A new benchmark report from internet performance monitoring company Catchpoint suggests that athletic footwear and apparel brands are facing a troubling gap between what their web monitoring dashboards report to them and what customers actually experience online, making a point that the experience as potentially costing the brands “hundreds of millions” due to slow, unreliable, or misleading digital experiences.

The company, which conducts real-time monitoring and captures data that lets firms better understand their customers’ digital experiences through availability, performance, reachability and reliability, said the risk in that perception-to-reality gap is magnified heading into Holiday retail selling season.

“The gap between how retailers believe their sites are performing in lab conditions and the reality customers face in the wild,” Catchpoint said.

“The 2025 Athletic Footwear and Apparel Digital Experience Benchmark analyzed the Top 20 brands by revenue, measuring performance from 120+ global monitoring agents, and ranking them using a ‘Digital Experience Score’, a true reflection of what real customers experience when they go online,” the company explained.

Catchpoint defined the Score is a single, user-centric metric from 0 to 100 that reflects how customers actually experience a brand’s digital touchpoint. It is described as a holistic view of experience quality combining device (end-user device performance), network (connectivity quality) and application factors (load times, responsiveness and error rates).

How Score is Calculated
The score is built from three dimensions:

  • Endpoint score – end-user device performance (e.g., CPU, memory constraints)
  • Network score – connectivity quality (packet loss, latency, round-trip time)
  • Application score – web/app performance (load times, CLS, responsiveness, error rates)

How to Read the Scores

  • Leading (90–100): Seamless, fast, globally consistent experiences
  • Strong (83–89): Solid performance, with room to optimize consistency or stability
  • Competitive (66–82): Acceptable but with risks, especially on mobile or in certain regions
  • Challenged (<66): Digital friction is likely hurting satisfaction, conversion, and loyalty

Athletic Brand Experience Score Rankings
The table below from the report shows all evaluated athletic brand websites ranked by their overall Digital Experience Score.

Market leaders like Nike and Adidas ranked near the bottom for customer experience in the report, while more “nimble” brands like Under Armour, Hoka and New Balance delivered industry-best digital experiences.

The SGB Analytics View: Fila ranked No. 1 overall, but the brand is no longer distributed in the U.S. (fila.com is inactive) so that score should be considered an outlier as it may reflect a more international perception of the user experience.

Catchpoint analysts said Nike’s $12.1B online revenue stream is threatened by lagging performance and reliability, with potentially over $200 million lost annually to downtime alone.

Website Performance Can Impact Brand Perception — And Sales
Catchpoint stressed their belief that digital experience is no longer optional, calling it a matter of survival.

“Poor website performance doesn’t just kill online sales, it destroys in-store revenue too,” the company said.

“A single slow-loading page can hand customers directly to competitors who’ve mastered digital-first performance,” Catchpoint suggested in its report. “The findings in this report challenge assumptions, expose blind spots, and reveal why only a handful of brands are truly delivering for customers.”

Overall, the company said that digitally influenced sales now represent 62 percent of all U.S. retail, and expected to rise to 70 percent by 2027. 

Performance Separates Winners from Losers
Most brands are underperforming, and revenue doesn’t guarantee performance. Only 20 percent of the tested brands delivered exceptional digital experiences.

Just three brands active in the U.S. land in the “Leading” or “Strong” tiers. The other 16 brands sit in the “Challenged” category, with experience scores below 66, with the industry’s two largest players said to dramatically underperform the rest:

  • Nike, despite generating nearly $50 billion annually, ranked No. 16 with a 52.6 experience score.
  • Adidas was firmly mid table at No. 11 with a 57.8 experience score and concerning 92.2 percent availability.

Catchpoint said some might ask if even the leaders score modestly, does this performance thing really matter? The company said the answer is yes because disruption doesn’t wait.

“Challenger brands like On and Hoka are already growing fast by capturing the revenue that giants leave behind,” the company said, pointing out that:

  • Nike shed $28 billion in market value, while On Running grew 40 percent year-over-year.
  • Hoka’s revenue jumped 24 percent, helping drive Deckers’ overall 16 percent sales gain to nearly $5 billion.

“When giants stumble, losses are amplified at global scale and create a strategic opening, one the disruptors are already exploiting,” the report noted.

