How Marathon Sports brought the trail indoors for its new concept store

This is a follow-up to our recent story about the upsurge in sales of trail-running shoes at REI and Brooks.

In 2025, Ben Cooke, president of Marathon Sports, the running specialty retailer with 32 stores in New England, traveled to Chamonix, France, the nexus of legendary 105-plus-mile trail race Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc (UTMB).

Because the event hosts numerous brand activations and shoe launches, Cooke thought he should check it out—although he wasn’t exactly champing at the bit.

“I begrudgingly went,” Cooke told Retail Brew.

Then he didn’t want to leave.

“I honestly was just absolutely blown away by the theater of it,” Cooke said.

Cooke knew that while the US has highly regarded ultramarathons, none boast the international draw and brand participation of Chamonix. So there he stood, like a Frostian trail runner whose path diverges.

“You could say, ‘Well, I hope someone does that,’” Cooke said. “Or you could be the type of person that says, ‘I’m going to do that’—and that is exactly what I set out to do.”

Marathon Sports hit the trail, acquiring eight trail races ranging from 5K to about 75 miles, assembling a women’s trail-running team with the Altra brand, and launching Dirt Camp, a three-day trail-running excursion in the Berkshires’ woods.

Meanwhile, Cooke searched for the place where someday his envisioned race could start and finish. He sought what he called the “Chamonix of New England,” a mountainous recreation mecca replete with hotels and restaurants. He landed on a gateway to the White Mountains: North Conway, New Hampshire.

In August, that’s where Marathon Sports opened its first store dedicated to trail running.

Rock on: Enter the North Conway store and you’re greeted by two mannequin runners in midstride atop a platform of rocks, as if they were about to bolt out the door for the maze of trails less than a mile away.

Holly Wiese, founder of 3 Dots Design—a Boulder, Colorado-based retail design firm with a focus on running, cycling, and outdoor stores—had already designed numerous stores for Cooke, but this assignment was different.

“The main objective of his brief was, ‘Holly, I want trail runners to open the front door and feel like they have found their place, they found their people,’” Wiese told Retail Brew.

At the same time, for road runners who are trail-curious, she wanted the store to entice rather than intimidate.

“If you’ve never done it, hopefully this is your gateway to the adventure,” she said.

Originally an airport hangar, the 4,000-square-foot space boasts exposed roofbeams and skylights, a rough-hewn shell that lends itself to the store’s outdoor vibe more than a typical drop-ceilinged store in a mall.

The shoe wall is fashioned to look like it’s made of rock—namely granite, New Hampshire’s state rock—and a rocky trail installed on the floor is not just a design flourish but also a way for shoppers to test how shoes will handle on their runs. The trail seems to continue into a wall-sized photo of the nearby White Mountains, with the store’s trail aligning perfectly with one in the image.

On another wall, a regional map highlights local trails, with a QR code to navigate to them…and on them.

The rundown: The retailer partnered with brands popular with trail runners for the store. Hoka, whose co-founders are trail runners who designed the brand’s original shoes for that purpose, pitched in for the trail map and an in-store cafe.

Glass-topped tables in the cafe double as display cases featuring battered Hoka shoe prototypes and tell the story of the brand’s connection to Chamonix.

Also in the cafe, the hydration brand Skratch has furnished a keg for runners to fill up their bottles with samples before hitting the trail.

A partnership with Brooks yielded cairns, which display the brand’s trail-running shoes and feature stories of the ultrarunners it sponsors.

Cooke said the object of the brand partnerships was not to have branded stores within his store or overt advertising messages, but rather to have displays that highlight the sport and its athletes.

“This is not going to turn into a commercial for this, that, and the other thing,” Cooke said, adding that he had to turn some prospective partners away. “The brands were super enthusiastic—I honestly had to beat a few off with a stick.”

With its cafe encouraging shoppers to linger, informational displays, and fixtures that evoke the outdoors, the space embodies store-building strategies including experiential design and storytelling.

For Cooke, the goal is not just to serve customers; it’s to create them.

“I need to build trail runners,” Cooke said. “I need to actually build the people into the sport. That’s my job.”