A New Kind of Running Brand
All these new runners present a clear opportunity for running brands, not just to sell them their singlets, shorts, and shoes, but to redefine the sport altogether. But it was small brands, not the established likes of Nike, Adidas, ASICS, and Puma, who saw that chance first.
Matt Taylor was an early mover. In the early 2010s, he noticed that major brands were mostly focused on selling entry-level shoes and how many Olympic medals their top athletes won. "There was really no connection to the consumer at all," he said. "It was all literally like a scorecard; 'Did we win or lose?' And then on the other end, it was 'How do we get someone that's never run before to run for the first time?'"
In 2014, Taylor founded Tracksmith to meet the needs of people who existed between those extremes, who he refers to as the “committed runner.” He believed these kinds of runners—who love the sport so much they skip going out on Friday to have a good long run on Saturday, who research routes to run even on vacation, and who do these things without illusions of becoming professional—not only existed, but also that they wanted apparel that was more tastefully designed than the standard fare neon. He also believed they would be willing to pay for that gear to be made from higher quality materials, even if that made it more expensive.
Taylor recognized that the culture around running needed addressing, too, and that brands could have something to do with it. Tracksmith elevates running heritage—its logo is a hare called Eliot, after a storied bar in Boston that became known as a runner's watering hole in the 1970s—and the tradition of competition. The company also put a lot of resources towards photography and video production that more thoughtfully depicted the running lifestyle than what mainstream brands produced. "There was not a single running ad that I looked at and was like, oh, that's real," he said. For Tracksmith's first shoot, the company photographed two runners out on a 15-mile run. The perfect shot came toward the end, when one of them started to push the pace and leave the other behind. "No other brand would wait 13 miles into a run to get the image," Taylor said.
But running's current moment of cool wasn't sewn in a monoculture. Brice Partouche, for example, leaned on his background in skateboarding, snowboarding, and punk rock, not a collegiate track team, to launch Satisfy in 2015. He got into running through the meditative and ceremonial aspect of the activity as ritual, not the culture of performance. Partouche saw the same void Taylor did, and through his lens recognized the creative, countercultural spirit in running, and he built Satisfy around that. Today, Satisfy is probably most known for its cotton "moth-eaten" graphic tees that come filled with holes; these are the anti-establishment middle finger aimed at Big Running's bland techwear. What’s more punk than that?
Courtesy of Dave Hashim
The Anti-Establishment of Unsanctioned Events
Brands weren't the only places where running evolved. Moore says he glimpsed a different demographic than what he was used to from competitive collegiate running just before the boom at unsanctioned events like Orchard Street Runners' Midnight Half and Bread Route Races, where participants flashed through Manhattan while much of the city ambled home from bars. With fewer rules—there is no course, only mandatory checkpoints—and sponsors, these races drew people from punk, hardcore, and artistic backgrounds who could also go flat-out. "I was like, oh shit, this is not the same vibe as cross-country practice in high school," he said.
Unsanctioned races draw a different kind of runner because they require a different sort of determination to compete in them. Without spectators, aid stations, medals, or the potential of a BQ, the reasons a runner might enter an event like The Speed Project, a 340-mile relay across the desert from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, might be more grounded in the endeavor itself than the trappings surrounding it. Going against the norm is part of the point, too, and many unsanctioned races were started as reactions against how difficult it has become to join mainstream events like a World Major Marathon.
If new brands were a reaction against the running apparel industry, unsanctioned races go against the sport's event infrastructure. And just as those once-niche companies have grown, so has the appeal of these races. They're growing—Speed Project created a new version of the race that travels across Chile's Atacama Desert in 2023, and another in France in 2024. And new ones are finding a following; in New York, a community of runners recently created Southbound 400, a three-day relay stage race from the Canadian border to the tip of Manhattan.
Courtesy of Miya Hirabayashi
All-In on Community
The explosive popularity of running clubs is familiar now, but they aren't a new thing. Orchard Street Runners has been gathering for group runs since 2011, back when Instagram included hokey borders and oversaturated filters. Before brands got in on the action, run clubs fostered a culture of dedication among amateurs.
Perhaps no new running brand has spliced together all these threads—the boom, the growth of run club communities, product quality, brand aesthetics—as adeptly as Bandit. Started in 2020, Bandit is newer on the scene than Tracksmith and Satisfy but earned cache quickly by tapping into New York City's vibrant and varied running communities. "Community is a marketing buzzword but they actually did it," said Moore. "I think when people wear Bandit they feel like they're a part of something."
The thing they're a part of: Bandit has stores in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and LA, it hosts weekly group runs, and it pops up at major marathons. Like Tracksmith and Satisfy—and District Vision and Miler and Soar and all the other new running brands—product is important, but so is brand identity. Customers want to be part of that, too. Bandit's seasonal lookbooks are high-concept, produced in places like Portugal and Iceland, and shot by photographers like Joe Greer. The product can be exclusive too; it sells out quickly, but a $125 annual membership provides early access to releases (among other perks). If running is cool, Bandit is the brand that knows it's cool.
