Quick confession before we get into it: two of this week's five picks came out of earnings calls, and I know earnings weeks tend to flatten brands into a stock chart. Stick with me. Read the Amer Sports print on Tuesday and the Deckers print on Thursday with a brand eye instead of an analyst's, and the week resolves into a useful split-screen. Five brands, all of them growing. Some are compounding brand equity as they scale; at least one is quietly spending it down. The number on the page looks the same for all of them. What separates them is the how.
TL;DR
- Salomon's segment grew 42% and carried Amer Sports' quarter — and earned next week's Feature.
- On built its biggest store in China by rebuilding the public park around it.
- Bandit brings back its F1-inspired Grand Prix — running, remixed with motorsport.
- Hoka had a record year — but growth is slowing. Now what?
- Merrell's bet on cities over hikers is showing up in the numbers.
Salomon's segment grew 42% and carried Amer Sports' quarter. The full feature runs Tuesday.
Start with the number: 42%. That's how much Amer Sports' Outdoor Performance segment — the one Salomon anchors — grew in the first quarter, reported Tuesday, to $713.6 million. It's a staggering rate for a business that size, and it carried the company. Group revenue rose 32% to $1.95 billion, Outdoor Performance ran hardest of the three segments, and its adjusted operating margin expanded nearly 480 basis points to 20.4% — so Amer raised full-year guidance across revenue, margin, and EPS, now guiding the segment to 22–24% growth for the year. CEO James Zheng credited results led by "exceptional Salomon Softgoods growth," and the CFO named Salomon softgoods one of the group's three biggest growth engines, alongside Arc'teryx and Wilson Tennis 360. Here's the detail to hold until next week: this isn't a single-hit-product story. The growth is apparel and bags, direct-to-consumer, and Greater China (group revenue there up 44.5%) all compounding at once — which is what it looks like when the operating model, not one shoe, is doing the work. Salomon was founded in Annecy in 1947, a mountain-sports company long before it was a sneaker brand, and it is now the one the rest of the industry is quietly studying. That's why we're giving Salomon the full Weekly Feature next Tuesday — how a binding-and-boot company rebuilt itself into a growth engine, and what's actually portable about it. Consider this the trailer.
On opened its biggest store in China. The brand decision is the park out front.
In March, On opened its largest flagship store in China — 802 square meters at Shenzhen MixC World. Per On's own release, the brand entered China in 2018 and has since opened more than 80 stores across 30-plus cities, with a target of 100 by year-end; China is now its second-largest market globally, and Asia-Pacific net sales grew 96.4% year-over-year in 2025. Inside, the store is what you'd expect from a premium DTC brand scaling fast: a two-story black-pine installation, Asia's first visual-interaction display for On's CloudTec platform. The brand decision is outside. Two century-old banyan trees stand at the entrance, and On redesigned and revitalized the surrounding park into a public space for runners and community gatherings — opening night was a community run with local clubs, paired with a Shenzhen episode of On's brand podcast. That's the move worth noting. On didn't lease retail square footage and optimize it; it rebuilt a piece of the city around the store and handed it back. For a DTC-led brand racing toward 100 doors in a market it entered only eight years ago, the flagship isn't a point of sale — it's a community anchor that happens to sell shoes. For CMOs whose store pro formas still measure a location by what happens inside its four walls, On just measured one by what it gives the block.
Bandit can't outspend running's giants. So it's out-remixing them.
Running brands tend to share a formula: the brand, multiplied by an attractive young runner — a few tattoos, sunglasses the size of dinner plates. You can picture the campaign without seeing it. Bandit Running, the Brooklyn apparel brand, found the missing third term. On May 30 it brings back the Bandit Grand Prix for a second edition, and the whole event is lifted from motorsport — not as set dressing, but as the operating concept. It's in the name. It's in the format: 5K open heats during the day (250 runners apiece) feed a 3K "Super Final" under the lights at night, with racers slotted onto a starting grid by "pole position" earned in the heats — all on a looped, spectator-dense course inside the Brooklyn Storehouse, a 700-foot music venue run with its sound and light system at full tilt, then a podium celebration and afterparty. Bandit's own copy calls it "an F1-inspired race," and its sponsors span the running and F1 worlds. So the formula is no longer (brand) × (hot young runner). It's (Bandit) × (run club) × (Formula 1) — the Drive to Survive paddock aesthetic, arguably the hottest territory in sport right now, remixed onto an indie road race nobody else in running is contesting. The debut last year drew 1,200-plus athletes and 3 million-plus impressions across Bandit's channels; the return doubles the field and adds a fully live-streamed broadcast. The lesson for any challenger CMO staring down a spending war it can't win: you can almost always win a remixing one.
Hoka had a record year. But growth is slowing — now what?
On Thursday, Deckers reported a record fiscal 2026, and Hoka led it: full-year net sales up 15.9% to $2.587 billion, with a Q4 up 14.5% to $671.2 million. A genuinely strong year. But read the trend line, not the trophy. Hoka grew nearly 24% the year before and 15.9% this year — and Deckers' own guidance calls for low-double-digit growth in fiscal 2027, then holds Hoka at low-double-digit every year in a new framework that runs through 2030. The company has, in effect, told the market its rocket is now a steady compounder. So: now what? That's a brand question before it's a financial one. Hoka spent the last decade as a momentum brand — the growth rate was the story, the maximalist silhouette a constant discovery, the every-quarter "fastest-growing" headline part of the appeal. When momentum normalizes, the brand has to carry what the growth rate used to: it has to keep feeling like a discovery after it's been modeled as a mature asset. The supporting tell is in the channel mix — companywide (Hoka and UGG together; Deckers doesn't break Hoka out by channel), fiscal-2026 wholesale grew 12.3% against DTC's 6.3%, and domestic sales were essentially flat (+0.2%) while international grew 26.8%. The growth that's left is wholesale and overseas; the home direct base, where the brand was built, has stalled. "Now what" is the most important line in Hoka's brand plan this year — and the live case study for anyone whose brand rode a category wave: how do you become the brand that lasts once you've stopped being the brand that's surging?
Merrell bet on cities over hikers. Q1 says it's working.
Merrell's growth strategy is a deliberately small map. Rather than spread spend across a national footprint, the brand has concentrated marketing, events, and retail in a short list of high-influence cities — what its leadership has described to the trade press as a "key city" strategy, Tokyo and Paris first, now adding London and New York. The visible expression is "Outside in the City," the program rolling across New York, London, and Paris through 2026 that extends Merrell's "It Starts Outside" platform onto pavement. This week the strategy posted a number. In Wolverine Worldwide's Q1 2026 results, Merrell grew 9% in the quarter and, per the company, extended its U.S. hike-market share gains to 12 of the last 13 quarters. The logic underneath, per Merrell's own framing in that coverage: most of its target "experience-seekers" already live in cities, so the growth move isn't to recruit more hikers — it's to widen the definition of "outside" until it includes the walk a city dweller already takes. For CMOs whose growth plan is a bigger map with more pins in it, Merrell's counter is the opposite instinct: fewer cities, built deeper, plus a category redefinition that grows the audience without adding a single pin. The thesis is now a quarter.
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