Episode
HOKA: Jean-Luc Diard and Nicolas Mermoud. The “Clown Shoe” That Became a $2B Bonanza
How I Built This with Guy Raz · Jan 26, 2026 · 1 h 00 min
In the late 2000s, two French mountain athletes set out to build a running shoe that captured the feeling of flying. Jean-Luc Diard and Nicolas “Nico” Mermoud had spent decades inside the innovation engine at Salomon—where product was obsession. In 2007, as Nico recovered from a brutal ultramarathon around Mont Blanc, the founders fixed on a problem that Big Footwear didn’t care about: downhill…