Cool-kid character aside, Bandit is plugged into running's core in ways that other new companies aiming to capitalize on running's hype moment aren't. Through its Unsponsored Project, Bandit provides compensation to athletes who compete at an elite level but don't yet have partnership deals with other brands. Recently, the company also hosted the Grand Prix, a criterium-style race event in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Among longtime runners like Moore, who competed in college and who follow the sport closely, who are in it for more than the newly injected lifestyle, there's a wariness that all the hype around running right now sometimes stinks of inauthenticity. When a brand like Bandit gives a runner like Yaseen Abdalla an NIL deal, they breathe a little easier.
Courtesy of Bandit
Can Big Brands Catch the Wave?
Some major labels have wisened up to the power of community building and tapped into the run clubs and unsanctioned DIY events, too. ASICS took a unique course—rather than copy and paste, the Japanese corporation chose to team up. It began a partnership with Bandit in 2022 that started with a marathon training program that has since led to collab collections featuring co-branded apparel designed by Bandit and a limited edition of ASICS' Novablast 5 running shoe. The shoe was released alongside a mountain of Bandit-led creative that linked (loosely, sort of confusingly) the work of sculptor Isamu Noguchi and a space launch.
"We wanted to be intentional about it," said Kelly Fatouretchi, director of merchandising at ASICS. The company has been around for 75 years, and it tends not to chase trends or stray too far from tradition. ASICS collaborates with other brands on lifestyle shoes, but rarely on performance models. But it recognized that the way Bandit connected with its community wasn't easily replicable. "They really managed to expertly cross that bridge of having running at the forefront and focusing on performance into running as a lifestyle." Teaming up with Bandit offered access to those who run in the sport's outside lane. "Somebody who is more in on what's going on, culturally, you know, outside of just the running community," Fatouretchi said.
Has Running Reached Peak Cool?
The efforts of larger brands have certainly produced interesting moments. Like Nike's 2025 After Dark Tour, a series of women-only races taking place at night in cities around the globe, Hoka's investment in the UTMB trail race series, and On's reveal of its LightSpray tech. But with running at a moment of peak popularity and new brands emerging each week, there's a lot of sameness in the sport, too. If you've been seeing a lot of blurry photos of tattooed runners lately, you're not alone.
Cole Townsend, who covers the overlap between running and fashion in the newsletter Running Supply, says that what's happening in running is no different from what's happened over the years with clothing and music and art. Something takes off and becomes cool enough that everyone wants to have it and every brand starts to make it. Then, once everyone has it it becomes unpopular again. After it’s been unpopular for long enough, it becomes okay to like it again. Where running is in that cycle is difficult to determine, but Townsend says recent run-focused collections by H&M and Zara offer a clue. "They're just fully ripping off Soar and Nike and other brands," he said.
On the flip side, even some of the small new brands are showing up inauthentically. Townsend has tracked the rise of what he calls "predatory Instagram brands." "They're just jumping in because they see it as a cash grab," he said. "They've created a very aspirational brand and look on Instagram, and that's made them able to sell a pretty garbage product."
The friction isn't just on the industry side either. As running gets more popular, run clubs are multiplying. Their benefit is undeniable; how can you cast aspersions on people hoping to exercise and socialize at the same time? But in places like New York, run clubs have become so predominant that some non-runners and solo runners see them as a nuisance.
Courtesy of Dave Hashim
Is Running Actually Cool?
With all the hype around running, some have compared marathon weeks to fashion weeks, implying that running has achieved the same exclusivity and draw as that industry. But if you actually go to a marathon, that supposedly equal plane starts to tilt. Yes, there are pop-ups and product launches, but marathons are also intrinsically nerdy. Go to the expo and you'll find thousands lining up for tech tees and energy chews. Far fewer will hit all the activations and peacock their coolest running fits; most are still there to take on a really difficult race they've spent months training for. Remember, we're still talking about an event where people smear Vaseline in their armpits and tape up their nipples. Is that cool?
Exclusivity has always been an element of coolness. When everyone can have everything, nothing is cool; it's all just normal. Barriers, whether in the form of material goods, privileged knowledge, or learned skill, help make a thing cool because accessing those things proves effort and commitment. But running has always been about accessibility; all you need is a pair of shoes, goes the line.
Perhaps running, though more popular now, is still what it's always been—an approachable form of exercise or, for those seeking it, a mental and physical challenge to pit oneself against. And yes, a way to socialize too. Algorithms tend to make things seem more popular than they actually are. Running's new cool factor might only be apparent to those who are attuned to it. For every kitted-out "cool" runner on Instagram there are thousands putting in their daily miles in whatever comfy clothes they have. "This stuff we're seeing on social media of run clubs and really ripped dudes running slow 400s is over-representative of what's actually going on," Townsend said.
And if the "running is cool" thing is a content phenomenon, it's driven heavily by major cities. Go for a run on New York's West Side Highway or at the East River Track and chances are you'll spot some Bandit gear. But culture varies from place to place. You’re unlikely to see these kinds of fits in Minneapolis, or even Boston, where Townsend lives, a city with running in its identity. "We do not have people running around in Satisfy," he said.
Moore is more straightforward about all this. "I struggle to think if it's actually cool or if it's just [that] there happen to be more cool people doing it," he said. "It's not cool in the sense that punk rock was cool."
