Can Kiprun crack the US running market?

A few days ago, a French running brand called Kiprun officially launched in US specialty running shops and online. Kiprun is one of Decathlon's "expert brands," alongside Van Rysel for cycling and Simond for mountaineering. If you're US-based, I might give you a pass for never having heard of Decathlon, although I'm consistently surprised at just how many people in the US outdoor industry are unfamiliar with one of the most significant sporting goods companies on the planet. They're the world's largest sporting goods retailer: 1,817 stores across 79 countries, around €16.2 billion in annual revenue. And they have zero cultural recognition in the United States.

I spoke with Julien Vancauwenberghe, Kiprun's global CMO, about the launch, the strategy, and what it's like to introduce a brand that's well-known in one market and completely invisible in another. He's a French-American marketer who came to Kiprun via Coca-Cola and Amazon, where he worked on Vitamin Water and Amazon Fresh. Not necessarily the resume you'd predict for someone running a French running brand's specialty wholesale launch.

When I asked why now, and what makes Kiprun think there's room for yet another brand in a crowded market, Julien's answer had three parts. He thinks the product is ready, the brand identity is ready (Kiprun went through a full visual rebrand recently), and the strategy is different this time.

It needs to be, because Decathlon hasn’t been able to crack the US in the past.

Decathlon has been in and out of America more than once. In 1999 they bought MVP Sports Stores and rebranded the locations. All of them were closed by 2006. They came back in 2017 with a store in downtown San Francisco and scaled up to full-sized stores in Emeryville and Potrero Hill, but closed everything in March 2022. I think the failures were primarily because Decathlon was trying to import a retail format that doesn't have a US equivalent. Or at least not one with positive associations in outdoor.

In Europe, Decathlon is where you can buy a tent, a yoga mat, a soccer jersey, running shoes, golf clubs, workout gear, and a bike pump in one trip. It’s affordable, good quality, and almost everything is store-branded. No one's putting them up directly against Arc'teryx, but if you need a solid rain jacket at half the price, that's the place.

The closest US analog would be REI, whose house brand is slightly cheaper than the brands it stocks but which is still mostly a curated outdoor retailer. Or Dick's, which has a broader stock but isn't owned retail. Neither is really the IKEA-slash-Trader-Joes-of-sports format Decathlon runs in Europe, where everything on the shelf is theirs and the quality holds up. Americans didn't have a great reference point for it, and "cheaper and store-branded" got associated more with Walmart than performance value.

Kiprun is doing things differently on basically every front. Instead of using the Decathlon brand or owned retail, they're focusing on wholesale through specialty running shops, performance positioning instead of value, and no Decathlon branding anywhere on the product. This makes their competitive set brands like Hoka, Brooks, Saucony, and On — not Dick's, REI, and Walmart. I think it’s a more competitive approach for them, but by no means a sure thing. The shoes will also be available online.

"From a consumer perspective, there's no association between Kiprun and Decathlon," Julien said. "If you look at a running shoe, no mention of Decathlon. We decided to focus on attracting a very specific customer target group, more performance-driven. That's not the core target of Decathlon." I will say, there is a bit of confusion here that consumers may have to navigate, particularly online. Kiprun.com exists, but so does decathlon.com/collections/kiprun-shoes, and the Kiprun site redirects to a dual-branded Stripe checkout.

For year one, it isn’t about national launch campaigns and heavy marketing, it's about the shops. "For now, our focus will be at the point of sale, working well with the right partners, and making sure that it sells through," Julien said. "All our focus should be on the community around the stores." He drew a parallel to his Vitamin Water days at Coca-Cola: "It was a brand that was built store after store. We were not doing a lot of typical marketing, we were making sure that the product was positioned in the right stores, and getting in the right hands of the right people."

For distribution, Kiprun is launching with Running Warehouse, Run Moore, and Heartbreak, targeting 10 to 20 retail partners in year one. They brought potential retail partners to Decathlon's facilities in France and to UTMB Chamonix so they could see the R&D labs, the scale of the operation, and understand the breadth and story of the brand in a deeper way.

The product lineup for the US is small. Kiprun has an extensive range in Europe but is launching in the US focused on just a few models: the Kipride Max ($160, daily trainer), the Kipstorm Elite ($250, carbon-plated road racer), and the Kipsummit Max ($150, max-cushion trail shoe). No true entry-level price points, no apparel, and no Kipstorm Lab (their $350 super shoe).

The shoes undercut comparable models by a decent amount. The Kipsummit Max is $15 cheaper than a Speedgoat 7. The Kipstorm Elite is ~$30 less than most of the carbon racers it'll sit next to. But Kiprun won't be leading with price in any of their consumer-facing marketing. "Our communication should be about establishing ourselves as a credible brand with great quality products," Julien said. "The price will be discovered on shelf or online." He's aware that in the US, lower price can signal lower quality, and the plan is to build the performance reputation first and let the pricing be a bonus rather than the headline. Leading with price would risk inviting the exact "budget brand" perception that hurt Decathlon and Kiprun is trying to avoid.

The reason the math works at all is that Decathlon designs, tests, and manufactures almost everything themselves. Julien compared the model to Trader Joe's, where about 90% of what's on the shelf is their own product. That vertical integration is what lets them sell a $250 carbon racer that's comparable to a $280+ shoe while also giving the retailer better margins. "Because of our scale and verticalization, we can offer generous margins to the retailer. And as long as we're committed to giving them a generous margin, they're very happy to support us."

I think the trickier part is what actually happens in-store. A customer walks into a run shop, picks up the Kipstorm Elite, sees that it's $30 less than a comparable carbon racer, and asks the employee why. The shop has to have a compelling answer that frames the price gap as a feature, rather than evidence that the shoe is somehow of lower quality. The next year of word-of-mouth and online discourse will be incredibly important. Either Kiprun is "performance at a fair price," or it's "the cheap one," which might put them right back where Decathlon was in the Bay Area.

You can watch some of this play out in real time on a recent Believe in the Run review of the Kipsummit Max. Both reviewers walked in expecting budget-tier quality. Both reviewers ended up with a positive review. Taylor Bodin wrote that the brand had set him up "for being completely and utterly surprised," which is basically the best-case version of what Kiprun is trying to engineer, and a useful example of the perception challenge they're working against. A reviewer is skeptical (despite almost no actual experience with the brand), runs in the shoe, and walks away surprised, saying it earns its place next to more expensive options. One review isn't a trend, but it's a useful early data point.