London marathon greets a new cohort of fashion-forward running brands

Major sportswear brands have long blurred the line between function and fashion, but as long-distance running gains popularity, a new generation of design- and community- led brands are entering the running – and wider sportswear – space with a different playbook. 

Many are looking to this weekend’s marathon and other running events later this season to deploy it.

Why sportswear matters

Dominated by major brands, the sportswear market has seen and anticipates consistent worldwide growth. While new upstarts share some of the same drivers as the big brands – distinctiveness and performance – they differ in their focus. 

In part, they are looking at helping serious runners stand out, with the Financial Times calling it a “fashion week for the running community”. These efforts often end up tying encounters with a brand to a sense of participation and community. But they are also looking to a smaller, often more committed niche than the broad swathes of interest sought by the big players, as they wrap their logos around global events. 

Availability, then, stems from the know-how, the reality of having earned your stripes as an athlete. 

Fashion and performance chases a key consumer segment

Taken as part of a deeper athleisure trend, which is the fastest growing category in fashion, according to GWI, there’s a distinctly fruitful audience to be found here. As GWI’s Ben Butling wrote back in November, they tend to be affluent individuals “happy to gloss over a higher price tag if it means access to fashionable items that look good, have the quality to match, and make them feel a part of a social tribe.” 

Brands at the edge

The FT foregrounds a handful of brands operating in this emergent design-led running space. There are upstarts, from creative people who spend a lot of time running, such as the clothing brands Soar, Satisfy, Pruzan and the apparel and eyewear brand District Vision. And then there are bigger brands like New Balance who will hold a fashion week-style party on the Thames to coincide with the London Marathon. 

Why it works

The trend is interesting due to what one founder, Tim Soar of Soar, calls the “festivalisation” of the sport, including additional events like panel discussions and post-race after parties, complete with some brands stocking high-end finisher specific t-shirts that tie the brand and the product to the experience. 

It’s a tried and tested method in the space, and follows a model of niche-led sustainable growth typified by the runner’s darling brand, Hoka. 

Following a spike in the popularity of running over the pandemic, Hoka kept its distribution to specific shops to grow loyalty among the community of the sport and assiduously avoiding overstocking, unlike a lot of other brands offered on the mass market. This maintained the premium perception of the brand – and, of course, margins. 

Background

The rise of design-led or fashion-forward running brands chimes with a longer term trend in fashion of urbanites in activewear, which The Cut termed Gorpcore back in 2017. (The ‘Gorp’ element refers to the popular American hiking snack ‘Good Old Raisins and Peanuts’.) 

If you live in a city and have noticed a lot of urbanites wearing hardcore outdoor brands like Patagonia or Arc’teryx, it’s likely as a result of the rise of Gorp. 

More recently, Cosmopolitan observed in January that the outdoor/performance trend has melded with the Succession-era tendency of quiet luxury, to form a kind of stealthy outdoors made up of eye-wateringly expensive performance gear. 

Sourced from the FT, WARC, NY Mag, Cosmopolitan, GWI, Statista, Retail Brew. Image: Pruzan