New Balance CEO Joe Preston on Why It’s Important to Control Your Own Destiny

Joe Preston, president and chief executive officer of New Balance Athletics Inc., is all about controlling the company’s own destiny.

In a conversation with Michael Atmore, editor in chief of WWD and chief brand officer of Fairchild Media, at WWD’s Apparel and Retail CEO Summit last week, the executive recalled a mantra the company adopted in 2019.

“When we made some changes within their organization in 2019 … it was all about trying to keep pace with the consumer and focusing on the things that we could control,” Preston said. “And clearly, that helped us during COVID, as everybody was dealing with a lot of things personally and professionally. But this mantra is something that we have carried forward. You know, I can’t control the price of gas, but I can control how we’re executing at retail or with our wholesale partners. So, we fundamentally focus on that, and no matter what is thrown our way, we’re going to be able to operate as a team and work diligently with agility to address it.”

Part of guiding its own path means being aware of the overall landscape, the CEO said. “We are highly cognizant of how our retail partners are doing,” Preston explained. “We keep track of them, and obviously we keep track of what’s going on from a competitive standpoint. But the opportunity is, if you are ahead of it, if you are on top of it with the consumer, then you can create product and experiences that keeps you competitive. It’s a market share game to try and grow responsibly.”

Staying a privately held company is another key part of New Balance controlling its own destiny, Preston noted. The CEO cited the fact that the company opened its own factories in Massachusetts and Maine in the late 1970s, both of which remain operational today.

“We’re the only athletic footwear company to have manufacturing here in the U.S. as well as in the U.K.,” he said. “This means we are embedding ourselves into these communities, hiring people that are working at your factories, and then our teams start working with nonprofits in the area. This allows the company to become part of the solution, or part of trying to make that community better. If we were a public company, who knows if we would have these facilities?”

This investment in domestic manufacturing continued in 2025. In its most recent earnings report released in February, New Balance noted that it celebrated the opening of its expanded Central Maine Made factory in Skowhegan last fall. At the same time, the company also began piloting production at its new advanced manufacturing facility in Londonderry, N.H. What’s more, New Balance also opened a new state-of-the-art distribution center in Salt Lake City last year.

Back at its Boston-area headquarters, Preston boasted about the brand’s new retail innovation center.

“The whole street that we operate on has three innovation centers. There’s the retail innovation center, a manufacturing innovation center about an eighth of a mile from our headquarters — and then inside this new track that we built in 2022, there’s a product innovation center. And so those three elements, we think, will set the teams up to deliver upon our ambitions for the next decade plus.”

And these ambitions have led to lucrative earnings results. Even though the company is privately held, New Balance still gives a glimpse into its performance once a year at the start of a new financial period.

In fiscal 2025, New Balance reported that it achieved $9.2 billion in annual global sales, up 19 percent from 2024, marking its fifth consecutive year of double-digit growth and market share gains worldwide.

New Balance also reported that it saw “record-setting results” in nearly every region, with its North American and European regions seeing “exceptional growth” — achieving over 20 percent growth and over 30 percent growth year-over-year, respectively.

These results are a good sign for the future of the brand despite a consumer environment that’s less than ideal.

“The consumer has been under pressure,” the CEO said. “We all know that because we’re all consumers. We’re constantly hearing about rising costs, whether it’s interest rates or gas prices. So, I think that cumulative effect has been building. There’s no question.”

But, with that said, Preston maintains that the athletic category is “hanging in there,” despite all of these pressure points.

“As we enter into holiday, I think it’s going to be competitive,” the CEO predicted. “Time and time again, though, the consumer has come out for the big moments. I speak to a lot of retailers around the world. Traffic patterns this year have been challenging, and at some points it seems like the consumer is just going home and hiding. But they have been coming out for the big moments, whether it be back-to-school or Easter earlier this year.”

Looking ahead to next year, Preston is even more hopeful. “I feel optimistic about 2027, although we have no idea what’s going to happen,” he said. “That’s one thing that may continue is the unpredictability of our world. But if we can get some stability, I do believe that by spring, we could be in a much different place. We could be in a much stronger environment.”

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