Nike ACG: All Aboard the Hype Train

An orange-painted Italian commuter train carrying Eliud Kipchoge, Caleb Olsen, Francis Bourgeois (the TikTok train guy), and a bunch of influencers through the Alps. Race sponsorships worth six figures. Team USA walking into the Olympics without a swoosh in sight. Nike’s All Conditions Gear (ACG) has been everywhere.

Nike relaunched ACG as its flagship outdoor brand, betting big that heritage, spectacle, and revamped product can speed run them back into the outdoor zeitgeist. But big budgets and LinkedIn posts about “world building” don’t guarantee success.

Does the spend match the substance? And will it work for trail running and the broader outdoor market, which has been dominated for the past decade by brands that aren’t Nike?

ACG has been a lot of things. It started in the late 70’s after Rick Ridgeway and John Roskelley sent back their Nike LDVs from K2 with notes on how to make them better. Since then, it’s been reinterpreted several times. Through the 90’s and 2000’s, it leaned into technical outerwear and experimentation. Errolson Hugh later pushed it toward urban techwear, and James Arizumi brought it back toward a more retro, accessible, outdoors-first identity. It’s been a rounding error on Nike’s balance sheet for a long time, but it has a passionate fanbase that cares deeply about the history and the product.

Meanwhile, the outdoor market exploded over the last decade and Nike was barely in the conversation. Brands like Salomon, The North Face, Hoka, Arc'teryx, and On built devoted communities and ate into market share from multiple directions, particularly in China, where outdoor is booming and Nike has really struggled of late.

Nike Trail launched in 2014 but never got the investment that road running did. By 2025, ACG had heritage but less reach or performance credibility, Nike Trail had a decade of underinvestment, and Nike still had no real foothold in outdoor.

Folding Nike Trail into ACG and relaunching the brand is an attempt to address a lot of issues at once. ACG has name recognition, a visual identity that isn't just "Nike but trails," and enough heritage to at least start a conversation about performance credibility and make a play for the outdoor crowd.

The rollout has been aggressive. It started at the 2025 Western States, where Caleb Olson won in a prototype of the ACG Ultrafly and the now-famous Radical AirFlow top (the one that looks like you're wearing a cheese grater). They folded Nike Trail into ACG entirely, previewed the new brand at UTMB, expanded their athlete roster, and announced race sponsorships at Broken Arrow Skyrace ($150K prize purse) and Gorge Waterfalls ($75K).

Then came the Winter Olympics and the massive marketing push and rebrand. A PR blitz, a Mars-themed indoor ultramarathon with Mental Athletic, Team USA wearing ACG, and of course, the train.

These are the kind of things that win advertising awards and get shared on LinkedIn. For a company like Nike, this level of spectacle is almost obligatory. They need the press hits, the LinkedIn posts about "world building," the signal to investors and retail partners that ACG is getting real investment and will put them back on track in China and the outdoor market. You don't get that with a grassroots word-of-mouth strategy. You get it with a branded train carrying Kipchoge through the mountains.

But obligatory doesn't mean it all lands. The train activation had insane attention to detail, but why push a non-technical carbon-plated racing shoe on a bunch of folks hiking in the snow? Why is a tennis player here wearing a one-off custom ACG kit? Why invite so many people clearly incapable of speaking credibly about trail or the Ultrafly? The Mental Athletic indoor ultra race was a wild visual, but very dystopian and high-fashion-coded, nothing like the rest of the marketing. It was something that might feel right for a Salomon or Satisfy but for Nike and ACG the collab feels less like a natural partnership and more like buying into "coolness".

I went into the Nike store on Oxford Street and the in-store visual execution is strong. But the gap between the tentpole marketing and the in-store reality is noticeable. It's a lot of real estate for one or two fairly niche hero pieces alongside a more standard lineup of apparel that doesn't feel that exciting.

In a lengthy Bloomberg interview during the Olympics, CEO Elliott Hill talked about ACG in terms of "the trail running consumer" and "the outdoor market opportunity." Not much about the style-forward audience who kept ACG culturally relevant for two decades. That feels intentional: the lifestyle side will only grow if the performance credibility is there. They're not abandoning that crowd (the trail/hike/explore categories on the site make that clear) but performance is center stage right now.