The SGB Analytics View: From an active lifestyle market analysis perspective, there has clearly been quite a bit more at play here over the past few years than website performance. On and Hoka have been innovating faster that Nike in the running business and certainly appeared to be more nimble in their efforts. Much of the growth of those brands is now coming from the expansion of the retail store side of the business and the brands open more channels to distribution. One could argue that Nike’s fall from grace (and market cap) came from its ill-fated focus on a digital-first strategy that left many retailers (wholesale partners) high and dry when it came to servicing the business and consumers. On and Hoka are both building from a much lower base that was at first predominantly built via e-commerce and run specialty, but is now highly dependent on big box sporting goods and mall footwear specialty in the U.S. and adding new markets internationally for continued growth and expansion.

The Performance Crisis is Real
Most brands simply aren’t fast enough. Only a handful clear the 3-second industry threshold while the majority crawl well beyond customer tolerance.

Only three brands (15 percent) load in under 3 seconds, which is considered t0 be the expectation from customers.

  • The median site takes 6.6 seconds, more than double that standard
  • 70 percent of brands exceed 5 seconds
  • 85 percent of brands fail the industry standard.

Speed and Experience Appear to Move in Unison
“The data makes it clear: faster sites consistently deliver better experiences, not by coincidence, but by cause and effect,” Catchpoint noted.

  • The faster the site, the higher the experience score
  • The slower a site loads, the worse the customer experience
  • New Balance, Under Armour, Hoka, which Catchpoint referred to as the “Performance Elite” – average 2.6s load times and a 92.6 score.
  • Bottom performers average 10.8s loads and a 50.7 score – a 320 percent gap.
  • The fastest performer loads 8.2x faster than the slowest.

Why the Performance Elite Wins
Catchpoint said the top performers haven’t just optimized their websites – they’ve recognized that in today’s instant-gratification economy, slow is the new down.

“When customers can abandon a slow site and reach a competitor in seconds, speed becomes the ultimate competitive advantage,” the company wrote in its report.

A Struggle to Stay Online
The giants of the industry are struggling to stay online – and it’s costing them, Catchpoint believes.

  • The biggest names, Nike, Adidas, Puma, and Asics, operate with sub-par reliability, well below enterprise standards.
  • The gap is huge: Gymshark runs at 99.93 percent, Adidas just 92.24 percent
  • The giants are in crisis: Nike, Adidas, Puma, and Asics all fall under 93 percent availability, while Gymshark, On, and Brooks prove near-perfect uptime is possible, consistently above 99.8 percent.

The Downtime Bill for Giants
When availability slips below enterprise standards, the financial impact is staggering,” the Catchpoint report said.

“Nike and Adidas, the two biggest names in athletic retail, are losing hundreds of millions each year simply because their sites don’t stay online,” the company said, referring to a calculation based on downtime costs calculated using Gartner’s $5,600/minute industry benchmark.

Nike (92.9 percent availability)

  • ~51 hours of downtime per month
  • $17 million lost monthly revenue
  • $200+ million in lost annual revenue

Adidas (92.2 percent availability)

  • ~56 hours of downtime per month
  • $19 million in lost monthly revenue
  • $225+ million in lost annual revenue

The Performance Paradox
Still, Catchpoint did say that the perfect uptime doesn’t guarantee good experiences, with over half of high-uptime brands still failing customers.

  • Sixteen of 20 brands (80 percent) run at ≥99.5 percent availability.
  • Yet more than half still deliver weak experiences (<66).
  • Adidas, Puma, and Lululemon illustrate this paradox clearly: high uptime, weak experiences.

The Monitoring Blind Spot is Like Real Estate – It’s Location, Location, Location
In the same city, for the same website, real customers waited up to 15× longer than cloud dashboards suggested.

Cloud dashboards don’t match customer reality. Catchpoint noted that in their snapshot tests of Nike, Adidas, and Lululemon, the same websites showed radically different load times, sometimes 8–15× slower experiences, depending on where the performance was measured. Cloud agents running in controlled, data-center environments tended to showed fast results, while last-mile monitoring (simulating real users on consumer ISPs) exposed much slower, less reliable experiences.

Same-City Monitoring Blind Spots
The chart below provided by Catchpoint shows how monitoring vantage point alone can change the performance story.

Cloud monitoring shows 3–5s load times, but local ISP users in the same cities waited 15–16s, which is up to 14× slower.
Catchpoint argues that this matters because same-city comparisons remove geography. The only difference is how monitoring is done:

  • Cloud and backbone vantage points run on optimized infrastructure and premium routes.
  • Real customers connect over broadband, mobile, or satellite with variable performance.

Lululemon: The Global Expansion Blind Spot
Perfect uptime doesn’t guarantee good experiences. Over half of high-uptime brands still fail customers.

The company noted that the LULU site loaded in 3.9s from a U.S. cloud vantage vs. 19.7s for PLDT broadband users in the Philippines — a 15.8s gap. Beyond city-level tests, the gaps widen globally. U.S.-based monitoring creates a false sense of security as what looks fine or strong in the U.S is unusable abroad. Catchpoint said these don’t represent edge cases – they appear in key expansion markets.

What are Technical Metrics?
In addition to the Digital Experience Score, Catchpoint evaluated each brand’s website across eight core technical metrics. These are said to capture how a site performs from an infrastructure and browser perspective, and are commonly used in digital performance monitoring.

Metrics tested:

  • Availability (16 percent) – Uptime percentage (target ≥99.9 percent)
  • Document Complete (12 percent) – Time until all key page elements are loaded (≤3s)
  • Page Load Time (12 percent) – Time until entire page is fully loaded (≤3s)
  • Response Time (12 percent) – Time to complete a full request (≤500ms)
  • Time to First Byte (12 percent) – Time to receive first byte from server (≤200ms)
  • Largest Contentful Paint (12 percent) – Time to load main content block (≤2.5s)
  • Cumulative Layout Shift (12 percent) – Visual layout stability (<0.1)
  • DNS Lookup Time (12 percent) – Time to resolve domain to IP address (≤100ms, ideally <50ms)

Ranking methodology:

  • Availability was weighted more heavily (16 percent) because downtime directly translates into lost sales and trust.
  • The other seven metrics were weighted equally (12 percent each) to reflect the balance of speed, responsiveness, and stability that shape customer experience.

The Hidden Gems: Modest Tech, Exceptional Experience
Asics was the only brand in this category

  • Technical rank: No. 18 → Experience rank: No. 8 (+10 positions)
  • Shows how customer-focused optimization beats raw infrastructure

The Alignment Champions: Strong on Both Fronts
Only two brands successfully convert technical strength into customer experience:

  • Under Armour: Technical No. 3 → Experience No. 2 (+1 position)
  • New Balance: Technical No. 1 → Experience No. 3 (-2 positions)

Both prove that well-designed systems can excel across multiple performance dimensions simultaneously.

Report Conclusion: Digital Experience Decides Winners
Catchpoint believes that across performance, availability, technical metrics, and monitoring blind spots, the truth is that  customers actually experience online is often far worse than dashboards suggest.

  • Performance separates winners from losers: Only four brands deliver acceptable load times, while 85 percent fail the 3-second benchmark.
  • Availability is table stakes: giants like Nike and Adidas suffer hundreds of millions in downtime costs while smaller challengers stay online.
  • Technical metrics mislead: nearly half of brands look “green” on dashboards yet fail customers in practice.
    Cloud monitoring hides reality: in the same city, real users wait up to 15× longer than cloud dashboards report.
  • The lesson is clear: digital excellence doesn’t come from infrastructure metrics or perfect uptime alone. It comes from monitoring and optimizing the real customer journey, across devices, networks, and geographies.

Testing Methodology
This benchmark evaluated 20 of the world’s largest athletic footwear and apparel companies, compiled by global revenue rankings to ensure representation of the industry’s most influential brands.

Timeframe: All data was collected between August 1 and August 31, 2025, providing a consistent one-month snapshot of real-world performance across all monitored sites.

Monitored Pages: Catchpoint tested the public homepages of each company — the first touchpoint for most shoppers. This provided a standardized basis for comparison, capturing how a typical visitor experiences each brand’s digital storefront.

Testing Locations: Tests were conducted from 123 global monitoring locations across six continents:

There were 26 North American agents and 97 international agents utilized, including the UK, Germany, India, Japan, Australia, South Africa, and Brazil

Catchpoint’s Global Agent Network includes cloud, wireless, last mile ISP, and backbone agents, each offering distinct vantage points to measure performance across region

  • Cloud agents operate within major public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.), detecting performance issues inside cloud data centers.
  • Wireless agents simulate real-world mobile access (3G/4G/5G) across carriers, revealing issues unique to cellular users.
  • Last-mile ISP agents run on actual residential broadband networks, capturing the true end-user experience with each local ISP.
  • Backbone agents are placed in Tier 1 and Tier 2 ISPs, providing a core Internet perspective to spot global trends, routing anomalies, and CDN-level outages.

Catchpoint said that by using these varied agents delivers comprehensive visibility, ensuring both global averages and regional nuances in performance are accurately detected and differentiated.

Image, charts and data courtesy of Catchpoint