It appears that JD Sports Fashion, the owner of the City Gear, DTLR, Finish Line, JD and Shoe Palace retail brands in the U.S. market, is ready to move to the next level in retail brand consolidation here in the Colonies. In the company’s recent 2025 Annual Report, JD Sports Fashion outlined its plans for North America and laid out its segmentation strategy in more detail.

JD already breaks out the retail brands, or as the company refers to them – the fascia, into the JD First and Complementary Concepts segments. They also have Sporting Goods and Outdoor Stores segments outside the U.S.

The JD First strategy is currently being executed in the U.S. as the company started converting Finish Line stores to the JD fascia as it has done with other acquired retail brands globally. While the Finish Line website still talks of those stores as a separate subsidiary of JD Sports Fashion, the Finish Line name is no longer used in corporate presentations talking about its retail brands.

The segment’s organic sales growth amounted to 8.6 percent in 2024, including 0.5 percent comp store sales growth “reflecting the growing presence of the JD brand in line with the JD First strategy, which is offsetting the weaker performance of Finish Line.”  The company reported 336 JD stores open at the end of the period in North America compared with 235 in the prior year.  Twenty-nine Finish Line stores were converted to JD during the year and 45 exited, resulting in 257 Finish Line stores and 256 concessions in Macy’s at the end of the year.

With the acquisition of Hibbett Sports last year, The company is now planning to merge additional brands within the Complementary Concepts segment. The company reported that it is also breaking the JD First and Complementary Concepts into market channels as follows:

Mass is aligned to JD Brand First, which may seem counter-intuitive to the U.S. retail community which regards Wallmart, Costco, Target and others in that realm as Mass Retailers. JD Sports Fashion, however, sees the Mass channel defining the U.S. JD customer as “the same young customer as everywhere else in the world.” That definition is obviously a far cry from the demographics of the existing U.S. Mass Retailers consumer.

The company said its JD stores in the Mass channel operate mainly in key A and B malls.

Reach is defined as “a convenient local format expanding our reach into underserved markets and rural areas,” according to the company’s Annual Report. It primarily includes Hibbett but also includes the Finish Line corners in Macy’s which “extends our reach to an older, more female customer in North America,” according to the Report.

“Hibbett’s footprint is complementary geographically in the U.S. to our existing U.S. fascias,” the company said in the Annual Report. “It enhances our presence and achieves our objective of strengthening our existing community fascias, being Shoe Palace on the West Coast and DTLR on the East Coast” defined under the company’s “Focus” channel.

Focus is the new term used for the company’s “city specialists” with great community stores in urban areas.

The company said they are mostly street mall venues with some presence in covered malls and are said to be fully complementary on a geographical basis. The brands under this umbrella currently include Shoe Palace, DTLR and City Gear (from the Hibbett acquisition).

Going forward, JD Sports Fashion has made the decision to rationalize the U.S. portfolio and will convert most of the City Gear stores to DTLR doors, with a limited number of stores converted to the Shoe Palace fascia. The DTLR and City Gear websites currently operate as one under the DTLR/CG moniker and functions as a transitional platform to provide consumers of the respective retail brands answers to questions why the two brands are converting to one.

Active Lifestyle industry advisor and analyst Matt Powell said he was not surprised by the decision. DTLR is better known and has been performing better,” he noted. “I believe there has been collaboration since the [Hibbett] acquisition.”

Image courtesy Hibbett/JD Sports Fashion plc