The Salomon Aero Blaze 3 is a Great Shoe. Is That Enough to Make the Brand Road Relevant?

Product launches are critical for brands within the endurance sports sphere. Get it right, and you have a product that can catch fire. Get it wrong, especially if you forecasted for big sales and you swung and missed, and you have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of inventory and no good way of cleaning up the mess left behind besides discounting. And then it’s nearly impossible to remove yourself from the cycle of “new –> discount –> even bigger discount” until, well, you’re no longer a company that ever sells anything at full retail.

It’s in that context that Salomon has been edging further and further into the road shoe category. The brand, most famous for its trail product, has been trying to grab a larger slice of the multibillion dollar run shoe pie. Perhaps the brand most successful at making that pivot is HOKA, which sold almost $571 million in product in Q2 2025 alone. For comparison, Salomon’s parent company, Amer Sports, reported sales of $411 million for the entire “Outdoor Performance” category over the same period. That section of the company includes Salomon’s ski business.

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