First, some background on TYR Sport’s entrance into the functional fitness arena.

When CEO Matt DiLorenzo started CrossFit in 2020, it sparked a new chapter for TYR Sport. One that would quickly reshape the brand’s presence in the fitness space. By Spring 2021, DiLorenzo had brought on Corey Berger, a two-time CrossFit Games team athlete and Level 1 coach, to lead the charge as Director of Business Development.

Since then, Berger has guided TYR’s entrance into the CrossFit world signing an impressive roster of Games athletes, partnering with major competitions like Wodapalooza and the Rogue Invitational, and showing up at grassroots events and local fundraisers alike.

“We have very specific values we believe in as a company,” Berger said in an interview with Morning Chalk Up early in his roll with TYR, “Being technically proficient and making sure our products work for everyone that puts them on. And number two, we’re focused on people who are driven to elevate themselves in whatever sport they compete in.”

Now, onto my convo with Corey…

Watch the full interview with Corey here or read on below!

Tatum: What's your read on the fitness landscape heading into 2026?

Corey: I think [the fitness landscape] is going to click back towards ambition. Not over-indulging in the wellness, but people are going to start to chase more. That's going to raise the level of fitness and the amount of intensity and effort that people put into it. We're going to trend back towards a little bit more of that hustle culture—go after it and get it. Go ahead and get your cold plunge, but focus on the work that's going to get you to your goal.

Tatum: So, the death of wellness—you heard it here first from TYR Sport's Corey Berger.

Corey: I mean, listen, you still have to do some of that. If you’re pushing really hard, chasing some ambitious goal for yourself—and when I say for yourself, I mean for yourself, not whatever anybody else thinks or whatever is happening online—you do still have to be cognizant of taking care of yourself so you can continue to stair-step towards what you’re trying to achieve.

We work with a lot of professional athletes who are pushing hard every day to insane levels, beyond what most people can comprehend. The rest of us scale it back from that, but relative to our own capacity, we’re pushing at a similar level. We’re feeling that same sore, that same tired. To an extent, the wellness stuff is going to help you continue to do that—but you’re doing it with intention. You’re not doing it just because it’s the cool thing or the popular thing. You’re not over-indulging in the recovery and the relaxing, because that’s ultimately going to keep you from making that next step towards your goal.

It’s about being more methodical—using recovery and wellness as a tool on your road to that goal. You’ll still see the running, you’ll still see the hybrid thing, but we’re going to start to see more heavy weights, more technical movements. People are going to look for that next level. That’s where I think we’ll see a lot of interesting things happen this year.

Tatum: Do you think we'll see a shift from trend-hopping to people committing to the sport they actually love?

Corey: I think it'll be a bit of both. For me personally, I like to dabble in a little bit of anything. If a buddy calls and wants to go do an ultramarathon, I'm in. Or I'll go hit some heavy power cleans with these guys—that's fun. But yeah, people are going to get more specific with their training. I don't think it'll kill the hybrid movement. What's going to happen is people are just going to look for the next level.

At a certain point, as human beings, we're innately ambitious. It's just how we've developed everything—we're in Austin seeing self-driving cars, right? It's a natural part of life to want to evolve and progress. We've seen people sit in a comfort zone recently, which was nice, a bit of a reset. Now I think we're going to see people say, "Okay, I've got this foundation, this baseline—what can I achieve? What's that next level?" They're going to get there and want to know: "I've proven to myself I can do this. What's next?" Maybe it's an ultramarathon. Maybe it's trying to compete at the CrossFit Games. But people are going to be more open about their goals and more intentional and ambitious about achieving them.

Tatum: And that all comes down to process and training—“the work is the way,” yeah?

Corey: The work is the way. Exactly. That’s why it connects really well to what we’re planning from a marketing perspective. We want to be that support for people. We want to highlight that story and say: it is important to be ambitious. It is important to stake your claim. Put it out there. Don’t be so worried—tell people what you’re going to achieve, and then go achieve it.

For us as a brand, our goal is to be there to support you in whatever you’re trying to achieve. All the product we develop, the athletes we work with—it’s about showing people what’s possible. It’s almost like Alfred to Bruce Wayne: we’ll make the cool tech for you to go do your thing.

From our marketing perspective, the question is: how can we help people connect to that story? If we only ever show these incredible athletes at the Olympics or at the Games, there’s a disconnect. It’s cool, it’s aspirational, but the majority of people aren’t chasing that exact goal. Their goal is different.

