The Boston-based footwear brand has completed its fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth, a trajectory that few in the industry predicted when the pandemic reshaped the competitive landscape.
New Balance Athletics reported global sales of $9.2 billion (€8.4 billion) for 2025, a 19 per cent year-over-year increase, the company disclosed in a statement from President and CEO Joe Preston on Feb. 19. The result marks the brand’s fifth successive year of both revenue expansion and global market share gains – a streak that began when Nike’s strategic miscalculations began opening structural gaps across wholesale channels and performance categories.
New Balance gains market share as Nike’s missteps create opening
Regional performance was broad-based rather than concentrated. North America delivered growth exceeding 20 per cent, while Europe – historically a more contested market for the brand – surpassed 30 per cent year over year, according to Preston’s statement. Two business units crossed the $1 billion (€915 million) threshold for the first time: the global apparel division and the company’s owned retail operation, a milestone that reinforces New Balance’s ambitions beyond its core footwear business.
The brand added 80 new retail doors in 2025 alone, part of a direct-to-consumer (DTC) push that Preston framed deliberately differently from the ill-fated strategy Nike pursued earlier this decade. “One of the things we’re not doing is establishing a [DTC] target internally,” Preston told CNBC, which exclusively published the 2025 results. “I don’t want to get in the way with how the consumer wants to shop.”
The Nike factor – and the limits of that narrative
It would be tempting to read New Balance’s rise almost entirely through the lens of Nike’s stumble. The logic is well established: Nike’s pandemic-era pivot towards direct selling effectively cleared shelf space at key wholesale accounts that New Balance, On, Brooks Running and Deckers-owned Hoka rushed to occupy. With attention and resources diverted to building a DTC infrastructure, Nike also fell behind on product innovation – a vulnerability its competitors exploited methodically.
Preston acknowledged the opportunity whilst pushing back on any suggestion that external factors alone explain the result. “The marketplace disruption that’s been taking place, the examples of Nike, sure, all that stuff is real,” he said. “And at the same time, I don’t think it’s the reason that we have begun to emerge.”
The internal discipline he points to is more instructive than any competitor’s misstep. Since 2020, New Balance has grown sales by roughly 180 per cent whilst simultaneously increasing its average selling price by approximately 30 per cent – a combination that suggests genuine brand equity accumulation rather than volume-driven opportunism. The brand achieved this by being selective with both distribution and promotional activity, resisting the discounting pressure that undermined margins across much of the footwear market.
How New Balance builds competitive advantage
New Balance’s athlete roster – which now includes Josh Allen, Coco Gauff, Shohei Ohtani, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Femke Bol, amongst others – shows the brand’s clear strategy to build lifestyle credibility on the back of genuine performance credentials.
The brand showcased its running positioning at the World Athletics Championships in Tokyo last year through its “Run Your Way” campaign, and extended its long-term partnership with the TCS New York City Marathon through the New York Road Runners organisation.
On the manufacturing side, New Balance expanded its Central Maine factory in Skowhegan and began piloting production at a new advanced facility in Londonderry, New Hampshire – investments that reinforce a domestic manufacturing narrative that resonates with both consumers and, increasingly, with trade policy dynamics. A new state-of-the-art distribution centre opened in Salt Lake City.
The company also launched an Asia Design Studio unifying lifestyle apparel teams across Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul. The move is presented internally as an expression of what Preston calls the ”One NB” culture – the operating philosophy credited with sustaining brand coherence through five years of rapid scaling.
What’s revealing here is the studio’s purpose: rather than create a separate Asian design identity for local markets, New Balance is integrating the region’s creative talent into a single global framework. At a moment when many global brands struggle to maintain a consistent aesthetic as they expand geographically, that structural choice reflects a deliberate bet that unified culture travels further than localised adaptation
New Balance eyes $10bn milestone
Preston indicated that $10 billion (€9.15 billion) in annual revenue is within reach by year-end, though he was careful to qualify the ambition. “We want to make sure that as we get there and surpass it, that the quality of our business is first and foremost,” he told CNBC. “We don’t want empty calories here.”
That caveat matters. New Balance remains a private company and has not disclosed profitability data, leaving the financial sustainability of its aggressive store-opening programme – 80 new locations in a single year – unverifiable from the outside. Whether the investment pace is consistent with the margin profile of a genuinely premium brand is a question the brand will not be held publicly accountable for. For now, however, the top-line story is one the rest of the industry is watching closely.
