Keen — Staying True to Your Own Path
WORDS → Francesca Robasto
DATE → 2026-09-02
In Chamonix, during UTMB week, Keen tells the story of its entry into trail running.
In Chamonix, during UTMB week, trail running becomes the center of the outdoor world for a few days. The valley fills with athletes, brands, retailers, and enthusiasts, and every corner becomes a privileged vantage point on how mountain running is changing. It’s in this context that we met Jeroen Meijer, Marketing Director EMEA at Keen, and Rachel Treinen, Director of Product Merchandising EMEA, to talk about the brand’s present and especially its future in trail running. At first glance, Keen’s entry into such a technical and competitive category might seem like a turning point. In reality, for the Portland-based American brand, it’s a rather natural evolution. Keen was born over twenty years ago as a reality deeply tied to the outdoors and, over the course of its history, has progressively expanded its field of action: from sandals to hiking, then fast hiking, and now trail running. “We’ve been on the trails for twenty years,” Jeroen explains. The new category doesn’t represent a change of direction, then, but the next step in a journey built on the ground.
The challenge is entering the world of trail without losing what has always defined Keen. In a market where performance is often associated with the pursuit of maximum lightness and speed, the brand chooses to start from a different idea of performance. Comfort, protection, and durability become the three fundamental elements around which to develop the product. Trail running remains a highly technical discipline, and the shoe must be able to protect the foot and guarantee reliability even over long distances. But Keen doesn’t seem interested in simply building another product aimed at the elite. The goal is to address a broader runner, someone who runs for the pleasure of being outdoors and is looking for a shoe capable of accompanying them on the trails without turning every outing into a race against the clock.
This approach has also influenced the development process. In the early phases of entering trail running, Keen chose to work primarily with everyday runners, people who ran out of passion and to be in nature, instead of immediately relying on professional athletes. As the range evolved, athlete involvement became progressively more important. Prototypes are now also tested by elite runners, capable of accumulating an enormous amount of miles in just a few days and therefore quickly providing valuable data and feedback. Their role, however, is not to define a product exclusively designed for competition. Athletes serve instead to put ideas to the test, identify details to improve, and contribute to a more precise development process. A form of collaboration that, according to Keen, will allow increasingly technical products to emerge in the coming years, without straying from the idea of accessibility that characterizes the brand.
It’s a philosophy we also find in the activities organized during UTMB. The “Mind the Gap” activation represents an attempt to insert itself into the most important week of the trail calendar without necessarily replicating the more exclusive formats that characterize Chamonix during these days. The limitations of the location inevitably make some events more contained, but the model Keen is developing in other contexts aims at open events, social runs, and initiatives designed to involve even those approaching the world of trail for the first time. The idea of community thus becomes an integral part of the strategy. Not just speaking to runners already present in the category, but creating opportunities to bring new people into the world of outdoor running.
Looking ahead, Keen also seems interested in a territory that increasingly reflects the way people actually run: the space between road and trail. The sharp distinction between road and trail appears less and less representative of daily habits. Many runners step right out their front door, cover a few miles on asphalt, and then reach the trailhead. It’s this “door-to-trail” space, more hybrid and multidimensional, that represents one of the areas Keen wants to explore in the future, without abandoning its focus on trail. During UTMB, the team’s work doesn’t just consist of presenting products.
Chamonix becomes a vast open-air laboratory: observing what runners are wearing, how the market is moving, what technologies are being introduced, and how user needs are changing. Keen’s global innovation team is also present, with the goal of gathering information directly from the field and understanding how to remain relevant in the category. In this journey, sustainability remains another central element. For lifestyle footwear, Keen has already developed approaches based on the ability to disassemble the product. In technical footwear, and particularly in trail running, the issue is more complex: a shoe must maintain structure and integrity to guarantee protection and safety. That’s why the first step is durability. A shoe built to last longer gets replaced less frequently and, consequently, reduces resource consumption. The second concerns what happens when the shoe truly reaches the end of its life. Keen is introducing ECO_END, a natural catalyst embedded in the midsole compound that promotes, under certain end-of-life conditions, the action of microorganisms on the shoe’s materials. The goal is to significantly accelerate material degradation at end of life, while reducing the formation and persistence of microplastics. The technology is being introduced initially on select running models, with the intention of progressively extending it to the running and outdoor lines.
Lasting longer, being more easily managed at end of life, and, above all, educating the consumer to take care of their gear: for Keen, sustainability doesn’t seem to be a single technology, but a process that accompanies the entire product life cycle. The same approach, ultimately, describes the way the brand wants to grow in trail running. No race for immediate market conquest, but a journey built from the ground up. “Doing the right thing before scaling it” is the philosophy that best sums up this strategy. Respect for people, respect for the environment, and a strong connection to the outdoors continue to be the reference points. In Chamonix, then, Keen isn’t simply presenting a new category. It’s trying to understand how to enter it while staying true to itself. In a landscape increasingly oriented toward extreme specialization, its answer comes through an idea that’s perhaps less spectacular, but very concrete: building reliable products, making them last, listening to those who use them, and growing one step at a time.
