Anta Sports is bringing its A-game to the U.S. market.
On the heels of back-to-back events during a triumphantly buzzy All-Star weekend, a new campaign featuring the Dallas Mavericks’ Kyrie Irving is positioning the 35-year-old Chinese-owned sports equipment company to become a household name in the U.S.
Irving, who serves as a creative director for the brand, stars in A Matter of Time, the new campaign for his KAI 3 shoe. The NBA star — currently sidelined by an ACL injury — teaches a young player the art of building physical balance, mental strength and discipline, at one point showing the prodigy how to do breathing exercises to relax his mind and body.
Team Epiphany produced the video, released on the brand’s and Irving’s social channels just days after they showed up to the NBA’s biggest weekend to celebrate both the shoe’s launch and Anta’s first U.S. flagship, which recently soft-opened on Rodeo Drive in the tony Beverly Hills shopping district.
An ‘All-Star’ American ‘debut’
The brand kicked off the weekend of festivities February 13 with an official ribbon-cutting for the store, featuring appearances by Irving and his fellow Mavericks teammate Klay Thompson, who was simultaneously celebrating the drop of his KT 11 shoe and a lifetime endorsement deal with the brand.
The event, also attended by Samuel Tsui, Anta’s U.S. CEO, along with the mayor of Beverly Hills, the Chamber of Commerce and throngs of fans who flooded Beverly Drive, was followed by “Antaland,” a family-friendly Sunday carnival activation on the Santa Monica Pier accessible to customers who made an in-store purchase — notably at any dollar amount and with the option to invite multiple guests.
The activation, also produced by Team Epiphany in collaboration with Irving, took place from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on February 15. Fans partook in branded rides, including the pier’s iconic Ferris wheel, and snapped photos with the former All-Star MVP, whose likeness was also used to create a Zoltar-esque animatronic fortune-telling machine. Guests and VIP attendees — including comedian Lil Rey Howery, WNBA star Tiffany Hayes and creator and actor Ace Greene — also scooped up branded merchandise such as basketballs and stuffed animals, and could purchase additional products at a designated pop-up onsite.
“The brief for us was really interesting,” Team Epiphany founder Coltrane Curtis told Campaign. “We had face time with Kyrie at the [campaign’s] photo shoot, and we were having a conversation about the brand launching the Beverly Hills location, and then wanting to have an activation during All-Star Weekend. That was the brief, right? ‘How do we drive traffic to the store? How do we have a presence at All-Star Weekend? And, more importantly, how do we break through?’ We've probably executed the last 10 All-Star weekends and really understand the landscape pretty well, and we do know that it's very difficult to break through the traditional noise.”
Curtis said the team ultimately landed on the activation based on Irving’s insight that NBA players often spend that weekend — which in the past has fallen during Valentine’s Day and the Presidents’ Day holiday weekend — away from their families. With many fans complaining this year that the weekend felt inaccessible to average would-be attendees due to high ticket prices and venues reserved exclusively for celebrity and wealthier (adult) patrons, the brand stood out by creating an experience in which all ages and classes were welcome.
“You go to All-Star Weekend, and everybody recruits from the same bucket, and they do the same thing,” Curtis said, who admitted to pulling a few strings to secure the pier for the event. “The oversaturation of very alike types of activations just creates an opportunity. As a classic marketer, you want to find a void in the noise and then literally plant seeds there.”
He continued: “The best thing was the gift-with-purchase-at-retail allowed consumers who were fans of the brand to actually have access to this event. That was the gateway in. And then we also recruited from very influential families in the LA area and leveraged Kyrie's relationships. I think we clicked almost 600 people there in a three-hour time window.” (The brand capped below the pier’s capacity of 1,400 to allow guests to move freely through the activation.)
Prior to this year’s events, Anta — which entered the U.S. market two-and-a- half years ago — participated in the weekend through retail partner Foot Locker. The brand’s first standalone event took place in September 2025 during New York Fashion Week, attracting fashion-forward tastemakers through the introduction of its lifestyle collection.
“We doubled our sales of what we did this year compared to last year,” Christian Laursen, Anta Sports’ head of marketing, North America, told Campaign of the results of the in-store event and activation.
Laursen said the brand also received an extra boost of press love after Stephen Curry — Thompson’s former Golden State Warriors teammate, famously part of the “Splash Brothers” duo for their 3-point shooting prowess — donned a pair from the brand’s lifestyle collection at the premiere of his animated film GOAT. Curry then wore a pair commemorating Thompson’s lifetime endorsement during Sunday’s All-Star game, which drew in an average of 8.8 million viewers across NBCU networks.
The star point guard, whose deal with Under Armour came to an end this past November, has fuelled speculation in recent days that he’ll join Anta’s roster, which previously included retired Boston Celtics champions Kevin Garnett and Rajon Rondo before adding Thompson and Irving, the latter signing with the brand three years ago and signalling the brand’s ambitions to disrupt the U.S. sports apparel market.
The ‘not-so-new’ kid on the sports apparel brand block
While consumers stateside have only just become aware of the brand over the past few years through a number of retail partners including Foot Locker, Sneaker Palace, Nice Kicks, Extra Butter and Livestock in Canada, Anta has quietly established itself as a sports apparel juggernaut. The brand is currently the No. 1 brand in China, with more than 12,000 stores, and the third brand globally in sales under Nike and Adidas.
The company, which is also the largest shareholder of Amer Sports, the parent company of sports apparel and gear brands including Salomon, Arc’teryx and Wilson, recently struck a deal to purchase a 29.06% stake of German-owned brand Puma, worth $1.8 billion, from the Pinault family, who own and operate the Kering luxury conglomerate. The deal, reported by Reuters, makes the company, which also owns rights to the Fila brand in China, Hong Kong, Macao and Singapore, the largest shareholder of the brand, and positions it for growth in the Chinese market.
That said, the company has set its sights on growth in the U.S., with Laursen confirming the location of its first standalone store in the U.S. was one with significant meaning.
“It's the center of the fashion world,” he said. “That's just so iconic from a retail standpoint. Us being a Chinese brand, [being here] took a lot of great pride for the Chinese-American community and even a lot of tourists. We've seen a lot of people in the first couple of weeks who are from China and just come in to see the face of a familiar Chinese brand and it just brings so much joy to them at the end of the day. So we wanted to be somewhere that was one: central to Los Angeles; two: inside a major stopping Mecca; and three: just be on the radar of both our Chinese American and obviously within our U.S. consumers as well, and a great community place for everybody to come hang out and shop and enjoy and experience the brand.”
Laursen says the brand will determine based on the performance of the store where it will land next but has plans to “grow like a weed.” In the meantime, he says the partnerships with Irving and Thompson have spurred a concentration of retail efforts in the Dallas region, and credits Irving — who he notes is heavily involved and shows a side fans rarely see in the new campaign — and Team Epiphany for its quick growth in the short time since its stateside arrival. “It's really hard to come by some great partners, but we're excited to be [partnered with] them. It's a Venn diagram of all-even Team Epiphany and Anta. And when that bull's-eye hits, you get events like the pier and the ad and New York Fashion Week and everything else. So it's a great partnership between three different entities coming together.”
Source: Campaign US
