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Olivier Guyot Translated by
Nicola Mira Published
September 13, 2025
As a partner of the Paris Olympic Games, Decathlon will outfit many visitors to the great sporting event that will thrill France and the entire world in 2025. The French sports retailer will of course equip many athletes too. Thirty-three top athletes from six countries have joined Decathlon’s ‘Athletes Team’, involved in product development in the run-up to the Olympics under the aegis of former race-walking champion Yohann Diniz. For example, judo champion Teddy Riner has teamed up with Decathlon’s Domyos brand to develop a pair of training shoes, swimmer Mary-Ambre Moluh is providing feedback on swimsuit development, and climber Mickael Mawem will co-design a pair of climbing shoes for the retailer’s Simond brand.
“At Decathlon, we have very good engineers and great ideas. The role of our co-design strategy is to improve our products thanks to feedback from athletes. The latter might also expect or want products that Decathlon doesn’t necessarily have in its range. We’re working to give them products that will help them perform and feel as well as possible. We have a total of 21 co-design projects currently under way, which will be commercialised between 2025 and 2025,” said Diniz, speaking at a presentation in Paris on September 12.
By collaborating with these top athletes, as well as working more closely with manufacturers able to develop high-tech solutions (such as Arkema for running shoe soles), Decathlon wants to expand its range with products tailored to the most demanding practitioners and athletes.
"We have a very robust development process, with 2,000 people in our staff,” said Fabien Brosse, chief sports and products officer at Decathlon. “But we are opening up to a growing number of partners. The first question when there is an issue is not how we will solve it, but with whom. We cater to 85 sports with all kinds of products, while most brands cater to 7 or 8 sports, and only feature footwear and apparel. We don’t want to control everything in-house. We’re keen to produce highly regarded competition products. And we’re investing in order to win over expert practitioners by pricing top-notch products very competitively,” he added.
Decathlon is using the same co-design approach to develop products targeted to practitioners of every level, and accessible to all. Launched in 2025 and enhanced in the last two years, Decathlon's co-design platform aims to involve consumers in designing and developing products that will eventually be sold in Decathlon stores.
Opening the platform to the world
“In the past, we used to encourage our customers to come to us with their new product ideas, but we found that we were unable to establish a coherent process to handle this kind of information. Now, Decathlon’s staff identifies a need relating to a specific sport or service, and development begins from this stage. Then, once the products are available, [consumers] test them and give their feedback,” said Louis Charpigny, the marketing manager in charge of the platform’s projects. “The platform is open to everyone, each in their own specific sport. We already have more than 100,000 subscribers in France. A group involved in a specific project can consist of between 300 and 1,000 people, and on average 50% of them answers in less than half a day any question we ask by email,” added Charpigny.
There are currently more than 50 active projects on Decathlon’s platform. They are mainly related to Decathlon’s most popular categories, such as outdoor sports, cycling, skiing, running and fitness-yoga, but projects have been set up to develop new surfing products, or to co-design a new type of fishing rod.
“We want to compare ideas coming from product specialists with consumer needs. For example, one of our product managers in the outdoor sports department wanted to develop a hiking outfit. Internally, the idea did not meet with much success. But the 500 customers that contributed to it on the co-design platform approved the project. And it is one of the highest-performing products according to our rating system. Our goal is not to have a 100% success rate with these projects, but rather to avoid producing unsuitable products,” said Charpigny.
Another advantage identified by Decathlon is that this approach, which may seem convoluted, could instead enable the group to reduce the time elapsing between the start of a product’s development process and its market launch. Today, on average, Decathlon expects this period to last about 18 months, and it might be able to shorten it by six months.
Notably, Decathlon is set to extend this co-design approach worldwide at the end of 2025, in order to meet the needs of its customers throughout the planet. Product development centres for ping-pong in China, for cricket in India, and for padel in Spain, can therefore expect to receive direct local feed-back on future products. At the same time, the group is working to rationalise its extensive own-brand range, which currently includes some 70 brands and sub-brands.
Decathlon intends to involve over a million customers in its co-design process, in order to raise satisfaction levels for its products and continue to boost its worldwide popularity. In 2025, Decathlon’s sales reached €15.4 billion, of which €4.7 billion in France, where the group then operated 325 stores.