361 Degrees' "Professional Paradox": It's still not a running brand

(Hao Dongyang / Written by; Zhang Guangkai / Edited by)

In 2025, 361 Degrees is a company that’s difficult to judge with a simple verdict.

Judging from its financial reports, this is hardly a bad performance. Full-year revenue reached 11.1 billion yuan, up about 11% year over year; net profit was 1.3 billion yuan, up 14%. In a consumer environment that is cooling overall, this kind of growth rate doesn’t just beat the industry—it can even be called a “steady top student.”

But if you move the numbers back by just a year for comparison, things don’t look nearly as comfortable. In 2024, the same company’s revenue growth was 19.6%, and net profit growth was 19.5%.

Growth is still there, but the momentum has clearly shifted gears. For a company that over the past five years has repeatedly emphasized “double-digit growth,” this is not merely a drop in figures—it’s a loosening of the narrative.

The issue isn’t whether 361 Degrees is growing, but rather: what exactly is its growth built on?

Certainty in scale, and the boundaries of the model

Break down that 11.1 billion yuan in revenue, and you can see a very clear—and very “traditional”—growth logic.

By the end of 2025, 361 Degrees had 5,394 stores in mainland China, with more than 76% located in third-tier cities and below. This means its main customer base is still firmly rooted in the mass consumption market.

Unlike brands such as Anta and Etong that have pushed DTC (direct-to-consumer) aggressively in recent years, 361 Degrees instead encourages distributors to expand stores, upgrade their brand image, and enter shopping mall ecosystems.

This reflects a very clear trade-off: giving up some brand control in exchange for faster scale expansion and lower capital burden.

Positioned for the mass sports market, 361 Degrees serves consumer groups that are price-sensitive and rely on offline experience. In this niche, the dealer network is a necessary infrastructure for “capillary” penetration—not a historical burden that needs to be cut off.

Within this framework, the so-called “channel upgrade” is more about stores getting larger and locations improving, rather than a fundamental change in operating logic.

In 2025, the average area of 361 Degrees brand stores increased to 165 square meters, and the share of mall channels rose—indeed improving retail efficiency. At the same time, traditional stores began to shrink, with a net reduction of 81 stores in the first half of the year.

“Super stores” are the most emblematic move in this phase.

In December 2024, 361 Degrees officially launched this new store format: “super stores.” In 2025, “super stores” entered a phase of rapid rollout. By the end of 2025, the group had disclosed 127 “super stores.”

Compared with traditional stores, the biggest feature of “super stores” is that they are larger—typically 800–1,000㎡. At the same time, they carry a fuller SKU assortment, with a more complex product structure; in terms of shopping experience for consumers, they place greater emphasis on “self-service shopping.” Brokerage research firms’ forecasts for annual efficiency per store are in the tens of millions—around the order of magnitude of nearly ten million. Both Changjiang Securities and International Securities list them as the group’s “second growth engine.”

Worth noting is that around the same time as 361 Degrees, Anta also rolled out a “big store” model, emphasizing full categories and one-stop shopping, and also expanding downward into lower-tier markets.

Even more worth digging into are the structural differences between “super stores” and the competitor “Super Anta.”

Anta’s super stores adopt a fully direct-operated model, giving the brand complete control over site selection, display, and pricing. In essence, this is the brand’s capability extending to the end terminals: the store is first brand space, and only second a sales venue. 361 Degrees’ super stores, however, are still advanced in parallel through brand direct operation and regional agency, with dealers as the main entities opening stores—still operating within a distribution logic. It is letting dealers sell more goods by using bigger stores, richer inventory, and higher rates of cross-selling.

Some analysis has pointed out that “super stores” are first and foremost a highly efficient system. The product structure includes new and standout items that drive traffic, ensuring the mid-priced products that keep sales moving, as well as some clearance of off-season goods to sell through quickly.

This system can effectively solve the issues of “inventory and sales-per-square-meter efficiency.” In essence, “super stores” are closer to a “brand store turned into a big-box marketplace.” It looks like a brand store, but it carries clear “channel-tool” attributes.

“Super stores” may look like 361 Degrees is doing “brand upgrading,” but what it truly accomplishes is upgrading a company built on distribution and value-for-money into a higher-efficiency selling machine.

More investment in the brand—but the selling logic has never changed

It is precisely on top of this channel structure that 361 Degrees began to step up brand efforts.

Basketball and running have become its two most important lines. Signing Nikola Jokic and building a signature shoe line establishes influence within basketball circles. Continuing to invest in marathon events and launching race-competition products such as Feiran then represents an attempt to enter a more professional running track.

On the surface, this is a typical upgrade path for a sports brand: using professional sports to rebuild brand storytelling.

But the problem is that the returns from brand building have not been captured directly by the brand itself. Instead, they are dispersed across a vast and fragmented dealer network.

Events, IP, and signed athletes do create content and attention. But that attention is not turned into brand assets—it is quickly funneled into the sales chain of stores and e-commerce.

For dealers, the significance of brand activities for “short-term sell-through” is far greater than their “long-term value.” That’s why a subtle mismatch emerges: 361 Degrees talks about “professionalism,” but the core of its internal operations still is “selling efficiency.”

This is also reflected in 361 Degrees’ gross margin. In 2025, its gross margin (around 41.5%) is still the lowest among China’s four major sports brands, remaining in the underlying range driven by “value-for-money.”

As product specialization narratives are increasingly reinforced, the brand’s pricing power has not followed. This isn’t short-term noise; it’s the direct consequence of a long-term mismatch between channel structure and brand premium.

