A new norda mountain shoe, and the Black Diamond kit rebuilt around it

A new shoe, not a new colorway

On August 26, during UTMB week in Chamonix, norda and Black Diamond released the first collection of a long-term partnership. Black Diamond calls it the most expansive collaboration in its four-decade existence, and it starts with a shoe. The 000 is a new norda model for mountain running and the scrambling that comes with it. Around it Black Diamond reworked its own equipment: the Distance 15 pack, the Distance Carbon Z FKT poles, a 30-liter Mission duffel made only for this collection, a cap, a tee, and a Miniwire carabiner in pink.

“We built this partnership from the ground up—quite literally,” norda’s creative director, Adam John, told Hypebeast. “Rather than take an existing shoe model and co-brand it, we created a brand-new shoe that dictated the type of movement we wanted the partnership to convey.” Black Diamond’s equipment, he said, “followed suit.”

The smallest piece marks the departure. The Miniwire is the lightest carabiner Black Diamond makes, and this one carries norda’s logo beside its own. It is the first time the company has put another brand’s name on one.

Stable on the ridge, quick on the trail

norda’s head of design, Louis-Martin Tremblay, drew the 000 for ground where running turns into scrambling. “What you need as a tool is completely different,” he told Field Mag. “If you’re going to do some edging, if you’re going to be on a traverse, you’re going to need a lot more stability, a lot more ground control on your foot to feel secure. But then if you’re going down and you decide to hit a trail, you want to have fun, you want to be able to have speed, to have some rebound.” norda had a design for that terrain underway, and the partnership was the chance to finish it.

The answer keeps norda’s woven bio-circular Dyneema upper and adds a rubberized toe bumper, a wraparound overlay and a structured heel for scree and trailless ridges. The heel loop comes from a climber’s quickdraw: Tremblay’s sketches label it the “mountaineering dogbone.” Under it is Vibram’s new Stream Flow midsole, which the 000 is the first shoe to use, an EVA foam reformulated to hold its cushioning longer. Tremblay describes it as firm and stable for the first 100 kilometers or so before it softens. The norda x Vibram soleplate takes its pattern from the rock of the Canadian Shield, and the laces carry Black Diamond’s diamond.

Black Diamond’s half

The product teams flew between Salt Lake City and Montreal to build the collection. “It was less a traditional collaboration and more a true product development process, with both teams deeply involved throughout,” Black Diamond’s design principal, Dan Rowe, told Field Mag. On his side the work began with gear already in testing. “We were really inspired by norda’s approach to materials,” he told the designer Jonathan Simcoe, “and saw an opportunity to bring that thinking into some products we had already been working on and testing for some time.”

A prototype Distance 15 in Challenge Sailcloth’s Ultra fabric had been in testing for more than a year, and the collection’s version moves the pack into that material, “reducing weight without giving up durability,” in Rowe’s words. The Distance Carbon Z FKT poles gained laser etching that he says is “unique to this collaboration.” The duffel borrows its construction from Black Diamond’s larger Missions, which designer Derick Noffsinger built to use the full cuttable width of the fabric and so waste less of it. Rowe’s team applied that construction to a 400-denier Challenge sailcloth at 30 liters, a size Black Diamond doesn’t otherwise make. “It is one of those products where the material, construction, and function all come together in a really simple way,” Rowe said.

I always thought if Black Diamond was ever to make a trail running shoe or mountain running shoe, it would look like what norda makes.

NEIL FISKE — PRESIDENT, BLACK DIAMOND EQUIPMENT

The colors of Vestal Basin

Joe Grant, a mountain runner from Durango, Colorado, brought the two companies together. A longtime Black Diamond athlete, he wore norda 002s on a 400-mile route of his own through the San Juan Mountains in the summer of 2024, then took the shoes to his equipment sponsor and wore them in Black Diamond shoots. The brands began formal talks in August 2025. Grant tested the prototype pack, and he is now signed to both.

He also chose where the collection would be photographed. “The concept behind this shoot was to visit one of my favorite places in the world, the Weminuche Wilderness, with my close friend and brilliant artist Forest Woodward,” he wrote for Black Diamond’s lookbook. The place is Vestal Basin, under Wham Ridge and Arrow Peak, and it supplied the palette: “The stunning pink and lavender hues of the Precambrian quartzite of the Uncompahgre Formation provided the color inspiration for this collection.” The colorways carry mineral names, Obsidian, Moonstone and Kunzite. The pink came off the rock.

Collection Zero

Nick Martire, norda’s co-founder and CEO, calls this first drop “Collection Zero,” and it went to a short list of stockists. It moved quickly for something so new. By mid-October Black Diamond’s store had sold out of the men’s Distance 15 and the Kunzite carabiner, and norda had one men’s size of the Kunzite 000 left. Treeline Review named the 000 its “Best durable” trail shoe of 2026, and Believe in the Run’s Alex Elizabeth called it “my shoe of the year.”

The partnership gives each company the thing it doesn’t make. Black Diamond gets a mountain running shoe built by a footwear company, with its own designers in the room, and norda gets a mountain kit and the trust of an equipment brand climbers stake their lives on. “Black Diamond is a brand of trust,” Martire told Footwear News, and to be trusted by it, he said, is “incredible.” Chris Marsh, on the Standard’s panel, called it “an example of what a collab should be,” and summed it up in three words: “Subtle. Confident. Real.”

Rowe has said the first capsule is just the beginning. For any brand weighing a collaboration, the lesson is in where this one started: with products both design teams wanted to make, and the logos after.

Each brand made what it knows best, and put the other’s name on it.

THE BRAND REPORT

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