Gravel running becomes brands’ new growth strategy

Road to trail hybrids are not new. Salomon, Nike (Pegasus Trail), On (Cloudsurfer Trail) and HOKA (Challenger) have sold versions for years.

What is different now is Salomon’s attempt to define gravel as a distinct subgenre built around an urban runner who moves between pavement, park paths and forest trails without switching shoes.

The approach borrows from Salomon’s sportstyle business, which helped broaden the brand’s visibility beyond core outdoor consumers as technical footwear gained traction in fashion and everyday wear. The rise of gorpcore created a larger audience for products that blur the boundary between performance and lifestyle, a dynamic Salomon is now applying to gravel running.

By 2026, Salomon has effectively positioned itself as the category leader in gravel running by treating it as more than a re-labeled “road-to-trail” shoe. Instead of selling hybrids as a technical compromise, Salomon sets gravel as a distinct subgenre with its own language (GRVL), product storytelling and community touchpoints.

The target is the urban runner who moves across concrete, park paths and light forest loops in a single session and wants one kit that performs without looking like either alpine gear or a pure asphalt racing shoe. That lifestyle-led positioning, combining performance and everyday wearability, lets Salomon define gravel as a bridge between running and sportstyle, and it has forced competitors that once defaulted to the “door-to-trail” label to respond on Salomon’s terms rather than their own.

Gravel is emerging as its own running category, but it is still hard to track in financial reports.

Most brands and retailers still group “gravel” within road to trail or trail, so category specific sales, growth and market share data remain patchy. That is why the clearest early signals show up in Salomon’s lifestyle business unit. Salomon’s expansion is a case in point: its gravel strategy is riding momentum from a growing footwear and sportstyle business, with the brand surpassing $2 billion in annual sales in 2025 (up 35 percent year over year) as Amer Sports executives repeatedly pointed to strong demand for sportstyle footwear.

Even so, Salomon remains a relatively small player in the global sneaker market, a point Amer Sports executives have used to justify continued investment behind the brand’s footwear growth opportunity. That context matters for gravel. It is a relatively low-risk category bet in a subsegment where leadership remains attainable, allowing Salomon to expand beyond its traditional trail-running audience without confronting the scale and competitive intensity of the broader sneaker market.

A gateway category, especially in North America

For Salomon, gravel functions as more than a shoe line. Speaking to Footwear News, Erin Cooper, senior marketing manager for Performance and Sportstyle, described gravel as a gateway into other sport categories and a way to introduce new consumers to the brand, particularly in North America. That regional emphasis shows in distribution. According to Salomon, approximately 280 of its roughly 300 US specialty accounts now carry gravel products.

The brand’s efforts extend beyond distribution. Through community events, social activations and experiential running formats, Salomon is attempting to create the kind of community-led ecosystem that helped transform gravel cycling from a niche category into a mainstream participation movement.

Rivals describe gravel differently and inherit different brand loyalty

Salomon is not alone in chasing the opportunity. Nike has folded gravel messaging into its ACG Pegasus Trail rather than building a standalone identity.

The Swedish brand Craft has created a dedicated “Gravel Shoes” section on its site, describing the category this way: “Gravel shoes are made for exactly that—gravel. Lightweight and agile like road shoes, but with added grip to handle loose terrain. Their lugged outsoles, inspired by gravel bike tires, deliver confident traction where road shoes slip.” HOKA has stayed closest to its trail-first product language, describing its Challenger 8 as a “gravel-grinding workhorse loved for its hyper cushy ride; we’ve added even more foam underfoot and improved the fit since the last iteration.” 

If language matters, we see divergent paths, with Salomon attempting to build gravel into a cultural platform and consumer identity, while competitors are largely treating it as a product-line extension of their legacy product lines. That’s SGI Europe’s reading of the messaging, not a claim either company has made directly.

So, the different gravel paths could alternatively be described as ”road-to-trail” or ”trail-to-road”, and this distinction is what drives the difference in consumer identity and perception.

Salomon’s version starts from mountain and trail heritage; Nike’s starts from the road. Whether that starting point becomes a real commercial advantage in gravel specifically is untested: it would take primary participation or purchase data on gravel converts specifically, which isn’t publicly available yet.

Where gravel sits between two harder sells

Industry observers argue gravel occupies a middle ground with built-in appeal: trail running can intimidate newer runners, while road running still carries a reputation for joint impact despite years of foam improvements. There’s directional support for at least the trail-running side of that argument. SFIA’s 2025 Topline Participation Report describes trail running as continuing its “decade-long growth trend,” alongside hiking, even as several other outdoor activities plateaued.

Gravel is positioned to capture some of that same momentum without requiring runners to commit to technical trail terrain outright. Whether that translates into a durable standalone category, however, remains too early to determine from the available participation data.

Accessibility may be gravel’s strongest consumer proposition

Gravel’s appeal also depends on where this surface actually exists, and that extends well beyond North America and the United States. In Europe, Berlin manages roughly 29,000 hectares of forest, making it Germany’s most forested city. The Tiergarten, a 520 acre park between the Reichstag and the zoo, includes roughly 14 miles of mostly gravel paths. The Grunewald forest on the city’s western edge adds another 150 plus kilometers of mixed gravel and singletrack, reachable directly by commuter rail.

Austrian capital Vienna takes the same pattern further: roughly half the city is officially green space, and the Wienerwald, a UNESCO biosphere reserve, wraps around the capital with trail access by public bus rather than by car. Copenhagen in Denmark follows the same logic. Amager Fælled offers more than 25 kilometers of gravel and mixed paths a short Metro ride from downtown, while Dyrehaven, a UNESCO listed forest, is about 20 minutes away by train.

Across these cities, the through line is not “escape the city” but a real junction between city and landscape: routes that shift from pavement to gravel to forest floor in a single run, reachable by transit rather than requiring a drive. That is a different pitch from trail running, which still often implies an outing outside the city. Gravel shoes are built for the surface change itself, not the destination. New York City has its own version of this inside its parks.

Today, tomorrow: this looks like the gorpcore playbook, applied to running

The pattern is familiar from adjacent categories. Outdoor footwear’s move from technical gear to daily wear (what we now call “gorpcore”) already reshaped hiking-boot and trail-runner sales. Gravel looks like an attempt to run that same playbook a second time: take a niche, technical product, attach it to an urban lifestyle identity, and use it to reach consumers beyond the core consumer base.

Whether it works depends less on outsole compounds than on whether “gravel” can hold cultural meaning the way “trail” or “sportstyle” already do. From the number of “gravel run” community events that have been flourishing recently, not only in the above mentiond cities, all speaks in favor of Salomon´s thesis: to give a name to the new category, relying on a strong credibilty earned in the outdoors, then develop together with a new culture of cityscapers that enjoy terrain next door.