China signals: Hyrox stumbles, Biem tops Hermès, leather shoes slide, stars go wild

Biem.L.Fdlkk posted a first-half gross margin of 75.88%, ahead of Hermès' 71.14% for the same period. China's leather shoe output is forecast to fall by more than 60% across the decade to 2026 as men trade formality for comfort. Sportswear and fashion labels are putting celebrity ambassadors into real races and expeditions rather than studio shoots. And Hyrox faces its second China controversy in six weeks, after an Australian athlete won the women’s elite race at the Beijing stop despite losing bowel control mid-competition. Biem outpaces Hermès on gross margin as China’s premium apparel ambitions grow Market intel: Shenzhen-listed Biem.L.Fdlkk (002832.SZ) reported first-half 2026 revenue of 2.601 billion RMB ($364 million), up 23.66% year-on-year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 491 million RMB ($69 million), up 18.41%. Gross margin reached 75.88%, close to five percentage points above the 71.14% Hermès reported for the same half. The comparison has been widely picked over in the Chinese market. That margin rests on a narrow position: high-end golf apparel, carrying retail markups of six to eight times cost against the three to four times typical of mass-market Chinese clothing brands. The company has sponsored professional tournaments for years and prices closer to accessible luxury than to mainstream apparel. Scale is another matter. Hermès posted half-year revenue of 8.163 billion euros and net profit of 2.238 billion euros — a net margin near 27%, against Biem.L.Fdlkk’s 18.9%. Hermès also carries more than a dozen categories, with leather goods above half of sales, while more than 90% of Biem.L.Fdlkk's revenue comes from apparel. Market indicator: Beating Hermès on one line of the income statement is a real marker of how far Chinese apparel has climbed, and Chinese coverage has read it that way. It is also one line. Gross margin measures pricing power at the product level; net margin measures whether a business converts that power into profit. On the second measure the gap is still wide, and it is the one that tells you what kind of company this is. Two questions follow, and Biem.L.Fdlkk has already started answering both. In the first half it took over core China operations for Japanese outdoor brand Snow Peak and continued building out its agency business for US recovery-footwear label OOFOS, positioning both as growth beyond the core golf line. Management has set a target of 30 billion RMB ($4.47 billion) in group revenue by 2033. Whether a brand built on tournament sponsorship and a single niche can carry that breadth without thinning what makes it premium is the thing to watch over the next several reporting periods. For other Chinese brands moving upmarket, the lesson in Biem.L.Fdlkk’s numbers is that pricing power was built slowly, through years of sponsorship and a defensible position in one category, before the margins followed. Raising prices without that groundwork produces a different set of results. Leather shoes lose their status as Chinese men prioritize comfort over formality Market intel: Chinese men are moving off traditional leather shoes and onto sneakers, outdoor footwear and lifestyle brands. National output fell from 4.618 billion pairs in 2016 to 3.54 billion by 2020, according to China Leather Industry Association figures, and Huajing Industry Research Institute forecasts a further slide to around 1.7 billion in 2026 — a drop of more than 60% across the decade. Listed manufacturers show the same curve. Aokang International, the largest domestic men’s leather shoe brand, ran four consecutive years of losses from 2022 to 2025 totalling more than 900 million RMB ($126 million), and posted first-half 2026 revenue of 769 million RMB ($108 million), down 28.88% year-on-year. Its own output halved over a decade, from 19.84 million pairs in 2015 to 8.72 million in 2025. Fuguiniao delisted in 2019; Red Dragonfly lost money in both 2024 and 2025. What sits behind the numbers is a change in what the category signifies rather than a shrinking footwear market overall. Leather shoes were tied to professional standing and formal occasions; buyers now weigh comfort, personal style and versatility. Zhang Yi, chief executive of iiMedia Research, links the shift to the first cohort of post-1990s workers becoming the dominant consumer group as employers relaxed dress codes, pushing business settings towards casual. Senior executives have made the same move in public. Jack Ma has been photographed in Loro Piana’s Flexy Walk wool sneakers, while Xiaomi’s Lei Jun wears On and Salomon. Market indicator: Aokang’s response shows how narrow the room for manoeuvre has become. The company has repositioned around comfort, launching a sports-leather hybrid it says cuts weight by half using a foam midsole and Dyneema fibre upper. Its investor relations office concedes the new category remains a small share of sales, and the