffs at distribution centers effective this week.
The Nike case is interesting because it's neither a pure insider nor a pure outsider hire — it's a returned veteran. The board's diagnosis: the problem wasn't that nobody understood Nike's culture, it was that recent leaders had drifted from it. Hill knows where the bodies are buried. But knowing the culture and being able to change it quickly enough are two different things, and the market is telling him the clock is ticking.
Mary Beth Laughton walked into REI from Nike, Athleta, and Sephora. Not from the outdoor industry. She's the first REI CEO who didn't come up through the co-op or its immediate ecosystem. Within a year, she launched "Peak 28: Ascending Together" — a three-year transformation plan — after the co-op posted $311 million in losses in 2023 and another $156 million in 2024 on declining revenue of $3.53 billion. Starting pay for new hires was cut. Benefits were reduced. Retirement shifted from guaranteed contributions to a traditional match model.
We wrote about what those cuts mean for the REI brand — how the co-op's moat was never its logo or its Opt Outside campaign, but the structural decisions that attracted mission-driven employees whose credibility made the customer experience worth specialty-channel margins. Laughton's challenge is existential: she needs to fix the P&L without draining the thing that makes REI worth fixing.
Fran Millar arrived at Rapha after leading Team Sky through seven Tour de France titles and running Belstaff's turnaround from a £20 million operating loss. Within weeks, she dropped Rapha's seven-year EF Pro Cycling sponsorship — the brand's most visible WorldTour presence. She then closed five clubhouses, slashed the brand's own valuation by £102 million, and bet the company's future on a USA Cycling partnership through the 2028 Olympics. Every move has been about subtracting pieces of Rapha's legacy identity to make room for something sustainable.
Chris Goble took over as North Face president after Caroline Brown's exit — disclosed by VF Corp CEO Bracken Darrell at a Citi conference on March 10, just weeks ago. Brown held the role for fewer than two years. Darrell called it "planned." Goble's background: he "led the turnaround of the Gap brand" during his time at Gap Inc. before joining VF as president of Dickies. He is the third North Face president in rapid succession.
The culture pattern across these four is revealing. Three of the four came from outside their brand's native culture — and that's the point. Turnaround leaders are typically hired to break the existing culture because the inside perspective is seen as part of the problem. Millar didn't come from premium cycling apparel — she came from elite sport operations and luxury fashion turnarounds. Laughton didn't come from outdoor — she came from retail optimization. Goble didn't come from outdoor either — he came from mass-market fashion turnarounds. Nike is the exception: Hill came from inside, but after a period away, which gave the board a "change without outsider risk" option.
The observable evidence follows a consistent playbook: legacy partnerships get cut (Rapha + EF Pro Cycling), employee benefits get restructured (REI), distribution jobs get eliminated (Nike), and leadership below the new CEO churns as the turnaround leader installs their own team. What the company publicly celebrates — Rapha's "disruptive" Olympic kit, REI's "ascending together" language, Nike's "Win Now" branding — contrasts with what it's actually doing: contracting, cutting, and recentering around profitability over identity.
The hard question for all four isn't whether they can cut — they've already proven that. It's what comes after. Once the restructuring is done and the P&L is stabilized, what's the big swing? What's the vision that makes employees, partners, and customers believe the pain was worth it? That's where turnarounds actually succeed or fail — not in the contraction phase, but in the moment the leader has to pivot from defense to offense. And that pivot is brutally hard in a struggling business. Human nature in a difficult environment is to play it safe, to keep optimizing what's already working, to avoid the bet that could go wrong. But safe is its own kind of risk. Nike at $44 can't afford to just grind back to where it was — it needs a reason for the market to believe in where it's going. Rapha without a post-clubhouse vision for community risks becoming just another cycling apparel company. REI without a compelling answer to "what is the co-op for now?" risks converging toward the retail mean. The North Face without a clear identity beyond VF Corp's turnaround math risks permanent drift. Each of these leaders has to find the thing worth building toward — and convince a skeptical organization to follow them there.
Deckers (Hoka parent) — CEO transition August 2025
Cotopaxi — CEO transition December 2024
Salomon — CEO transition January 2025
These three look different from the turnarounds because none of these brands is in crisis. They're growing. But growth creates its own leadership inflection point: the skills that built the brand are different from the skills that scale it.
At Deckers, longtime CEO Dave Powers retired after overseeing the transformation of Hoka from a niche cushioning brand into an $2.3 billion segment (fiscal year 2026 projections). His replacement: Stefano Caroti, the Chief Commercial Officer. Not a product visionary. Not a brand builder. A commercial operator who knows distribution, wholesale relationships, and margin architecture. Meanwhile, Hoka's brand president Robin Green came from 17 years at Nike — another operator-class hire for a brand that's past the "does anyone know who we are?" phase and deep into the "how do we serve demand efficiently at global scale?" phase.
At Cotopaxi, founder Stephan Jacob moved from the center of the operation (COO/CTO) to a global business development role, while CFO and COO Lindsay Shumlas was promoted to CEO. That's a founder voluntarily ceding the top job to his own finance chief. The signal: Cotopaxi's next challenge isn't vision — it's operational discipline, international scaling, and capital efficiency. Shumlas arrived from CEO roles at Vici and Manhattan Beachwear. She's brought in a new CMO, promoted a Chief Product Officer, and reorganized the leadership team in under a year.
At Salomon, Guillaume Meyzenq was promoted from Chief Product Officer to President and CEO effective January 2025, as the brand crossed $2 billion in annual revenue (up 35% in 2025). An internal promotion from within the product organization signals that Amer Sports — Salomon's parent — believes the brand's product engine is the thing to protect, and that the next phase of growth needs to be led by someone who understands the pipeline, not someone who needs to learn it.
