The State of Sneakers: Spring/Summer 2026

Why the most exciting brands in footwear can all be right and the industry can still only be average.

The State of Sneakers, Spring/Summer 2026.

People keep asking me some version of the same question this spring. They phrase it differently depending on where they sit in the business, but it always comes back to the same place. How healthy is this thing, really? And the people asking are not casuals. They are buyers, founders, brand-side veterans, the folks who have been reading balance sheets and lacing up samples for twenty years. They feel something good in the air. Running brands posting numbers nobody used to post. Trail shoes on feet that have never touched a trail. A retail merger that, against the odds, actually worked. If you have been paying attention, it feels like the industry is sitting at a 7 out of 10, maybe better.

So I decided to stop guessing and score it.

I have spent a little over two decades inside this business, building, selling, and writing about footwear, and I built a model that rates every major brand, both surviving retail giants, and seven product categories on a 1 to 10 scale. Then I weighted the brand scores by each company’s approximate annual revenue, so the final number reflects dollars instead of vibes. A tiny brand having a perfect year and a giant having a bad one should not count the same, because they do not move the same amount of money. The full scorecard is below. The methodology is below that. I will show you exactly how every brand landed and why.

The industry composite came back at 5.9.

Not a 7. Not the number the room feels. A 5.9, which is to say the footwear business in the spring of 2026 is, on the whole, average. And the gap between what it feels like and what it scores is the most interesting story in the industry right now, because the reason for that gap is a single company.