Kailas FUGA takes a permanent address in the center of Chamonix, and opens it during the week the valley collects the entire trail world.
- The first European FUGA Store sits in downtown Chamonix, opened to coincide with the EX PRO G launch.
- A full week of programming around the opening: on-trail testing of the shoe, coaching sessions, meet-ups with the team’s athletes.
- The shop displays several of the brand’s technologies, Grip Lab among them, and positions itself as a gathering point for anyone running in the area.
Right now the center of Chamonix is a fair going up and coming down: marquees, booths open for ten days, brands renting a window for the length of the races. Kailas FUGA has chosen to open a store that will still be there once the village is dismantled.
The Chamonix FUGA Store is the brand’s first European retail location, and it opened alongside the launch of the FUGA EX PRO G, the racing shoe with a gaiter built into the upper. Around the opening Kailas FUGA built a week of programming: field testing of the EX PRO G, coaching sessions, meet-ups with the team’s athletes.
Why Chamonix
Chamonix in August is where the world’s trail running meets and concentrates. The UTMB, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, has ended up shaping everyone’s calendar, and these days the valley gathers athletes, brands and fans inside the same thousand feet. As we write, the finals are underway, and for one week that street is the center of the discipline.
The rest of the year the same street keeps working. Chamonix lives on alpinism, hiking and skiing, with a flow that doesn’t depend on a race bib: someone who arrives in October for two days of dry trails finds the same shops open as someone who arrives in August to run a hundred kilometers (about 60 miles). Which is why a permanent space in that valley makes sense twelve months a year, and why it does something other than a temporary hub that lives for the length of a race and then moves on.
Inside the Store
The shop is built as an immersion in the brand rather than a shelf: alongside the gear for sale, it displays some of its product technologies, Grip Lab among them. But the store also carries the FUGA Basecamp designation, and that term describes the stated function best — a meeting point for people running in the area, at any level.
The practical advantage sits six hundred feet from the shop door. In Chamonix the trails start in town: a shoe tried on in the store can end up on a real climb within the hour, with gradient and rock in place of ten feet of carpet. The EX PRO G test runs organized during the week matter mostly for this, and it’s the kind of thing only a physical address at the bottom of the valley makes possible.
Sixty Pros and 115 Club Members
The opening reads better through the headcount. The Kailas FUGA Team fields sixty professional athletes from more than nineteen countries, and nearly half are European: more than thirty are racing this week. The FUGA Mountain Club, founded in China in 2017 and today the largest sponsored trail club in the world, has passed 115 members in Europe, fifty of them on course right now. In all, more than eighty people wearing the same brand, spread across five different races.
The number that counts is the 115. Eighty race bibs are the snapshot of a single week; a club with 115 European members is a structure that existed before the store and that will keep moving across the Alps once the racing ends. The retail location arrives as the physical address of something already in the air: Kailas FUGA consolidating in Europe.
Baggio Zhong, founder of Kailas and head of product development, describes several years of close work with partners in Europe, aimed at reading the market. The line is telling, because the opening is the arrival point of a road that started far from any storefront. In Italy that work has also run through the women’s Talent Team the brand supports.
Anyone passing through Chamonix in the fall, with the valley quiet again and the trails finally clear, will find that door open all the same. That’s the difference between showing up for a race and putting down roots in a place.
