New Balance Sues Decathlon Over the Logo on Kiprun’s Running Shoes

New Balance sued Decathlon in federal court in Boston on Tuesday over the logo on its Kiprun running shoes, asking a judge to halt sales and order a recall of every pair carrying a mark the Boston company says American runners are already reading as its own N.

The case was filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts against Decathlon America LLC and Decathlon USA LLC, and was first reported by Reuters. Kiprun’s mark is an angular K, adopted in a 2025 rebrand and drawn, the brand said at the time, from the starting blocks on a track. On much of Kiprun’s marketing and on the shoes themselves it appears mirrored, and New Balance told the court that the mirrored version is “unmistakably an N.”

New Balance says it put Decathlon on written notice in January, requesting that the company change their design, and that Decathlon declined, holding that the logo is a K. New Balance then said that this was “half true at best.” Three months after that exchange, on April 6, Kiprun went on sale in the United States with three shoes, its own site and a handful of specialty running retailers including Running Warehouse and Run Moore. The suit now names eight Kiprun models sold to American customers, from the $130 Kipsummit up to the $350 Kipstorm Lab, and asks that infringing stock be recalled and destroyed.

The Evidence New Balance Is Leaning On

Much of what the company has put in front of the court came from runners. The filing points to YouTube videos, Instagram reels and Reddit threads in which people look at the Kiprun shoes and call the logo an N, and it cites a comment from someone identified as a lead footwear designer at Decathlon acknowledging that shoppers were doing it. Infringement cases are decided on whether buyers are likely to be confused rather than on whether two marks match, so that material carries more weight than its casual origins suggest.

Josh Gerben, the trademark attorney whose firm published the complaint, wrote that establishing confusion is usually slow and expensive work for a legal team, and that having runners do it unprompted leaves New Balance in a strong position at trial. Only a small share of these disputes ever reach one. Gerben put the cost of carrying a case through discovery and into a courtroom at $1 million to $5 million a side, which is what tends to push both parties toward a deal instead.

The letter itself has been worth defending for half a century. New Balance first put the N on the 320 in 1976, and several of its registrations are now incontestable, which narrows the grounds a rival can attack them on. Michael Kors and Nautica both settled with the company over the same letter, Reuters reported, and a Chinese court ordered shoemakers there to pay New Balance $1.5 million in 2017.

Kiprun Has Been on Sale in the U.S. Since April

The shoes under challenge are the ones Decathlon built its American pitch around. The $255 Kipstorm Elite, Kiprun’s carbon-plated racer, sits within $5 of New Balance’s FuelCell SuperComp Elite v4 and turns up on the same shelves, in a super shoe market where 63 percent of finishers at Chicago and New York now race in a plated shoe. Kiprun has been pushing hard on product too, with a sensor-equipped trainer due at the end of the year, and it sponsors Jimmy Gressier, the Frenchman who won the world 10,000m title in Tokyo last year and who races in the brand’s KD900X Lab. That is more visibility than Decathlon’s running line has ever had.

Decathlon is the larger company by some distance, with 1,902 stores in 82 countries, and the smaller one in the market this fight is about. New Balance turned over $9.2 billion in 2025, a 19 percent jump, and has been taking share off Nike while chasing a $10 billion year.

Neither company had responded to Reuters‘ requests for comment by Wednesday. Unless the two sides reach a deal first, Decathlon’s answer to the complaint is the next thing due in Boston.