The new growth playbook for sports and outdoors brands

Nike’s turnaround is being built on wholesale, with the channel now accounting for roughly 60% of revenue. Amer Sports closed out a breakout 2025 by pairing elevated wholesale distribution with flagship retail in key cities. And Gymshark, a brand built entirely on DTC, recently named Dick’s Sporting Goods as its first-ever U.S. wholesale partner.

Wholesale is a strategic, capital-efficient growth lever. One in five brands now report more than $100M in annual wholesale revenues, and Arc'teryx posted 38%+ growth in 2024, pushing it past $2B across all channels. For sports and outdoor brands, this is a category where technical credibility, specialty retail expertise, and deep community trust converge. 

Here are three wholesale tactics (and case studies) brands are using to drive growth.

Tap into new regions without building from scratch

International expansion used to mean standing up local logistics, hiring a regional team, and burning cash on paid media to build awareness. That math no longer works. DTC acquisition costs keep climbing, social commerce is volatile, and each market requires a distinct approach. 

Wholesale offers a more seamless path. Established retailers understand the local terrain, weather patterns, sports calendar, and consumer in a way a central brand team can’t replicate from afar. From margin pressure to smart pricing strategies, challenges facing the sports and outdoor industry shows why brands are leaning harder on retail partners to grow efficiently.

Italian luxury brand Maurizio Mykonos wanted to expand beyond its strong European base and break into the US market. Rather than stand up a US operation from the ground up, they used NuORDER to present a polished, always-on wholesale experience to American buyers—complete with reliable inventory data, curated linesheets, and simple order management. The result: buyers place orders year-round instead of just at trade shows, and Maurizio Mykonos gets a competitive edge when meeting new U.S. prospects.

Read the full Maurizio Mykonos success story to see how wholesale fuels cross-border growth.

Engaging niche communities through specialty retail

In sports and outdoor, credibility had to be earned through community. Climbers, trail runners, backcountry skiers, cyclists, anglers, hunters, golfers. Each has its own language and trusted gatekeepers. Specialty retailers are the connective tissue that links brands to those communities, and wholesale is how brands get onto those floors and into those conversations.

A recommendation from a knowledgeable shop staffer carries more weight than almost any paid campaign, and specialty retail is often where real product feedback surfaces first—long before a survey catches it. Every sell-through at a specialty shop builds community trust that compounds into bigger orders, deeper assortments, and new doors.

The historical friction was reach. A specialty buyer in Boulder, for example, couldn’t always make it to tradeshows like Outdoor Retailer or ISPO, and a brand’s sales team couldn't realistically visit every shop. Digital tools have closed that gap. Virtual showrooms and shoppable digital catalogs let specialty buyers preview seasonal assortments anytime, from anywhere.

Outdoor leaders, from Black Diamond to Canada Goose, are using these digital platforms to give specialty buyers around the world an immersive way to explore assortments, content, and pricing. The payoff: deeper engagement with community-rooted retailers, more informed buys, and relationships that scale without requiring every conversation to happen in person.

Building credibility through strong retail partnerships

Being stocked next to the right brands in the right stores is a brand-building act, not just a distribution decision — and sports and outdoor brands are getting more deliberate about it. Selective distribution protects price integrity, reinforces technical positioning, and unlocks opportunities: co-marketing campaigns, limited drops, in-store activations, and priority merchandising placement. 

That mindset also reflects a broader industry shift from sell-in to sell-through. The strongest brands today are taking a collaborative approach, moving from transaction to transformation to help retail partners buy with confidence through richer content, shared data, and thoughtful assortment guidance. 

High-performance outdoor brand Arc’teryx recently committed to becoming the easiest brand for retailers and distributors to work with. Working closely with NuORDER and their dedicated account team, Arc’teryx streamlined order workflows, expanded dealer visibility across more role types, and observed the buying process live to find friction points most brands miss. The result: a 31% increase in wholesale revenue, bigger orders placed with confidence, and the kind of retailer loyalty that compounds into co-marketing and exclusive partnerships.

What sports & outdoor brands need in a B2B platform

Each of these growth plays depends on the same underlying capability: to collaborate with retail partners in real time, at scale, with clean data. For sports and outdoor brands specifically, that means:

• Branded B2B sites and Virtual Showrooms that let specialty buyers anywhere—from a shop in the Dolomites to a specialty running store in Oregon—preview assortments on their schedule.

• Account-specific pricing, curated assortments, and Whiteboard tools to tailor the experience for every partner, from a flagship department store to an independent climbing shop.

• Real-time inventory and in-season replenishment to match the industry's shift toward shorter lead times and smaller, more frequent buys

• Integrated data that turns wholesale from a back channel into a strategic engine for reorders, sell-through, and smarter product decisions

The sports and outdoor brands winning in 2026 are the ones treating every retail partner like a growth partner. Ready to see what that looks like for your brand? Book a demo with NuORDER to explore how wholesale can help you tap into new regions, engage niche communities, and build partnerships that compound in value for your business.