The campaign we’re working on right now is really just about this: the work is the way. Everybody’s doing some version of work towards whatever version of their goal they have. If we position our marketing to say, “We’ve got the tools for you, we get what you’re after, we’re there with you—we’re you in a sense”—that’s going to create a much stronger connection.

For us as a brand, that’s the focus. Not following the hype or the noise. Just being direct: we get it, you want to achieve something—we got you.

Thank you to TYR Sport for giving Branding the Barbell readers an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the CXT-3 campaign. If you’d like to check out the creative studio behind the campaign, check out Alex Garcia’s House of Distribution.

In the meantime, follow Corey’s work at TYR @corey.berger_ and @tyrsport on Instagram.

Welcome to Branding the Barbell. This week, we’re deep-diving on the economy that’s growing in popularity but not necessarily in regulations. And that, my friends, is the peptide economy. I’m also sharing some of the things I’ve had my eye on this space from Xenom to Nike ACG’s ice race.

It’s a weird, wild world out here in fitness and wellness—but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else (most of the time.)

Let’s dive in.

The next frontier.

A category that most consumers couldn’t define two years ago is now being positioned as the next frontier of optimization as we see peptides enter the conversation beyond reddit and into longevity clinics and your favorite celebrity’s wellness stack.

Peptide searches surged 550% this year at The Vitamin Shoppe, while over 80% of longevity clinics now offer MD-supervised peptide protocols. Life Time opened longevity clinics in its gyms, and women’s health platforms like Wisp are partnering with peptide labs to develop targeted therapies.

And as the elite are popping glp’s and the bros are bone-smashing, we’ve entered an interesting convergence of worlds. Traditional self-optimization culture that we’ve come to know as eating well and prioritizing your mental health is now overlapping with the opposing force that is conventional beauty standards rising to increasingly impossible heights. But instead of the deprivation culture we saw reign in the early aughts, it’s optimization.

Quick-fix culture, existenialized.

Many consumers are growing exhausted by over-optimization and are leaning into counter-trends. For some, that’s ditching the wearable and leaning on intuition as their guide to wellness. For others, their adopting habits that are almost so contrary to wellness itself it seems unwell (see the million think pieces written about Thom Garland’s poignant observation in “The Rise of the Wellness Anarchist.”)

While the hyper-optimization culture of peptides at first glance may feel contrary to the exhaustion, it’s actually its final form. While we grow weary of tracking all the data and implementing all the habits based on said data into our already overextended lives, peptides serve as an escape hatch. We can ditch the tedious work and dive into a world where our bodies crave less of what we don’t want and manufacture more of what we do want.

Do your own research, unless, of course, you’re the FDA.

Now to truly understand the culture the peptide economy exists within, you have to start with the pandemic. In this era, while younger generations began prioritizing a larger chunk of their disposable income and hours toward wellness, we witnessed increasing skepticism toward pharmaceutical companies, regulatory bodies, and traditional healthcare systems. In its place, a culture of “doing your own research” and “taking back your health into your own hands” rocketed to the mainstream.

In the US, while the FDA has attempted to restrict certain peptide compounds, political oversight has pushed back and it looks like regulatory oversight may actually decrease—at least in the near term—rather than increase. This creates an unusual market environment as early movers can establish category positions before rules crystallize. We’ve seen a surge of brands begin implementing peptides from low-dose consumer products to high-margin clinical services.

The traditional system of trust in this sector has shifted.

While the democratization of wellness information rose, celebrity and influencer adoption of peptides has created powerful social proof. Joe Rogan discusses peptide use for tendonitis recovery while reality tv stars chat while getting NAD+ treatments, unintentionally positioning peptides in the market as the tool of high-performers and status holders.

Where we’ve seen evidence is limited, personal testimony fills the vacuum. This creates an interesting dynamic where anecdotal evidence often becomes more culturally powerful than the absence of traditional clinical evidence.

Now this is an important dynamic for brands to understand, as this new system of trust suggests that building trust infrastructure may be just as valuable as building evidence bases, at least in the near term.

There are three potential trajectories that I suspect we’ll see the peptide economy follow:

(Not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

1. Legitimization through verticalization. Large wellness brands and healthcare systems are integrating peptide protocols into comprehensive longevity offerings, like Life Time's MIORA clinics, that test whether peptides can anchor premium healthspan services. If this model works, peptides become standard components of high-end wellness, normalized through institutional adoption.

