New Balance’s Cow Print 327 Crosses the Pacific for a September 18 Japan Rel

The Pumpernickel/Sea Salt colorway that resurfaced the 327 stateside in August now gets a Japan rel date, cow print and all.

A brown and white cowhide print wrapped around a five year old running silhouette isn’t the kind of story that usually needs a passport, but the New Balance 327 “Cow Print” pack is making the trip anyway. New Balance has set September 18 as the Japan rel date for the Pumpernickel/Sea Salt colorway, style code W327APC, arrive through the brand’s Japan online store at ¥13,970.

The pair first surfaced in the United States on August 12, retailing for $105 alongside a black and white sibling in Breakfast Tea/Pumpernickel/Sea Salt (W327APA). Together the two made up New Balance’s cow print pack, a modest but pointed reminder that the 327 hasn’t gone anywhere since its early buzz years, even after ceding attention to newer models in the lineup for several seasons. WWD reported both pairs share the same components beyond their patterned uppers: leather N logos, white flared midsoles, and lugged rubber outsoles finished in black.

The revival also land during a broader animal print moment in footwear. Gear Patrol placed the $105 price between New Balance’s 574 at $99 and its 9060 at $160, framing the Cow Print pack as a modest materials upgrade rather than an attempt to chase the brand’s more hyped, higher priced retro run form.

Cow print isn’t new to shoe, or to the 327 specifically, but Pumpernickel/Sea Salt leans into the pattern rather than tucking it into a single panel. The nylon base carries the print in full, chocolate brown against white, with matching brown suede overlays doing the structural work around the toe box and heel where printed nylon alone wouldn’t hold up to wear. The oversized N logo, a defining 327 detail since the model’s debut, sits stitched in leather on the lateral side only, a treatment specific to the women’s version New Balance is shipping in both markets. Pumpernickel and Sea Salt are New Balance’s own naming shorthand for the shoe’s two dominant tones, a food inspired naming convention the brand has used across other 327 colorways well beyond this particular pack.

A New Balance sneaker with a brown suede and cow print upper, a white “N” logo, and a thick white midsole, sitting on wooden planks in golden hour sunlight with a rustic background.

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The 327 has always worked less like a single outline and more like a mash-up note left on Charlotte Lee’s desk. Lee, the Manchester based designer who joined New Balance in 2014 and now works as the brand’s design manager for EMEA energy and speed, built the 327 in 2020 by pulling directly from the brand’s own archive rather than inventing a new score from scratch, and the Cow Print pack keeps that habit intact.

The silhouette’s backstory helps explain why New Balance keeps returning to it for pattern experiment like this one. The 327 was officially unveiled in early 2020 as part of a collaborative collection with the Paris label Casablanca, with the reveal landing roughly four months ahead of the shoe’s planned general release and generating enough online attention that Lee later told Highsnobiety she hadn’t anticipated the response. That early buzz established the 327 as a silhouette worth revisiting with new colorways and patterns long after the original hype cycle passed, which is effectively what the Cow Print pack is doing five years later.

For this pack specifically, the archive digging goes three models deep, according to WWD’s rundown of the release. The nylon and suede upper construction traces to the New Balance 320, the shoe that introduced the brand’s oversized N logo on its sidewalls back in 1976 and gave the 327 both its material palette and part of its name. The lugged, trail ready outsole and wrapped heel construction borrow from the 355, a shoe built for terrain the 327 will never actually see. The midsole’s flared, wedge shaped profile comes from the SuperComp, a running model from the same decade.

It’s a formula Lee has leaned on across the 327’s run, not just for this pack. Rather than chasing a single retro reference the way plenty of archive revivals do, she treats New Balance’s back catalog as a parts bin, borrowing an outsole here and a midsole shape there until the combination reads as something that never technically existed the first time around. The Cow Print pack adds a pattern the 1970s originals never wore, but the bones underneath are pure 327 formula.

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New Balance rarely lands a general release colorway in Japan and the United States on the same day, and the Cow Print pack is no exception. Roughly five weeks separate the two markets, with Pumpernickel/Sea Salt reaching Japanese shoppers on September 18 through New Balance’s domestic online store, following the pair’s August 12 debut stateside. A Japan market release notice put the price at ¥13,970, a figure that lines up with what New Balance’s own Japan storefront currently charges for other 327 lifestyle colorways in the women’s line.

The pricing gap between the two releases, $105 in the US against ¥13,970 in Japan, reflects New Balance’s standard regional pricing rather than any change to the product itself. The shoe crossing the Pacific is the same W327APC built for the US market, down to the leather N logo and lugged outsole. Both rel list the pair as a women’s exclusive, consistent with how New Balance has positioned the Cow Print pack from the start.

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Unlike the Casablanca collide that introduced the contour, the Cow Print pack is a straightforward general rel rather than a limited drop, meaning it should move through New Balance’s standard sizing run in both markets without a raffle or draw. The brand has not published a specific size range for the September 18 Japan release, though its Japan storefront currently carries other 327 women’s colorways across a wide half size run, roughly 22 to 29 centimeters, sold directly through New Balance’s own site rather than exclusively through third party retailers.

The Breakfast Tea/Pumpernickel/Sea Salt companion colorway, sold in the US since August, does not yet have a confirmed Japan release date.