That story has a few gaps right now. The flagship product of the entire relaunch is the ACG Ultrafly 2, a $260 carbon-plated trail racing shoe. Hill told Bloomberg that the shoe and its carbon plate brings "innovation" and "newness and freshness" to trail running. In a Huckberry Gear Lab segment that doubled as a long Nike ad, the host called it a "high-performing 4x4 SUV." ACG's footwear director framed it around "the everyday athlete."

But…carbon plates have been in trail shoes since 2021, and plenty of brands are on their v3 or 4, with new, varying approaches to carbon plates. Some recently popular shoes like the Prodigio Pro (arguably the consensus best trail shoe of 2025) and the Norda 005 are instead focusing on advanced foam compounds and avoiding the stiffness and instability issues that plates can cause on technical terrain.

Believe in the Run called the Ultrafly "Some Conditions Gear," specifically flagging stiffness and instability from the carbon plate. It seems to be a big improvement over the original, and a great shoe for fast, non-technical trails. It'll be great for certain people in specific contexts. But a super-shoe-price-point, carbon-plated racer with 3mm lugs is not an everyday shoe for most people, not revolutionary, and it's definitely not a 4x4. I think the upcoming ACG Pegasus or Zegama are the models that will bring the mass appeal (and better collab crossovers) for ACG, not the Ultrafly.

Open the website and it feels like two different brands sharing the same name. The trail line is bright and offbeat, while the Hiking and Explore categories lean more gorpcore, with earth tones, on-trend flash-lit photography, and oversized fits. The problem is how it all sits together. Technical gear, gorpcore pieces, and basic activewear all appear side by side. It feels like multiple brand decks merged into a single Shopify collection.

The trail tone feels deliberately un-Nike, which is probably the point. You can see the new ACG trying to channel the original's irreverence, but I think the original had an edge and perspective that made it unique and isn’t replicated here .

When a brand known for athletic intensity tries to reposition itself as the “look how zany I am” outdoor friend, it feels a bit like something that felt safe and tested well in a agency deck. I hope they bring a bit more of the OG swagger back in future marketing.

Salomon is an obvious comparison, because they've managed to be both a credible performance trail brand and a fashion/lifestyle brand at the same time. But that crossover was slow and grew out of both organic adoption and deliberate choices over the last decade.

The North Face might actually be a better, though, because TNF operates at a scale more like what Nike is targeting. You see their puffers on every other person in London and New York, but the reason that works is because their performance history and story is what drives their lifestyle sales.

ACG has some of that history, but not at the right scale. It feels like Nike is trying to speedrun that journey, pitching ACG simultaneously to gorpcore fans, trail runners, hikers, the fashion-adjacent Olympics audience, and the Chinese outdoor market, all with one brand and one launch window.

I'm stoked Nike is investing in trail running and outdoor, and you’ll catch me watching for new releases. Most trail running brands don’t have this level of budget. That investment raises visibility for the entire sport and buys goodwill with the community. Yeah, the train is flashy, but high-dollar race sponsorships and prize purses are a massive boon to a sport figuring out growth and professionalization.

The catch is whether Nike sticks with it. They have a history of giving up on things, and the visual/marketing side of ACG feels a bit ahead of the product right now. Hill told Bloomberg "you'll see us extend beyond trail running moving forward." It's hard to see exactly how committed they are and the exact shape of what ACG wants to be.

Success for ACG probably looks less like beating Hoka in trail and more like competing with the Amer Sports portfolio and The North Face for outdoor lifestyle. I suspect the size of the trail-specific market isn’t enough to keep Nike heavily engaged unless it’s doing double duty by building technical credibility for the lifestyle side of the line. The question isn't really "trail running or gorpcore?" It's whether Nike can become one of those brands that's both credible and cool across outdoor categories.

Underneath all of it is China. The first standalone ACG store is opening in Beijing, not NYC, Portland, or London. China's outdoor market is booming, and Nike has posted consecutive quarters of revenue declines there, while other outdoor brands have seen massive gains. ACG gives them a way to re-enter with a brand identity that is less weighed down by "Nike." Trail running is the story for credibility. China is the story for revenue.

But, I just want to see what ACG looks like two years from now, when the launch halo has faded, we’ve seen multiple seasons of product, and the whole thing has to sustain itself on new, interesting releases and community interest rather than marketing budget.