Meet the challenger: how Anta is rebuilding Maia Active

There is an Olympic gold medalist who falls. Not in competition, but on a practice run, weight shifts wrong, the kind of fall that arrives unexpectedly. She pauses. Then she gets back up. It is the beginning of an almost three-minute-long video: the latest campaign of Maia Active in China.

Maia Active’s 10th-anniversary campaign, 动起来，不怕再来 (translated in: “Get moving, and don’t be afraid to try again”), has been launched in April this year. It is built around three stories of women who used movement to recover from physical and emotional low points.

The three women’s stories are specific and documented.

Chen Haoyu, serving as Energy Ambassador, was injured by a high-intensity training regimen after years of ignoring her body’s signals. She transitioned to yoga and pilates, reframing movement from performing for others to attending to her own breath and inner awareness.

Deng Yawen, gold medalist in women’s park freestyle BMX at the Paris 2024 Olympics, found that the pain after the podium became a daily presence, with psychological fractures sharpening as the glory faded. Through cycling and running, she arrived at the conviction that difficulty is simply evidence of being in motion.

Chui Nalisha, who grew up in a suppressive environment and later experienced a period of severe emotional collapse, rebuilt mental and physical health through aerobic, strength and functional training. Both Deng and Chui carry the title Energy Restart Officer, a designation the brand coined specifically for this campaign.

The campaign’s point is not capability. It is about discovering that movement is possible, not frightening, and doable. The video argues that fitness stands for personal healing and the courage to begin again. Not aesthetics. Not perfectionism. But resilience.

The Anta equation

To understand what Maia is attempting, the ownership structure matters.

Anta Sports, Maia’s current owner, ranks third globally in sportswear behind Nike and adidas. Its portfolio includes Fila, Descente and the Amer Sports group (home of Arc’teryx, Salomon and Wilson), acquired via a consortium in 2019.

Within that portfolio, Maia is positioned differently from everything else Anta owns. It is not a licensed heritage label, a technical outdoor brand, or a Western import being localized. It is a Chinese women’s activewear brand trying to define a category that Lululemon still occupies by default, in a market where a sophisticated yoga consumer is choosing between a global premium standard and a brand built specifically for her.

In Anta’s mid-2024 financial reporting, Maia was listed under “all other brands” for the first time. That classification may understate its strategic priority. Community-led, experience-retail models are precisely the kind of brand architecture that a conglomerate built around large-format, wholesale-heavy businesses cannot easily replicate.

Built for one body

Maia Active’s founding thesis remains its primary competitive argument.

The brand was founded in Shanghai in 2016 on a simple premise: women in East Asia, with different proportions, skin tone references, and relationships to sport and self presentation, were not being served by the international activewear brands that dominated the market.

Maia’s original designs pursued that gap with anatomical precision. Its signature sculpting leggings use a multizone construction that tunes the waist, hips, crotch, knees, and ankles independently. The brand also developed proprietary fabrics built for specific compression and stretch needs, aiming for the soft, cloud feel its core consumer wanted.

By 2022, Maia had sold more than 300,000 pairs of its signature leggings and projected total platform sales of RMB 500 million (approximately €66 million). But in its early years, the business remained primarily digital and had not yet solved physical retail.

Physical retail requires a different operating model, supply chain, and level of capital. Anta provided all three.

By May 2024, the group had appointed Steve Cho, formerly VP of Retail at Anta, as Maia’s president. Cho, a South Korean national with nearly 25 years in activewear experience who previously expanded New Balance’s revenue in China by a factor of 30, arrived with a clear mandate: preserve the brand’s identity while rebuilding its commercial architecture from the ground up.

“We do not do PowerPoint meetings here,” Cho told 36Kr in a 2025 interview. “I would much rather people come in, grab a coffee, and just talk.”

His office at Maia’s Shanghai headquarters is designed to support that. Maia’s founding culture, fast, direct, product instinct led, had to survive the integration. By the evidence available, it has. The key teams in marketing, merchandising, and product development remained largely intact through the transition.

The three-part rebuild

Three strategic moves have defined the post-acquisition period.

The first was a product reset. Under new leadership, Maia narrowed its assortment, reducing non-core categories such as outerwear and refocusing on yoga as its central use case. The emphasis shifted toward coordinated, scenario-based dressing, centered on leggings, bras and adjacent categories.

The second was a retail transformation. Maia had approximately 36 stores when the new management took over. Since then, the network has expanded to more than 50 locations, concentrated in tier 1 and tier 2 cities. The brand has increasingly prioritized experience-led retail formats to support its community-driven positioning and offline growth.

The third move was a scaled community strategy. Maia’s ‘Maia Fun Club’ has expanded its programming, organizing hundreds of yoga-focused events across multiple cities and reinforcing the brand’s connection with its core female consumer.

 What “Move Again, Fear Nothing” is really staking

Cho has set an ambitious goal: to position Maia among the leading yoga apparel brands in China, with longer-term regional ambitions.

The competitive field is still forming. Alo Yoga had not yet established a formal retail presence in China as of early 2025, though the brand was preparing its market entry and first store openings. Lululemon has publicly acknowledged slower global growth, yet its community infrastructure in China is a decade in the building. A lower-priced tier of yoga alternatives has expanded in the domestic market; Maia explicitly positions above it and has held that line.

The product architecture underpinning the positioning rests on three pillars.

The first is anatomical specificity: design calibrated to East Asian body proportions, including a bra innovation program addressing the “no-show” preferences distinct from Western market standards.

The second is fabric development: proprietary textile performance at compression levels and stretch ratios that, according to the brand, outperform standard benchmarks, co-developed with tier-one suppliers.

The third is emotional positioning: what we see in this 10th anniversary campaign, “Move Again, Fear Nothing,” which presents a supportive brand on the emotional side too. A brand that believes in the women it supports and their power to stand up again.

Then, community. Maia is compressing into a few years a community-loyalty model that Lululemon refined over two decades before it arrived in China. Anta’s infrastructure removes the operational constraints that limited the first chapter, but it cannot manufacture the accumulated brand trust that Lululemon carries, although with the current issues we see and document every week.

The anniversary campaign is the clearest statement yet of where Maia’s argument is placed. Not on a better price point, though its pricing, lower than Lululemon’s, gives it room to maneuver. Not on better fabric alone, though the product specificity is genuine.

The argument is on emotional alignment: that a Chinese brand, built for Chinese women, by people who have accompanied them for 10 years, can earn the kind of affinity that turns a legging purchase into an identity decision.

After watching this video several times and following these women, who feel so similar to our friends, sisters and daughters, we also ask ourselves: What if Maia Active, designed for Asian women, can go beyond Asia to reach people looking for supportive brands and emotional stories that are not about Instagram aesthetics, but about empowerment? What if we take the fresh view that comes through in each beautifully photographed frame of this video? What if Maia is the next Lululemon?