13 | Sporty Brands

and how differently they tell their stories.

May 31, 2024

The scroll-stopping moment is the intention of every piece of creative storytelling a brand puts out into the social universe. We — on the other end — fall victim to it far more than we admit, and the minutes turn into hours as the wormhole gets bigger with our preferences stored and monetized, and our self-worth sinks and our collective intellig …

That got out of hand quickly. Apologies. We were talking about scroll-stopping moments. And I simply wanted to write that I experienced one while researching this newsletter, which initially was going in quite a different direction — much like that intro.

It was a sponsored post, a clip of an interesting-looking not-quite runner sprinting at top speed through Paris and it was for a brand I’d never heard of called Pompeii. Their IG description read “We champion walking” and the disconnect between that line and the actual footage gave me pause.

I swiveled to the open browser tab with On Running’s recent shareholder deck open. The company just announced record Q1 sales of €518 million - buoyed by double digit percentage growth across all major GEOs. Slightly buried in the chest-thumping deck was another nugget: their direct to consumer sales had boomed, and I was in the process of trying to understand what role storytelling played in that.

A quick scroll down and On’s tag line revealed itself: “Igniting the human spirit through movement.” 

Now, there isn’t that big a gap between “We champion walking” and that line in meaning. They both celebrate movement, something we are less inclined to do these days. But here were two brands with radically different ways to tell the story of how movement in their gear is better than movement in other brands’ gear.

This isn’t a side-by-side comparison. One is a global company on the stock exchange with aspirations of becoming the world’s premium sportswear brand. The other was started by college buddies who googled “how do you make shoes”, has five shops in Spain with a web site that describes the founders as “a group of people who think alike, not an entity named ‘company’. “ One built its brand on innovation. The other on lifestyle. Both brands champion sport. Just at a different pace.

👇🏼 some nice examples

On Running 🏃‍♀️ was started by three Swiss men around a running shoe innovation championed by one of them in particular, 3-time Ironman champion Olivier Bernhard. The Cliffs Notes: founded in 2010, their innovative CloudTec soles made a splash in 2012; In 2019, fellow Swiss Roger Federer came on board as an investor and led them into tennis shoes and apparel. They raised $764m in their 2021 IPO. They’ve since added training, outdoor, and the first attempts at lifestyle (collabs with Spanish fashion brand Loewe “LOW-EH-VAY”) to their verticals. Running is their core, but take a stroll around office parks in Mountain View and Cupertino and you’ll see the tech set have adopted them as an everyday shoe as well. Their storytelling strategy doesn’t touch on that part, though. It’s almost entirely focused on high performance sport. They started the On Athletic Club, bringing together top track athletes in Boulder, CO. Top-tier coaches help them to world records and personal bests, but the runner feedback also provides the brand with a way to push the innovation in their shoe development. They get hundreds of thousands of YouTube views and good engagement with a clever execution featuring those athletes called “Table Talk” where they’re interviewed while getting massaged. Those athletes also make their way to the brand’s On Track Nights events, which create a festival atmosphere around a variety of competitive races with the contrarian strapline “Running is not a Spectator Sport”. The storytelling also runs deep. I wiped away tears watching Right to Race, about South Sudanese refugee Dominic Lokinyomo Lobalu’s fight to compete for Switzerland, where he found a coach, home, and a eye-opening running career after declaring asylum. These are athletes from non-mainstream sports featured in videos garnering millions of views. Oh, the power of the niche. The steady-flow content strategy seems to be doing the trick. According to On, site traffic is up 51% from 2021 to 2023. And direct to consumer sales increased almost 40% in the first quarter. And yet they want MORE MORE MORE. Why settle for an addressable market of €25 billion, when you can go for a an addressable market of more than €70 billion? (I say this all the time) So now comes the tricky part for them. Finding the storytelling strategy that shifts from performance to lifestyle, angled at the taste-makers (not in Mountain View, btw) that have elevated Nike, and Hoka, and New Balance, into Culture. From performance, to lifestyle. Maybe it starts with slowing down.

Pompeii Brand 🌋 has no aspirations (yet), of reaching a an addressable market of €70billion. Their annual revenue is only around €5m, totally fine for a lifestyle brand out of Spain started by friends who wanted to make shoes and initially sold them out of a van. It was around this time they seized on the idea of championing walking. Their shoe products lean into this. You wouldn’t actually wear them while doing sports, even if the storytelling around them suggests otherwise. Shoe models like Bell are introduced with photography of sand courts and the tagline, inspired by tennis. A smooth trailer for their Elan Pippa shoe (an “homage to early days gymnastics”) features a skilled model executing a backflip in a t-shirt tucked into slacks. The brand’s look and feel plucks at nostalgia with warm hues and throwback settings and images that recall lazy Mediterranean summer days. And that consistency enables them to stretch into different communities: They’ve created football jersey collections with historic Italian football brand Kappa and gear for Spanish eSports team Dux. But they yank each of these partners firmly into their world — one that emphasizes leisure and aspires to build a community around the simplicity of walking (and walking stylishly). Their Walking Club membership provides customers access to exclusive merchandise and an issue of their Walking Club “fanzine”, a celebration of up-and-comers in the Spanish creative scene with an accompanying IG handle that serves as a Pompeii moodboard, filled old sports photography, designs, and heroes that represent the brand. It feels like walking gives them a rare opportunity of building community that combines physical and digital: Organizing their fans on walking tours of the neighborhoods around their stores, or connecting and celebrating the creatives they feature. A high performance sports brand’s eternal challenge is making their story accessible to anyone who’s thought of lacing them up for a short jog around the neighborhood. But a brand that starts off championing walking? That sounds like a lifestyle with a potentially big community.

💦 Flotsam & Jetsam 🏝️
Random links from this week’s haul

🎧 Being on the other end of Debby Millman’s interviewing style must feel like dropping into an Eames chair after a long day. This one with the humble New York editor par excellence Adam Moss is worthwhile.

🛳️ Honestly have no idea how I came across this Wired profile of Greek shipping heiress Marina Hadjipeteras. But once I started reading about the quiet power she’s amassed in a male-dominated industry, I couldn’t stop.

Hey, what is this?
BRAND NEW STORY highlights smart strategies and good stories told by brands and humans. It’s penned by me, Andreas Tzortzis (or, simply, Dre) and draws on insights from my career at Red Bull, Apple, and in my own brand consultancy Hella. It appears every week or so because I write it, schedule it and hit send. I’m always on the look out for your ideas, so write me, and go ahead and forward it to folks who might find it interesting. Sign up and see the archive here.

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