best-selling line on its Tmall store is still a 200-to-300 RMB ($29.80-$44.71) formal shoe that reviewers mostly buy as wedding footwear. Men’s, women’s and leather goods revenue all fell by double digits in the first half, with online down 56%. Distribution hedging failed first. Aokang held Skechers and Puma agency rights for a decade; by the end of 2025 its Skechers stores were gone and seven Puma outlets remained. Gross margin on the Skechers business was 19.49% in 2025, and 8.37% on the segment holding Puma. Agency volume never offset the declining core, and it came at margins that made the attempt barely worth running. Demand has moved inside the category more than it has left it. China’s fashion casual leather shoe segment reached 48.6 billion RMB ($6.8 billion) in 2025, up 7.3% year-on-year, while sports and casual styles took close to 80% of men’s footwear spending. Buyers have rejected the stiff formal construction. Leather as a material is doing fine — which leaves traditional makers fighting over a shrinking formal core while Salomon, On, Hoka and Descente own the comfort end outright. Sportswear brands send ambassadors into the wild as authenticity becomes the new premium Market intel: Brands operating in China are putting ambassadors into real terrain rather than studio sets, and pairing them with subject specialists rather than stylists. Burberry marked its 170th anniversary with a documentary series made with Chinese National Geography, sending brand ambassador Chen Kun (陈坤) into the Qinling mountains alongside the magazine’s president Li Shuanke (李栓科) and naturalist Zhang Chenliang (张辰亮). A second episode took Janice Man (文咏珊) to Shangri-La with photographer Peng Jiansheng (彭建生). Canada Goose sent global brand ambassador Greg Hsu (许光汉) from Helsinki into Finnish Lapland to shoot its Haider Ackermann-designed autumn-winter collection under the midnight sun. Racing is the harder version of the same play. Salomon brand friend Tony Yang (杨祐宁) finished the ETC category at UTMB Mont-Blanc in August, 15 kilometers with 1,200 meters of elevation gain, in three hours 45 minutes — his first trail race. Montane global ambassador Zhu Yilong (朱一龙) ran the 10-kilometer category at the brand’s VIA training series in Beijing in May, also his first, finishing in two hours 20 minutes 29 seconds and 120th among male entrants. Kailas Fuga, the trail line of Chinese outdoor brand Kailas, has taken the participation route. The brand says it ran the first edition of Her Ambition (她的野心), a mountain-running training camp for women, with actress Xin Zhilei (辛芷蕾) as co-initiator, training alongside participants in the mountains. Brand messaging around the camp runs against pace and distance targets — no need to be gentle, no need to explain, be yourself on the mountain. Trail running’s commercial base is expanding fast. Race equipment in China is forecast to reach 14.6 billion RMB ($2 billion) in 2026, up 50.7% year-on-year, according to figures cited by 36Kr. iiMedia Research counted 403 trail events nationally by 1 May 2026, up 31.3%, drawing more than 1.038 million entries. Market indicator: Endorsement in China is being asked to carry proof. A finishing time is checkable, a placing is checkable, and a training camp has participants who post about it afterwards. None of that is true of a studio shoot, which is why the format is migrating — the cost of a claim that can be checked is that it can also fail, and brands are now accepting that trade. The exposure is real. Zhu Yilong’s placing puts him in the back half of a 10-kilometer field, and Chinese coverage treated that generously — but it was published, and a worse outing would have been published too. Tony Yang’s three hours 45 minutes over 15 kilometers and 1,200 meters of climb reads differently to anyone who runs, which is the audience the Salomon partnership is aimed at. Brands are handing verification rights to a community that will use them. Sorting the tiers matters commercially, because the three formats in this section are not one strategy. An expedition documentary buys cultural positioning. A campaign shot on location buys product imagery with a better backdrop than a studio. A race entry or a training camp buys credibility inside a specific community, and only that last tier is legible to people already in the sport. Brands paying participation prices for campaign outcomes are the ones to watch. Where this lands for luxury is the tier problem in sharper form. Outdoor performance is becoming a status register in China — one that rewards demonstrated capacity rather than spend, which is the inverse of how luxury signalling normally works. Buying into it with a campaign shoot is legible to the sport as buying in. Hyrox faces defining crisis as athlete controversy exposes event management issues Market intel: Joanna Wietrzyk, the Australian world record holder in the women's Pro division, won the women's elite race at Hyrox's Beijing stop on 12 September in a little over an hour, having