✳️ Inside Salomon's Strategic Transformation of Trail Running’s Future

An exclusive interview with Scott Mellin, Global Chief Brand Officer of Salomon.

Hey pals,

The source of last weeks news came from an interview I had with Scott Mellin, Global Chief Brand Officer, in a Parisian bar off the Champs Elysee. Over the course of an hour Scott was gracious enough to take me through Salomon’s strategy in trail running, tying together all the pieces of news we’ve seen from the brand over the past year.

It’s impressive. Salomon are not just positioning themselves favourably in the market to ride the wave of new participants in trail running, they’re creating it.

Underpinning this vision for the future of trail running was an acceleration of the professionalisation of the sport. With that change comes improvements, but also a loss of the wildness of trail running.

This article today is as much about Salomon’s masterful strategy as much as it is a reflection on the trajectory of trail running.

Hope you enjoy, and hope you have a wonderful week,

Matt

There's something distinctly familiar about watching a free-spirited activity transform into an optimised system. What begins as play inevitably becomes process; what starts as passion calcifies into structure. Trail running is now hurtling toward this familiar fate. Scott Mellin, Salomon's Global Chief Brand Officer, doesn't just accept this transformation - he's engineering it.

"Our business is shaping the future of sport and culture," Mellin tells me, sitting in a Parisian bar off the Champs Elysee. It's the kind of corporate statement that could sound hollow, except he means it quite literally. Over the course of the interview Scott walked me through how Salomon isn't just selling trail running gear; they’re redesigning the sport's entire ecosystem. Everything from how races are broadcast to what athletes eat at aid stations.

When Scott began his time at Salomon two years ago he asked what would happen if Salomon disappeared tomorrow: "The vacuum we'd leave behind is innovation, innovation that shapes the future." This vision powers a comprehensive five part strategy that reveals as much about our contemporary relationship with outdoor spaces as it does about the business of selling shoes.

From 300 to 40

When Mellin arrived at Salomon, he encountered a sprawling roster of over 300 sponsored athletes—a number so large it was hard to call it a team in the first place.

"We had more athletes than we needed," he tells me with a directness that cuts through corporate tendency toward diplomatic evasion. "We had amazing athletes that because of the size of the team and the organisation and the weight of it, we couldn't do what we wanted to do with the greats."

Over the past two years Salomon has been cutting it’s team down from roughly 300 athletes to the 40 that were announced at their 2025 team announcement. The new structure features three tiers: "the legends, the solid up and coming, and the young guns", and prioritises depth of relationship over breadth. "You can't do that across 300 but you can do that with 12-15, 20,"

This culling was as much about a fundamental shift in how Salomon approaches athlete partnerships as it was about marketing efficiency. "What's the integration into product development? What's their relationship with the marketing engine to help popularize them and make their voice a powerful tool for a brand engine which thrives on creating an emotional connection with consumers."

Consider their 7 year contract with Courtney Dauwalter, arguably the most dominant ultra-runner alive today. "We basically signed her for life," Mellin notes, the term itself is revealing. Not a contract, not a deal—a lifetime commitment. The language is almost matrimonial, suggesting something deeper than transaction.

But there's loss in this efficiency too. The 260+ athletes cut from Salomon's roster represent not just marketing data points but individuals whose identity and livelihood were partially defined by that relationship. When I ask about their reaction, Marion Blache, Global Marketing Director at Salomon, also sat in the interview acknowledges the human impact: "That's the worst thing. It's over two years, which gives them time to think: what do they want to do?"

Making Trail Running Ready for Prime Time

If you've never watched trail running on television, you're not alone. The sport has existed primarily as participant experience, YouTube livestreams and social media highlight reels - until now. Salomon's second transformation pillar aims squarely at bringing trail running into your living room, and eventually, the Olympics.

"We had two initial ambitions," Mellin explains. "One was, how do we make the Gold Trail World Series the most important series in the world?... There were two angles. One was to globalise it, and the other was to televise it."

I won’t go through the entire thought process, I went through that last week. What is pertinent to note is that this move is about reshaping trail running's entire presence in our cultural consciousness as well as boosting its visibility.

What fascinates me about this move is how deliberately it mimics the playbook of other once-niche sports. Snowboarding, climbing, and surfing all followed similar trajectories from counterculture to Olympics, from participant-focused to spectator-friendly. Each transformation required the same fundamental shift: standardisation. Rules must be clear, outcomes measurable, narratives digestible.

The question this raises is profound: Does broadcast-readiness inevitably strip sports of their essential wildness? When we reshape running through mountains to fit neat television windows and commercial breaks, what essence of the experience survives the translation?

Mellin's ambition extends beyond mere visibility to legitimacy's ultimate prize: "We would love to see our form of trail running racing in the Olympics... Probably not going to happen in LA... but we're looking at Brisbane." This Olympic aspiration represents the final stage of domestication for a sport born from the desire to escape structure.

Meanwhile, tension emerges between global ambition and local community. Race directors have pushed back against Salomon's decision last year to cancel the national series and to hoover everything up into the world structure, seeing it as abandonment of grassroots events. Mellin's response reflects the cold logic of corporate efficiency: "At the end of the day, do fewer things really well.”

The rhino that oversaw the interview with Scott. No idea what a rhino head was doing in a Parisian bar.

Growing into new audiences

What's fascinating about Salomon's strategy under Mellin is how deliberately it navigates the tension between core authenticity and market growth. The brand segments its audience into what they call "purists", the dedicated trail runners who form their base, and "achievers," who represent a broader, more casual consumer. The purists, Mellin notes, account for just 24% of Salomon's global opportunity. The math is straightforward: the third pillar of their strategy lies in tapping into that other 76%.

