Earlier this year, while perusing a preview of HOKA's spring sneaker lineup, I was smacked by a sudden realization: These are all really good. Insanely good, even. Like, every single shoe knocks it out of the park. Casual enjoyers may not notice anything but, as a whole, this selection is really strong.

And more importantly, it's the culmination of a HOKA project a half-decade in the making.

As parent company Deckers notches record revenue thanks in great deal to ongoing HOKA domination, HOKA's lifestyle department is kicking off a five-year plan that doubles down on its casual footwear business, as revealed exclusively to Highsnobiety.

The signs of a HOKA revival were there. This season is HOKA's strongest to date, at least on the lifestyle front: It revived the much-missed Bondi 7, the greatest crossover performance shoe of the modern age, the Mafate Three2, Mafate Speed 2, Tor Summit, and the Ora Primo clog, some of its strongest archival styles. It also debuted fresh silhouettes like the Mach Remastered.

It's a meaty lineup, held together by high-spec high-vis materials and colorways that lean into retro running-shoe pop without feeling dated. It's also sincere. Just a bunch of HOKA classics, no attempt to ape trends. Even the HOKA Mary Jane feels like a HOKA that happens to be of the moment rather than one trying to be of the moment.

It's telling that as footwear trends wax and wane — Ballet flats! Boat shoes! Approach sneakers! — HOKA is sticking to shoes that already worked.

In fact, most of these silhouettes aren't even new. But this is the first time they've been honed into a unified whole. That's what really struck me in the first place: These aren't just great shoes. This is a great cohesive lineup.

I figured that HOKA must have hired a new team to fuel this freshness. A new creative lead, maybe. Turns out, I was kinda right: Chris Hui, HOKA's lifestyle footwear design director, joined the Deckers-owned sportswear label back in 2023, so he's not really new. But the fruit of his team's years-long labor is only just beginning to ripen.

If you thought HOKA shoes were omnipresent before, you haven't seen anything yet.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

In short, what's the goal of HOKA's lifestyle department?

Chris Hui: A pair of shoes that's the go-to dependable daily trainer. A super important part of our lifestyle category is that people are actually out there wearing our shoes. We inject so much of the learning and technical expertise from our performance side into our lifestyle products. Even though it's not screaming at you that these are techy performance shoes, they're built with the same integrity and research.

I feel like that's been HOKA's lifestyle slogan for a long while, but what's new — or, at least, why does it feel new?

Performance has really established the brand and drives the majority of our business, but lifestyle is absolutely viewed as a core part of the future, and a big part of our plans to move forward. The business has really doubled down and invested into [lifestyle]. We brought in people like myself, like my teammates, to really give the curation that you're finally seeing come to market.

Tighter plan, creative direction, new design leadership, sharpening our collaboration partners — it was important that we did it all in a way that was strategic because the opportunity is there. We've been quite selective about how we want to represent ourselves in this market because we have long-term plans. So far the response has been as successful as we've ever planned and it's only the beginning. We're super excited to unveil Fall 2026. We're finishing up '27 and working on '28 — I think it's really gonna surprise a lot of people.

What was the impetus for this shift?

It reached a breaking point where it was so obvious. The tastemakers and the real "front" of, whether you wanna call it fashion or streetwear, were all adopting our brand organically. Like, we'd go to Fashion Week and a triple-black Bondi 8 was part of the uniform for stylists and designers. Not so much the people who are there to be seen but the people who actually driving the industry.

It was a very clear signal to the brand that there's something here and if we don't make a plan for how we want to show up, we're leaving ourselves at the mercy of wherever the market takes us. That's when a team of industry experts was brought in to build out a new perspective. All of those leads were assembled to build this plan that's just beginning to execute in 2026. It's a five-year plan that's just beginning to hit.

No one does triple black sneakers like HOKA. In fact, all-black HOKAs were probably the first all-black sneakers I really liked, because they emphasized the sneakers' distinct shape.

I love that. We treat triple black colorways with the same amount of attention as what other brands might do with like signature shoes or like OG colorways.

That feels like a good distillation of HOKA's design ethos at large.

We place a ton of importance and belief in the the weight of good design. Every time we're planning a new season, reviewing the designs of a new line, we ask ourselves, "Are these designs taking us somewhere new? Are they distinct and memorable?" Without good product and design, brands wouldn't exist.

The second we become an "everything" brand or a jack of all trades, then we lose what made us so special in the first place. So, we have very specific points in our plan of how we begin to diversify and build those bridges to new spaces and expand the aperture of what HOKA represents as a brand.

I noticed that there's a lot of returning and archival silhouettes, not a lot of "on-trend" styles save for maybe the Mary Jane.

We always wanna break people's expectations. When we do [trends], we want them to be quintessentially HOKA. So when we built the Mary Jane, it was gonna be on a Bondi. It was that juxtaposition of something that's known to be so small and petite on our biggest silhouette — that felt to us as the only solution that we could offer the marketplace.

The way we answer other trends is gonna be the same: It has to be undeniably HOKA or we won't do it. It's too important to us to maintain our credibility and our point of view, especially as we're trying to stay focused.

Well, I have to ask: one of the defining HOKA factors are the thick soles. Will HOKA ever do a flat shoe?

This is what I'll say: HOKA has always wanted to do things that people don't expect. So, I would never say that anything is off the table for us. That's what makes the future so exciting.

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