A New Conversation in New Orleans
Footwear News brought together some of outdoor’s most influential voices at its inaugural Switchback Dinner in New Orleans, and the conversation kept returning to one reality: women are not an emerging demographic in the outdoor footwear market – they are already driving it. The event, centered on the evolving outdoor industry, gave leaders from brands including Altra and Chaco a formal setting to say out loud what many have known for years but rarely structured strategy around.
The dinner marked FN’s first Switchback gathering, a format designed to put the outdoor footwear sector in focused dialogue about where it is going and who is leading it there.
What surfaced across the table was less a revelation than a reckoning – female consumers and female executives are reshaping how outdoor brands design product, build community, and define the category itself, and the brands paying attention are building differently because of it.
Leadership That Looks Like the Customer
Altra and Chaco each sent leaders to the Switchback Dinner, and both brands have been navigating a similar internal question: how do you build an organization that reflects the people buying your shoes? For outdoor footwear, that question has become harder to sidestep. Women have been among the most consistent growth drivers in the outdoor market for several years, yet the executive and design ranks at many brands have historically not reflected that. The Switchback Dinner put that gap on the table directly.
Female leaders at the dinner spoke to how their presence inside these companies changes the product conversation from the start – not at the final approval stage, but at the brief. When the person asking “who is this for?” has actually run trails in a narrow-fit shoe that was designed for a male foot and recolored, the answer to that question shifts. Fit, weight distribution, and the specific demands of female anatomy in motion become non-negotiable starting points rather than afterthoughts addressed through a women’s colorway dropped six months after a men’s launch.
Chaco, known for its adjustable-strap sandals and loyal outdoor following, and Altra, which built its identity around zero-drop, foot-shaped design, both carry product philosophies that have natural alignment with female consumers – though articulating that alignment and actually centering women in the design and marketing process are two different things. The Switchback Dinner drew that line clearly.
What “Reshaping the Industry” Actually Means at Ground Level
It is easy to say women are reshaping outdoor footwear. It is harder to define where that shows up in concrete decisions. At the Switchback Dinner, the discussion moved toward specifics: how female consumers engage with outdoor brands differently, what they expect from community and brand voice, and where traditional outdoor marketing – built around rugged individualism and performance metrics – fails to connect.
Female outdoor consumers have pushed brands toward a broader definition of what outdoor activity looks like. Trail running, hiking, water sports, and casual outdoor movement are not separate categories to many women – they move across all of them, and they want footwear that acknowledges that range. Altra’s zero-drop platform and Chaco’s sandal versatility both speak to a consumer who is not looking for a single-use technical product but something that fits into a life lived partly outdoors. That consumer has been vocal, and the brands that have listened have found a loyal base.
The presence of female executives accelerates this. When brand leadership includes women who are themselves the target consumer, product testing, retail strategy, and campaign development all absorb that perspective earlier in the process. The Switchback Dinner made the case that this is not a soft cultural benefit – it is a structural advantage in a market where outdoor participation among women continues to grow and where brand loyalty is earned through products that actually fit and function for the people wearing them. FN has been tracking this shift across its Women Who Rock recognition program, which highlights female leaders driving change across the footwear industry.
New Orleans, New Format, Old Problem Finally Getting Airtime
The choice to hold the inaugural Switchback Dinner in New Orleans gave the event a setting that carries its own weight – a city with a complicated relationship to tradition and reinvention, which turned out to suit the conversation well. FN’s Switchback format is built for exactly this kind of industry dialogue: direct, sector-specific, and structured to produce something more than panel-speak. Whether the dinner format becomes a recurring fixture on the outdoor footwear calendar depends on whether the conversations it starts translate into action inside the brands represented at the table.
Altra and Chaco are not small players. Altra, which has built a dedicated following among ultrarunners and everyday trail runners since its founding, operates in a performance footwear segment where technical credibility matters enormously. Chaco, with decades behind its strap system and a consumer base that spans outdoor recreation and casual wear, holds a different kind of loyalty. That both brands showed up to a dinner centered on women’s influence in the industry signals something about where the outdoor footwear conversation is moving – or at least where these two brands are willing to be seen standing.
The outdoor industry has spent years talking about diversifying its consumer base and its leadership. The Switchback Dinner did not solve that. But putting Altra and Chaco executives in the same room in New Orleans, with women’s centrality to the outdoor market as the organizing premise, is at minimum a different kind of starting point than another trade-show panel where the same questions get asked and the same non-answers get applauded. What either brand does with that conversation when they return to their offices – that is the part nobody talked about at dinner.
