The Great Sportswear Reckoning
Premium Analysis
The global sportswear industry has entered a structural inflection point driven by three simultaneous crises that reveal a single underlying mechanism: the collapse of the “scale-first, culture-later” playbook. Lululemon’s proxy war exposes the end of the pandemic athleisure supercycle.
Nike’s “middle innings” turnaround reveals the cost of abandoning category-specific communities. Under Armour’s Curry Brand separation marks the definitive failure of the challenger-brand-through-athlete-endorsement thesis.
What emerges in 2026 isn’t a market share reshuffling; it’s a fundamental restructuring of how sportswear creates and captures value, where “performance” now means cultural credibility as much as technical capability.
