Collab Lab Files Year-End Report on Sportswear Partnerships

December 12. Bimma Williams of Collab Lab put out his year-end report on sportswear collaborations. Business of Fashion ran an interview to mark the release. The piece is behind a paywall.

Collab Lab tracks partnership deals in the sportswear sector. The annual report is a known reference point for resale analysts and secondary-market dealers. Williams grades collaborations on release scarcity, retail execution, and secondary performance. The 2025 edition covers roughly 140 pairings, filtered from a longer list.

The BoF interview headline references good collaborations and bad ones. No detail from the body is available without subscription. The report itself is presumably available through Collab Lab's site, though the access model is unclear from the lead.

Collaborations ruled sportswear this year in the sense that every house with a performance line dropped at least one limited capsule. The format is standard now. A designer pairs with a technical brand, the product ships in six colorways, resale opens 48 hours later. Some land above retail, most don't. The question is no longer whether the collaboration happened, but whether anyone remembers it three weeks out.

Williams has been filing these reports since 2019. The grading system has tightened each year. Early editions treated any collab as noteworthy. Recent ones apply a stricter filter: did the pairing produce something that couldn't have existed otherwise, or was it two logos on the same shoe?

The paywall means we can't pull specifics. That's the beat. The report is out, the interview is gated, and the year-end collab story is being filed by someone who's watched the category long enough to know when a pairing is lazy.