lost bowel control during the event and continued through the remaining stations. Waste contaminated the running track, sled mat, floor covering and station areas. Officials reported the incident and directed other competitors to route around the affected ground, but did not stop the race. More than 1,000 entrants subsequently competed on the same course, and several reported slipping on debris. Officiating consistency became the sharper grievance. Competitors pointed out that a domestic entrant at the same meeting had been given a two-minute penalty after water splashed onto their face while drinking at an aid station — the rulebook prohibits deliberately pouring water over the head to cool down, and penalises spitting or clearing the nose onto the floor at two minutes per offence. No penalty was issued in the elite race. Wietrzyk posted afterwards that a win is a win, thanked supporters and said she had recovered quickly. She has not addressed the contamination or its effect on other competitors. Hyrox China issued a statement that evening confirming it had sealed and disinfected the affected area, removed the equipment involved, and would replace the carpet and deep-clean the venue after racing finished. It did not address the officiating decisions. Hyrox's global account followed on 14 September, acknowledging that protocols written separately for elite competition and mass participation had produced ambiguity in how they were applied, and committing to review. The same statement said anyone making violent threats against athletes through comments, direct messages or social media would be permanently banned from all Hyrox events. CCTV's sports channel weighed in the same day. Its Morning Sports Report programme said competitive effort should not mean pressing on regardless of public hygiene and other people's rights, and argued the episode exposed underdeveloped rulebooks across commercial events in China — specifically unclear thresholds for officials and medical staff to intervene, and for stopping competition on assessment. It called for regulators to accelerate industry standards and for local agencies to coordinate on event safety. Beijing is the second China incident in six weeks. At the Chengdu stop on 1 August, two commentators on the official livestream repeatedly mocked table tennis grand slam winner Zhang Jike (张继科), who was competing in the men's relay as an invited guest with an existing arm injury after his event was switched at short notice. Hyrox China terminated both commentators' contracts and issued a public apology on 2 August. Market indicator: State broadcaster commentary is the development that changes Hyrox's position in China. A social media backlash is survivable and usually short. A CCTV segment arguing that a whole category of commercial events operates without adequate rules, and calling on regulators to issue standards, sets a different clock running — it invites regulatory attention to the format itself rather than to one organiser's bad weekend. Any operator running mass-participation events in China should read that segment as addressed to them. Hyrox's specific exposure is that its product is standardization. The proposition is that a time set in Beijing means the same thing as a time set in Hamburg, which is what makes global rankings and qualification work. Contamination and officiating are not peripheral to that promise; inconsistent enforcement inside a single meeting undermines the thing customers are buying. The global statement conceded the protocol gap directly, which was the right call and also an expensive admission. Handling has been uneven rather than absent, which is worth saying plainly. Chengdu was dealt with in 24 hours — contracts terminated, apology issued. Beijing produced a sanitation statement that avoided the officiating question for two days, then a global statement that addressed protocol while leading on athlete protection. Defending a competitor from threats is legitimate. Doing it before answering why the rules were applied differently to two people at the same meeting reverses the order the Chinese audience was waiting on. Ownership sharpens the timing. The founders completed their buyback of majority control on 8 September, four days before Beijing, with L Catterton and WndrCo as minority partners and Infront out entirely. Toetzke and Fürste now hold operational authority and the reputational consequences together, at a valuation reported around €600 million that assumes continued expansion. China is among the fastest-growing markets in that expansion case, and it is where the brand is now carrying two governance failures in six weeks and a state broadcaster asking who regulates the category.

China signals: Hyrox stumbles, Biem tops Hermès, leather shoes slide, stars go wild

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China signals: Hyrox stumbles, Biem tops Hermès, leather shoes slide, stars go wild

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag