Converse's Sales Fell 31% as China's Young Move On From Canvas Sneakers
Nike's latest figures show the canvas classic shrinking fast in the market that once kept it everywhere: Converse revenue is down 31% for the year and 28% in the latest quarter, as China's students trade Chuck Taylors for thick-soled retro runners.
Dig out a group photo of Chinese university students from around 2018 and odds are someone in it is wearing black-and-white Converse high-tops. The shoe that was once a default — worn with school uniforms, carried into livehouses, on skateboards, on campus quads — has been quietly deleted from young Chinese shoppers' carts, and the company's books now show what the street says. Converse's global revenue fell about 31% in the fiscal year ended May 2026, to roughly 1.17 billion dollars, and dropped another 28% in the most recent quarter to 263 million dollars, Nike's filings show. The decline is three years deep: from a 2.43 billion dollar peak in fiscal 2023, revenue has contracted about 51.6%, while operating profit has nearly evaporated — 18 million dollars for the year, a 97.3% collapse from three years earlier. (@梨视频, @钱江视频)
What replaced it is a change in silhouette. Today's street staple is the thick-soled retro runner, the slim German training shoe, and outdoor-adjacent styles — a wardrobe shift documented this week in a China Newsweek report that set off the trending hashtag asking, bluntly, "Is Converse unable to sell anymore?" The comment sections skew less toward grief than toward triage: the shoe is still around, but treated as a durable object rather than a fashion signal.
Nobody illustrates that shift better than the tech blogger Chen Zhen, who posted photos of his own scuffed gray pair beside a workbench scattered with glue, pliers and shavings: "Patched up for another three years — the Converse whose sole came off is about to be resurrected." (@陈震同学) The image of a 2018-era icon being repaired rather than replaced is its own comment on the moment: the brand's remaining faithful are holding on to what they own, not buying what the company makes next.
Analysts quoted in the coverage point to the obvious suspects — little product innovation since the Chuck 70, a silhouette the market has priced in for a decade, and competition from domestic and niche brands that refresh faster. Zhejiang TV's news commentary put it as a business lesson rather than a eulogy: "What young people are abandoning isn't canvas shoes. It's treating 'classic' as a licence to stop trying." (@钱江视频)
Converse is a century-old brand whose Chinese relevance was built in the 2010s by the very cohort now walking away. The quarterly numbers say the pace of the retreat is still accelerating, not stabilizing — which makes the next few Nike filings a test of whether the company can win back a generation, or whether the canvas high-top joins the list of Western brands that peaked in China and never found a second act.
