Designing IDA’s 2026 Spring Drop: Helia Fractal, Built to Break Through
Come behind the scenes with our design team to learn what inspired our Spring 2026 design.
After the 2025 launch of the IDA Helia family–designed in close collaboration with professional women athletes and inspired by the Phoenix wing–we knew we didn’t want that story to end. Helia wasn’t just a new speed cleat for IDA; it was a further proof point of what happens when performance, fit, and design are built with women, not adapted for them. For SS26, our design team set out to evolve that foundation, carrying forward the same athlete-first intention while pushing the visual language into its next chapter.
The Phoenix has always symbolized rebirth, renewal, and the relentless rise through challenge. That spirit still grounds this 2026 Spring season, but we wanted to push the narrative forward visually-layering in new meaning, movement, and depth.
We chose the triangle as a central graphic because of what it represents across cultures: balance, stability, and harmony. It reflects the equilibrium we strive for in sport and in life. The triangle’s relationship to prisms also opened up ideas of refraction, perspective, and transformation–mirroring the Phoenix’s ability to shift, adapt, and emerge stronger. There’s even a quieter nod to holistic strength through the triangle’s connection to triads like mind, body, and spirit.
But for SS26, balance couldn’t feel static.
Even stability can be dynamic.
To bring that idea to life, we layered in IDA’s signature waves–introducing motion, dispersion, and a sense of ascension. The result is a graphic language that holds the grounded strength of the triangle while expressing continual movement and transformation. It expands, makes space, and breaks through pressure, pushing boundaries and coming into its own.
This season also marks a first for IDA: our first true pink colorway. We’ve always pushed back on the industry’s tired “shrink it and pink it” approach, and we always will when it comes to product fundamentals. However for SS26, we chose to embrace the color on our own terms, using pink as a statement instead of a shortcut. This wasn’t about trend or tokenism; it was about listening. Our community asked for it, and we took the time to design it with the same rigor, performance intention, and aesthetic depth as every other IDA colorway. You could call it “rethink it and pink it”–a color choice grounded in confidence, purpose, and what players actually want.
That’s SS26: a design to support your speed, dynamism, and confidence, so you can radiate and be your biggest champion.