The culture shift in this archetype is subtler than the turnaround model, but it's real. When an operator replaces a visionary, the organization's center of gravity moves from "what should we build?" to "how do we deliver what we've already figured out?" Meetings get more structured. Spend gets more scrutinized. The creative team starts hearing "what's the ROI on that?" more often. None of that is bad — it's necessary at a certain scale. But it changes who thrives inside the company and who starts feeling like the culture has shifted underneath them.
Vuori — Global President hired July 2025
Columbia — Co-presidents named November 2025
These aren't CEO replacements. They're something more interesting: founders who recognized they needed institutional infrastructure around themselves before the business outgrew them.
Vuori founder Joe Kudla created the Global President role specifically for Ashley Kechter, who came from Fabletics where she was global brand president. Kechter now oversees retail, e-commerce, supply chain, planning, international, and wholesale — essentially everything operational. Kudla keeps the CEO title and, presumably, the brand vision and culture-setting role. The timing matters: Vuori hit 100 owned retail locations in 2025 (six months ahead of schedule), has a $5.5 billion valuation from SoftBank, and is expanding into Europe and Asia. The brand that was one guy's vision in Encinitas now operates in 18 countries. You can't run that on founder energy alone.
Columbia's version is generational. Tim Boyle — who has led the company his mother founded for decades — named co-presidents in November: Peter Bragdon (overseeing international, Mountain Hardwear, prAna, and SOREL) and Joseph Boyle, his son, as President of the Columbia Brand. This is family succession happening in public, in stages, with the founder still in the chair. The culture implications are significant: every employee at Columbia now has a clearer picture of where the company is heading dynastically, which reshapes internal politics, retention calculations, and how people think about their own trajectory inside the company.
The pattern here is founders building the bridge between "my company" and "a company" — and trying to do it before crisis forces their hand. Vuori is adding professional management while things are going well. Columbia is engineering a transition across a generation. Both are bets that the founder can maintain cultural influence without holding every operational lever.
Brooks Running — Dan Sheridan, CEO since 2023
Patagonia — Ryan Gellert, CEO since 2020
Here's the counterpoint to all of the above — and it might be the most important data point in the whole landscape.
Brooks Running and Patagonia are the two brands on our watchlist with the most stable leadership. Sheridan was promoted from within after rising through the company since 1998. Gellert has been at Patagonia since 2014 and CEO since 2020, having previously run the brand's EMEA operation. Neither is going anywhere.
And they're both outperforming.
Brooks posted a record 2025: global revenue up 16%, nine consecutive years of growth, back-to-back quarters of all-time high revenue. Sheridan, in a Fortune interview, described his management philosophy as Charlie Munger-inspired: avoid arrogance, bureaucracy, and complacency. The results suggest it's working. Brooks isn't trying to be a lifestyle brand. It isn't expanding into cycling or outdoor. It's a running company that keeps getting better at being a running company.
Patagonia continues to operate from a position of strategic clarity that most brands can only envy. Gellert has been vocal about environmental policy and political engagement, but the brand's operational identity hasn't shifted because it hasn't needed to. The ownership transfer to the Holdfast Collective and Patagonia Purpose Trust in 2022 removed the acquisition speculation that hangs over most private brands and gave Gellert the rarest thing a CEO can have: a mandate to think in decades.
What makes these two instructive isn't just that they're doing well. It's what their stability reveals about the brands that are changing leaders.
To be fair, correlation isn't causation. Brooks' success comes from a ruthlessly focused strategy — cut everything that isn't running, invest in biomechanics and training education, stay in your lane. Patagonia's comes partly from a unique ownership structure that removes the short-term pressures other brands face. Stable leadership isn't the only reason they're outperforming. But it's not a coincidence either.
The compounding effect is real. Every year a CEO stays, the strategy gets more deeply embedded in the organization. Hiring patterns reinforce the culture. Institutional knowledge accumulates. Partners and retailers build deeper relationships with the same people. Brooks' retail buyers know what to expect from Sheridan's team because the team has been consistent. That predictability has a commercial value that doesn't show up on any balance sheet.
Leadership churn, by contrast, resets the clock. Every new CEO spends 6-12 months learning the organization, building their team, and establishing their agenda. The North Face is arguably on its third reset in rapid succession. Nike is 18 months into a turnaround that Hill says will "take a while." The opportunity cost of that learning curve — across three or four leadership changes in the time Brooks has had one — is enormous but invisible.
Brooks didn't need a turnaround specialist because it never stopped running its turnaround. Sheridan was there when the company refocused on running, when it cut everything else, when it invested in biomechanics and training education. The strategy didn't need a new leader to execute it. It needed the same leader to keep executing it.
If you sell to REI, your buyer conversation is about to change. Laughton came from Sephora and Nike — environments where vendor relationships are commercially rigorous and data-driven, not built on handshake partnerships and shared passion for the outdoors. The co-op's "Peak 28" strategy explicitly calls for a reinvented assortment. If you're a brand that's been coasting on a long REI relationship without strong sell-through data, that relationship is going to get tested.
If you partner with On — as a retailer, an event, or a media property — the co-founder return means the people making partnership decisions are going to care more about brand alignment and less about pure distribution math. On under Hoffmann was scaling efficiently. On under Allemann and Coppetti will likely be pickier about who they associate with and why.
If you compete with Hoka, Cotopaxi, or Salomon, know that all three just installed operators who will optimize the machine. That means faster distribution, tighter margin management, and more disciplined spend. The window where these brands were still figuring out their go-to-market is closing.
And if you're a founder wondering whether it's time to bring in a professional CEO or build a management layer — Vuori and Columbia are the models to study. Both found ways to add institutional depth without a crisis forcing the decision. That's rarer than it sounds.