This is where campaigns like "Welcome Back to Earth" and "Reinvented" come in. They function as invitations to customers to join them in the mountains. "We unabashedly call ourselves a modern mountain sport lifestyle brand," Mellin tells me, before unpacking this phrase with careful precision. It's a framework that lets Salomon claim both innovation and heritage, mountain authenticity and urban relevance. The line in their “Reinvented” campaign goes that Salomon was invented in the mountains, but is now being reinvented in the streets. Their 2024 Super Bowl ad, a $7 million statement for a brand with low American awareness, was a signal to the US and their distributors that they're committed to introducing the outdoors to more people.

When Pizza No Longer Fuels Champions

There's something appealingly human about the image of elite athletes refueling with pizza between race segments. It creates a democratising connection - they're just like us, only faster. But in Mellin's vision of trail running's future, this charming inefficiency cannot stand.

"I went to a couple of our races," he recalls. "I was shocked at what they were eating, the amount of time they were spending on their feet before and after a race, the lack of recovery. And these were winners. And I was like, what could they do if we put science in front of and behind them to really professionalise their approach to the sport?"

Here we find the most fundamental tension in Salomon's transformation project: the collision between trail running's "dirtbag history" and the inexorable march of optimisation. When I point out this contradiction—between a sport built on accessibility and improvisation and one increasingly defined by scientific precision—Mellin doesn't deny the tension. Instead, he zooms out to the horizon.

"I tend to play the long game. And so I'm looking five, seven, ten years down the road, after a decade of investment in this program that the 16, 17, 18-year old kids that are running at an elite level, the only team they want to be on is Solomon, because that's where you're going to go win."

The inspiration for the 4th pillar of their approach comes from cycling, specifically the transformation of British cycling under Team Sky (now INEOS), which revolutionised the sport through its notorious "marginal gains" philosophy. "We took a big page out of professional cycling," Mellin admits. "We brought in Aitor Viribay from INEOS pro cycling. He's brought in a cast of nutritionists, chefs, physiologists... lots of things."

What's remarkable about this cycling inspiration is how deliberately it imports not just methods but mindset. Team Sky was controversial precisely because it approached cycling as a system to be optimised rather than a tradition to be honored. The results were undeniable, and divisive. Some saw beautiful efficiency; others saw the soul of the sport mechanised.

Trail running now faces this same crucible. Marion described how the scientific approach helps Courtney Dauwalter "have less pain and ensure that she can have less issues in terms of her body when she can get older". Who could reasonably object? And yet something intangible shifts when pizza gives way to personalised nutrition protocols, when intuition yields to data.

Athletes as Product Engines

The final piece of Salomon's transformation reveals perhaps the most straightforward business logic: using elite athletes as walking R&D labs.

"We have a component of Solomon product development called STOA, which is service to athletes," Mellin explains. "You can think of it like in the French fashion language, as an atelier... if you're a Salomon athlete, you have your own last, and you have custom shoes."

This process creates a direct feedback loop between elite performance and consumer products. "Sometimes it's a little bit of a Mr. Potato Head process, where you're taking this lower and this upper and preferences... over time, the runners' feet are changing, we have to provide an optimised solution. We learn a lot from that whole process."

What's striking about this approach is how it closes the circle on Salomon's entire strategy. The streamlined athlete team are marketing assets AND product developers. The scientific approach is designed to win races AND generate innovations. The televised global races build awareness AND are perfect testing grounds.

Every element serves multiple functions in an interlocking system designed to position Salomon at the center of trail running's future. It's corporate strategy as ecosystem engineering.

Reflections: The Inevitable Optimisation

There's a certain inevitability to what's happening with trail running. We've seen this pattern repeat across countless domains of human activity: what begins as play becomes professionalised; what starts as exploration becomes codified. From cooking to music to sport, passionate amateurs eventually give way to scientific professionals.

What makes the Salomon case study so compelling is the transparency with which they're engineering this transition. They aren't simply responding to changes in trail running; they're deliberately accelerating and shaping them according to a coherent vision.

The company's vision is clear: prioritize fewer, bigger initiatives; focus resources on elite performers; apply science to areas once defined by their lack of structure; and use that entire ecosystem to drive product innovation. All of this serves their self-defined mission: "shaping the future of sport and culture."

And perhaps this change is necessary. Perhaps trail running needs this transformation to grow beyond its current boundaries, to reach new participants, to create sustainable careers for athletes. Perhaps scientific approaches will indeed extend careers and reduce suffering, as Marion suggests about Dauwalter's "pain cave."

In Corrine and Dylan’s recent Rest Day podcast where they discussed my article last week, Corrine made the astute observation that when other sports entered the Olympics, that “Olympics appropriate” variant didn’t take over the sport, it created a new version of it. It co-existed with the original creating multiple ways-in for people to approach the sport from. In that light, Salomon’s vision for professional trail running won’t change the essence of our sport, just a small corner of it.

Yet I can't help wondering what magic might be lost in this optimisation. When I ask about trail running's history—its pizza-fueled champions and burritos at aid stations—Mellin doesn't reject these traditions outright. But his forward-looking perspective suggests they represent an earlier, less evolved stage of the sport's development.

What happens when the last sport where winning could coexist with simplicity becomes yet another domain conquered by optimization? Something is gained, certainly. But something irreplaceable may also slip away. Not just from trail running, but from our relationship with mountains, movement, and the messy human experience of pushing our limits in wild places.

Salomon's vision isn't wrong. It may even be inevitable. But as trail running transforms from community to content, from experiences to products, it's worth pausing to consider what we're optimising for - and what we might be optimising away.