With the overall running boom on track, Brooks continues its hot steak.
The brand, which ranks No. 1 in the national retail segment according to Circana, also counts three of the top six adult performance footwear styles. Given the label’s innovative product pipeline, Footwear News caught up with Brooks CEO Dan Sheridan to learn more about the company’s innovation process and what adjustments it has made due to current U.S. trade policies.
Footwear News: What does innovation mean to you?
Dan Sheridan: At the root of it, we’re a product company, and innovation is an essential to living out our purpose. And here at Brooks, everything we do, from a product innovation perspective, is focused on science and a deep research in the biomechanics of how we move. We innovate based on that deep research and what we’ve been able to do over a 25-year period is to develop products for runners to keep them running farther, faster and improve their performance.
FN: What is that process? Is it feedback from a lot of testing and finding out what the user wants?
DS: Here in Seattle, we have a biomechanics lab in our headquarters. We’ve had it since early 2000 [and they] study biomechanics, how people run. It starts with the runners’ gaits. We then work with a lot of partners in this our manufacturing process to develop materials, uppers and geometrics that really are rooted in how you run….Everyone has a unique joint motion [and our jobs] are to keep you in your joint motion that’s called [your] run signature. [And] if we do that, we’re going to reduce the rate of injury.
FN: What are the key properties for a Brooks running shoe?
DS: Through R&D with our materials partners, we can get cushioning properties in a shoe and resiliency and energy give-back in a shoe. That’s coming through the foams, and we’re working [with partners including BASF] to develop proprietary foams in our shoes that don’t compromise on anything that runners want.
FN: Between the different properties in terms of density of foam, the spring when you take the next step and all those details, how does your integration team determine what the best mix for your running shoe update?
DS: We have a wear-test program where we’re constantly engaging with runners across a wide spectrum of mechanical traits [and] we send out product to close to 500 people every time we do a permutation of a product to get feedback. So the R&D is on the front end and then we prove it through this wear-test program.
FN: In your third quarter earnings results, a 17 percent revenue gain helped the brand achieve its ninth consecutive quarter of growth. Can that continue?
DS: We’re going to have a record year this year. It’s because the science that we base everything on works.
FN: What are the most important features in the running shoes?
DS: What we try and do is develop platforms to reach a range of runners. One technology that have in our shoe is called guide rails. They’re dual-density pieces that sit on the side of the shoe that try to keep you down in the middle of the shoe. The Adrenaline GTS is a style celebrating its 25th year. The technology really gives opportunity for runners to stay in their joint motion.
FN: The Adrenaline GTS seems to work for a wide range of runners. How do you know when it’s time to iterate again and improve on what’s already working?
DS: The craziest part of this business is that it takes 12 months when we update a shoe….We don’t do updates in terms of technology and foams unless it will benefit the runner. We do updates a lot of times throughout a cycle [that’s based on] a trend in the upper material, color or design.
FN: Where are most of your shoes produced and how has tariffs impacted your sourcing and supply chain?
DS: Mostly in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. We’re a global company. We sell in over 50 countries around the world [so] any friction or disruption of trade policy and the like impacts us. Southeast Asia is the best place for us to produce right now because we’ve been working with long-term partners for over 25 years that are craftsmen and craftswomen who are making performance product. It’s really hard to make performance product.
Athletic footwear has had tariffs from Southeast Asia since the 1930s. So we had 20 percent before this next round came through. Now we have [a total of] 40 percent tariffs on our product. That’s a 100 percent increase…[and what we’re doing is we took a full value chain approach. So we didn’t just go after price increases — though we’re going to have some slight price increases in 2026 — we worked with our partners to share the burden, the cost across the value chain. And we’ve got our arms around it, but we’re impacted in a big way. These tariffs are not a small problem for us.
FN: We know how specialized footwear production is. Is there any way that you think at some point down the road that maybe it might be brought back to the U.S.?
DS: What I know about supply chains is that they’re really hard to move, and what we know about our supply chain and the best performance running gear is that the best makers are located in Southeast Asia. I don’t mean we’re not trying to diversify our supply chain. We’re always doing that. We have a project now looking at future manufacturing to address some of the pressure from this trade policy. And we’ve got some projects going on, but it takes years.
FN: Will AI play any role in making factories or operations in general more efficient?
DS: We’re deploying AI throughout all of our organization, specifically around increasing efficiency [and using] technology to help with innovation [as well as] working with our manufacturing partners.
