With footwear and apparel now representing approximately two-thirds of Salomon’s outdoor performance revenue, the Amer Sports-owned brand has named global artist Jisoo as its brand ambassador: the most prominent public signal yet of a repositioning that accelerated in the last three years.
Salomon has named Korean artist and former BLACKPINK member Jisoo as its global brand ambassador, in a partnership the Annecy-based company says will span product collaborations and creative projects over the long term. The announcement, made this week, drew the expected wave of coverage in fashion and streetwear media. The business context behind it is harder to find in those accounts, but considerably more interesting.
The brand that spent its first five decades making ski equipment has, by its own financial reckoning, largely become a footwear and apparel company. According to Amer Sports earnings data, footwear and clothing now account for approximately two-thirds of revenue in the outdoor performance segment that Salomon leads. Sneaker sales alone passed $1 billion in 2024. Winter sports equipment, once the reason for the brand’s existence, has receded to a minority share of the business.
Jisoo is the public face of that shift.
Three years of transformation
The transformation has been building since at least 2024, when Salomon launched “Welcome Back to Earth”, a campaign that repositioned the brand’s mountain identity in more emotional than purely technical terms. A second campaign, “Invented. ReInvented.”, followed in 2025 and extended that framing into urban environments. This year’s iteration, “Shaping New Futures”, developed with BBDO Paris, places innovation at the center of the brand narrative — a platform expansive enough to hold winter sports, performance running and lifestyle simultaneously.
Guillaume Meyzenq, chief executive of Salomon, has described the direction plainly: the brand is moving “from a modern mountain sport equipment brand into a modern mountain sports culture.”
It is a description of a company that delivered strong double-digit growth in 2025, surpassing $2 billion in revenue for the first time, and that is now building the organizational infrastructure to sustain that trajectory.
The talent behind the brand rebuild
The executive appointments Salomon has made over the past 14 months are the clearest signal that this is a structural shift, not a marketing cycle.
Valérie Loh joined in 2026 as Senior Vice President, Brand and Marketing. Her background is in luxury: Moncler, Rémy Cointreau, Bottega Veneta, Parfums Christian Dior. Moncler is the most instructive reference point — it is the brand that has most successfully navigated the transition from alpine specialist to cultural luxury property, and Loh held senior marketing leadership roles within its organization during that ascent.
In March 2025, Nick Parkinson was appointed global brand creative director. He spent 15 years at Nike, where he worked on the repositioning of Nike Running, before serving as creative director of Converse and global creative director of Jordan Brand. His brief at Salomon is to build a consistent global creative strategy across every market and consumer touchpoint.
In January 2026, Heikki Salonen and Laura Herbst, both formerly of MM6 Maison Margiela, joined as creative director and studio director. The hiring of talent from a conceptual fashion house associated with deconstruction and cultural subversion is not a typical move for an outdoor performance brand. It is, however, consistent with a brand that has spent the past two years recruiting from the luxury and fashion world rather than from sportswear.
Olivier Benon, formerly in charge of store expansion for JD Sports across Europe, the Middle East and Africa — overseeing more than 250 openings since 2013 — joined to lead Salomon’s EMEA retail development. Scaling a sneaker and lifestyle store network requires a different set of skills than managing performance specialty distribution. Benon brings those skills from one of the most aggressive retail expansion models in European sportswear.
The retail numbers
Store expansion has accompanied the brand rebuild at pace. Salomon ended 2025 with 286 doors in Greater China, having added 33 net new stores in the fourth quarter alone and nearly 100 over the full year. In 2026, the brand initially indicated plans to add approximately 35 further stores in the region at a more measured rate, with later guidance suggesting a possible increase.
In the US — still a smaller market for Salomon relative to Europe and Asia — the brand plans to open seven to ten new stores in 2026, focusing on major cities including New York and Los Angeles. A new Paris office and showroom opened last year, designed to strengthen relationships with buyers and the creative community in the brand’s home market.
The performance in China and broader Asia is directly relevant to the Jisoo appointment. Amer Sports CEO James Zheng has pointed to strong and accelerating demand across the region, while highlighting the high productivity and profitability of Salomon’s retail network in Greater China. A global ambassador with Jisoo’s following in those markets is not a neutral choice.
The strategic test: can Salomon grow cultural relevance without losing technical credibility?
Any performance brand that moves into fashion courts a version of the same problem: the more cultural traction it gains, the less it looks like the expert it started out as. Salomon has been managing that tension consciously.
Its partnership with the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games served a dual purpose: commercial activation and credential maintenance. The brand’s former global marketing head, Scott Mellin, who departed in February, was direct about the calculation, telling Reuters the Olympic tie-up was “a way for us to cement our authenticity in sport as we’ve aggressively moved into fashion.”
Parkinson, the creative director, frames the internal version of that challenge in operational terms. “My objective is to create a cohesive brand at every touchpoint for the consumer,” he told The Drum in March. “The brand is growing organically, so we have to match those challenges internally.” His stated horizon is 2030.
Jisoo’s own statement, prepared for the announcement, follows a consistent line. She mentions growing up near the mountains in South Korea, describes time outdoors as a source of “freedom and grounding,” and frames the partnership as a reflection of her daily life rather than a commercial arrangement.
Whether or not that framing is entirely candid, it is editorially coherent. And coherence with the brand’s self-presentation was clearly the brief.