This mismatch isn’t obvious in a favorable business cycle. When consumption is growing, all traffic can be absorbed. But once the environment tightens, the problems surface quickly: the brand doesn’t have thick enough narrative capability to carry a more complex reality.

When “the fastest nurse” Zhang Shuihua mentioned after the Harbin Marathon that she “hopes to receive support for compensatory rest,” public focus shifted rapidly from “inspiration” to “fairness.”

People began discussing resource allocation, professional constraints, and whether ordinary people can truly replicate such a path. This isn’t an accidental public opinion incident. It’s that running—a sport that naturally carries social issues—has been activated.

She is not a professional athlete, yet she can run top-tier results. She has a high-intensity job, yet she still insists on training. Her presence almost embodies 361 Degrees’ claim that “ordinary people can also be professional.”

For a brand truly centered on running, this should be a moment that could be expanded, explained, and even transformed into deeper resonance.

But within less than 72 hours, 361 Degrees announced a contract termination in its official livestream with a printed sheet of paper, using wording about “adjustments to the development paths of both parties.”

The significance of this move isn’t in whether it “cuts ties.” It’s in the speed and method: 361 Degrees hardly tried to understand the story, nor did it attempt to continue telling it—it simply terminated it directly.

The reason isn’t actually complicated.

In a system that relies heavily on distribution and e-commerce conversion, any uncertainty in public opinion will be quickly equated with sales risk. When traffic acquisition costs rise and competition intensifies, a company’s instinctive reaction is to compress the risk window rather than extend the narrative cycle.

So this company made an “operationally correct,” but “brand-wise failed,” choice.

Although 361 Degrees later received some sympathy votes—after all, the endorser got caught in public opinion turmoil, and terminating the contract could be seen as understandable—this defense doesn’t hold up under further scrutiny.

361 Degrees focuses mainly on the running category. The Feiran series is its flagship racing competition product, and the No. 3 track is its own marathon IP. Against this backdrop, signing a nurse who runs top results under amateur training conditions is precisely the emotional narrative the brand proactively chose.

Her value is that she is both the owner of top results and a carrier of the identity of an ordinary worker. If you sign her because she is “the fastest nurse,” you can’t then abandon her with a printed paper just because public opinion turns against her for being a “nurse.”

A more fundamental judgment: it’s still not a “running brand”

The Zhang Shuihua incident didn’t change 361 Degrees’ fundamentals. It can still sell more shoes, open more stores, and maintain a steady growth profile in its financial reports.

To a large extent, this is because the running track is truly doing well. Whether it’s domestic sports brands/operators like Etong and Taobo, or international brands like lululemon and On, they all want to go deeper into this track.

But the Zhang Shuihua incident exposed a more critical fact: 361 Degrees is not yet a truly meaningful running brand.

This is not to deny its progress on the product side. The racing capability of the Feiran series and the parameter performance of carbon-plate running shoes have already brought it into the “entry range” of professional running shoes.

The issue is that running has never been a category defined solely by products. It’s about the ability to understand “the runner’s situation,” and the ability to maintain narrative consistency in complex scenarios.

When a brand chooses to enter marathons, it isn’t only selling equipment—it is also participating in a discussion about time, the body, and social structures. And such discussions are naturally not clean, not fully controllable, and can’t completely serve sales.

A truly running brand, at minimum, simultaneously masters three kinds of capabilities: it must be able to define technology (how shoes run faster), it must be able to define people (what kind of people run), and more importantly, it must be able to explain relationships—the tension between ordinary people and extremes, between individuals and institutions, and between passion and reality.

Because once it enters this context, what the brand faces is no longer just product evaluation. It’s responding to “the act of running itself”: Who can run? Under what conditions can people run? Is running fair? Is loving the sport at a cost? These questions may not directly convert into sales, but they determine whether the brand has a foundation for long-term trust.

By contrast, 361 Degrees has only completed part of the first step—entering technical competition—but it hasn’t established stable discourse power. More importantly, in the last two layers of capability, it is still essentially blank.

The structure 361 Degrees currently has makes it hard for the company to handle these issues.

Its channel system requires fast turnover; its user structure is more focused on value-for-money; its growth model depends on stable conversion. Under these constraints, any narrative that is uncertain and needs time to ferment will be seen as risk rather than an asset.

So it can make running shoes, but it’s hard to become a “running brand.” It can enter the marathon track, but it can’t truly own the narrative of marathons.

361 Degrees is describing itself with many correct words: specialization, internationalization, youthfulness. But when a brand says it is “professional,” it isn’t only talking about product parameters. It’s also talking about its attitude toward athletes, its understanding of competitors’ situations, and the logic of trade-offs between the brand’s interests and athletes’ dignity.

In February 2026, Zhang Shuihua officially signed with Etong, the “first running brand,” and became an elite runner under the company alongside He Jie and Yang Shaohui. By then, she had already completed the identity shift from nurse to full-time athlete. Etong took over a “mature asset” at a relatively low cost—an asset that was discovered and then personally discarded by 361 Degrees itself.

Going from 11.1 billion yuan to a larger revenue scale is not difficult for 361 Degrees. With the existing channel system and pricing advantages, it can continue expanding and continue to occupy a place in the mass market.

What’s truly difficult is when it says it is “more professional”—whether that “professionalism” is reflected not only in the shoes, but also in its understanding of people and its choices. Zhang Shuihua is not an accidental incident; she is a mirror. What it reflects isn’t a public relations mistake—it’s the boundaries of a company’s capabilities.

On the running track, what ultimately determines a brand’s height is never how many pairs of shoes you sell. It’s whether you have the ability to handle the complexity of people when a real runner stands in front of you.

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