How Salomon Got To the Top Of the (Fashion) Mountain
It’s not about history. It’s about the turning points.
Nowadays, Salomon sneakers are literally all over the place: real outdoor enthusiasts (the rare breed), gorpcore enthusiasts (the newer breed), rappers (Pusha T, Drake, A$AP Rocky), models (Emily Ratajkowski, Bella Hadid), snowboarders (god bless!), skateboarders (Palace Skateboards) — you name it. Personally, I’m not a big fan of trends in general, but still, I’m always drawn to the stories behind them. So how did the French brand get to its current reign of fashion’s obsession with outdoor footwear?
The recent post on
suggests there are three crucial points in the brand’s recent history: the launch of the XT-6 trail running shoe in 2013, the first steps into fashion through Parisian store The Broken Arm and avant-garde designer Boris Bidjan Saberi in 2016, and Arc’teryx designer Jean-Philippe Lalonde joining the team. While it all sounds coherent thinking backward, it doesn’t explain why Salomon tapped into fashion in the first place.
So with this post, I try to dive a little deeper to uncover the blind spots that lead Salomon to the heights of the fashion world. I intentionally skip the earlier history of the brand, including its buyouts by adidas and Amer Sports (owner of Arc’teryx, Peak Performance, Wilson, and other sportswear brands), since it has already been well-covered by the likes of
and Courier.The existing evidence
A good place to start tracing down the current hype about Salomon sneakers is to go to culture and fashion media like Hypebeast. Curiously, there are virtually no articles on Salomon before 2015, when the brand collaborated with the American outdoors bag producer Topo Designs and the progressive Parisian fashion store The Broken Arm. So what made Salomon tap into collaborations in 2015?
Jean Phillipe Lalonde, who is often praised for Salomon’s lifestyle success, joined the company only in 2016. As he recalls in an interview with the Distance store, at that time the company had already made the first steps towards a new audience outside of professional sports through joint projects with The Broken Arm and the avant-garde streetwear designer Boris Bidjan Saberi. Jean Phillipe, previously honing his skills at Arc’teryx’s forward-thinking Veilance line, then went on formalizing the efforts under the new Salomon Advanced label.
If not Jean Phillipe, then who started it all? In an interview with Complex, Salomon’s global marketing manager Alex van Oostrum says it was indeed The Broken Arm store that first saw great success selling the brand’s trail running sneakers to non-professional audiences in 2014. According to Alex, that’s what triggered the company’s foray into lifestyle the next year.
When GQ named the Salomon S/Lab XT-6 its sneaker of the year in 2019, Jean Phillipe Lalonde recalled how he got a notice from the production team about the XT-6 molds scheduled to be destroyed in 2016. Thanks to Jean Phillipe, a couple years later the sneaker landed on the shelves of Dover Street Market.
This year marks the 10th anniversary of XT-6, but how did the silhouette come to be in the first place? Though I haven’t spoken to anyone from Salomon directly, my hunch is that the truth may well be concealed outside the company itself.
Where it all started
According to Bob Sheard, Amer Sports came to his branding agency Fresh Britain after the buyout from adidas in 2005, asking for new positioning of the Salomon brand that would help the company to regain its power. If you’ve never heard of Fresh Britain before, they’ve done amazing branding work for major consumer brands like Nike, New Balance, Levi’s, Harley Davidson, Speedo, and many others.
In a short interview for Monocle’s The Entrepreneurs podcast, Bob shared the company’s existing «Fuel your instincts» lifestyle-driven positioning was struggling to connect with the audience. So what Fresh Britain did, is they went to one of the remaining Salomon factories in France and interviewed everyone there. That’s how they encountered an oldish guy who showed them a room full of patents. It turned out Salomon had patented over 8,000 innovations. That was twice as many as NASA had at that time.
Upon discovering this tremendous number of technologies the company had patented, Fresh Britain figured out that Salomon is more of an innovation brand, than a lifestyle brand. Furthermore, those innovations as well as designers and athletes were all focused on the mountains. Salomon produced both equipment and clothing for mountain-related activities all year round from snowboarding in winter to trail running in summer.
That’s why Fresh Britain's solution was to quit all non-related activities such as surfing and rollerblading and narrow down to ‘The Mountain Sports Company’. Part of that move was the introduction of the XT-Wing trail running shoe in 2008, the predecessor of the now-hyped XT-4 and XT-6 sneakers.
Summary
I know, this has already been a long investigation, and going backward in time doesn’t help grasping all the details on the fly. Hopefully, we can now recreate history in chronological order:
Amer Sports buys Salomon from adidas in 2005. The French company struggles with its positioning to consumers.
Fresh Britain branding agency defines the key strengths of Salomon and develops ‘The Mountain Sports Company’ positioning.
The important part of the new vision is trail running. Thus Salomon and Fresh Britain develop the XT-Wing sneaker, the first shoe of the now-thriving XT range. Runner’s World awards the sneaker with «The Best Debut» in 2008.
Salomon continues to improve the XT-Wing eventually introducing the XT-6 in 2013.
Progressive Parisian store The Broken Arm experiments with selling Salomon’s trail running sneakers to fashion audiences with great success in 2014.
Building upon the feedback from The Broken Arm Salomon ventures into the lifestyle category in 2015.
In 2016 Jean Phillipe Lalonde joins Salomon from Arc’teryx Veilance, saves the XT-6 from extinction, and finally establishes the Salomon Advanced line.
The rest is history. Through collaborations with The Broken Arm, Boris Bidjan Saberi, Marine Serre, TAKAHIROMIYASHITA, and others Salomon gradually climbs to the top of the fashion mountain.
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PS All of the above is solely my interpretation of the information I found in public sources. If you happen to participate in the events or just have more information, please, do not hesitate to let me know in the comments. I would like this article to be the best source for tracing down the history of Salomon’s lifestyle success.