2. CPG normalization. Brands are already incorporating low-dose peptides into skincare and wellness products and companies like The Ordinary and Typology are already using peptides in personal care, following the collagen peptide trajectory. Ubiquity at doses that may have minimal effect, but creating massive category awareness and consumer comfort.

3. Regulatory or market correction. There’s still a slew of medical experts that aren’t yet fully endorsing all peptide protocols. Depending on the potential side affects downstream, research uncovering limited efficacy, or honestly increased regulatory restrictions, the future market may face an adjustment. The question for brands is becoming - how to build for growth while being dynamic enough to make corrections as needed.

Ultimately, what the peptide boom tells us about the modern wellness consumer is that they value autonomy. Whether you do business in this sector or not, understanding this consumer sentiment will be critical as brands approach marketing wellness in 2026 and beyond. The democratization of wellness is hitting its stride, and the brands that will in the new system of trust will priotize transparency and hand their consumers the tools to do take their wellness into their own hands.

Where do you think we’ll see things move?

In my algo:

• Vintage activewear is absolutely BUZZING rn (putting a ✅ next to my December trend prediction there.)

  
  

• CrossFit made a post marketing to Hyrox’ees for the Open (the comments say CrossFitters still have beef with this because if they’re not beefing they’ll lose their gains—little known fact.)
  

• XENOM is here and it’s $500 a ticket
  

• Art Basel but for Wellness is coming to Miami, and my studio branded it 🤪. Come hang with me here.

But this year, as fitness and wellness is steadily eating up space in culture, the campaigns that these brands chose to run reveal what they believe about their customers, their category, and the culture at large. The campaigns that cut through did so by rejecting the predictable optimism that has defined “resolution-season” marketing for decades.

And after analyzing what I think are some of the most notable campaigns of the month I’ve synthesized what they reveal to us about not only the industry and consumer psychology, but where fitness culture is heading.

Strap in.

January 1 actually isn’t January 1

One of the more significant strategic shifts this January was about campaigns timing. And this is something I think we’ll see bleed into many industries — the irrelevance of time. My favorite brand strategist Jasmine Bina wrote that we are now marketing in The Eternal Now. As trend cycles move at the speed of light and our collective cultural consciousness forgets a moment as quickly as it happens, days like January 1 can lose some significance in the world of advertising. And as fitness actively seeks to meet consumers where they are, multiple brands hit the new year with new frames on resolution timing.

Ladder zeroed in on January 9th, the second Friday of the month colloquially known as "Quitter's Day," named for the idea that this is when the majority of folks abandon their resolutions. Their Instagram spot showed fitness equipment being repurposed with the tagline: "This Quitter's Day, we're turning abandoned fitness equipment into… actual fitness equipment." What they’re accomplishing with this campaign is positioning their brand alongside the very data-backed human inevitability of failure and reframe it from being a crisis of character to be avoided but an opportunity for further connection. By acknowledging that quitting happens and hey, we’re all human here, Ladder positions itself in users lives as an ally rather than a judge. A great recipe for a high LTV, if you ask me.

Decathlon took a less approachable angle. Working with agency Rethink, the retailer made their best-selling KIPRUN 500 WR running shoes intentionally unreturnable throughout January. Customers who purchase must acknowledge at checkout that they’re waiving return rights as a symbolic commitment. Now this has heavy echoes of the classic Equinox strategy of “no signups on Jan 1,” but hey, it’s interesting to see this applied in retail.

“We’re using friction as a strategic tool for motivation,” explained Xavier Blais, partner and executive creative director at Rethink. “It transforms the brand from a vendor into an accountability partner.”

The campaign sweetens the commitment with 1,000 loyalty points for customers who keep their purchase for 30 days. With that data that 92% of resolutions fail in hand, Decathlon bet that upping the stakes could change behavior.

Premier Protein actually had my favorite application of this theme with their campaign. Working with Ogilvy and comedian Michelle Buteau, Premier formally declared that New Year’s doesn’t start on January 1st, it starts on January 5th, when the holiday haze lifts and routines actually resume. This is a legacy brand coming to us with a simple, relatable idea, and that’s why I think it works.

These campaigns are all timed to moments of potential failure — that’s the magic. The fitness and wellness industry is widely leaning into what behavioral science has known for years: shame doesn’t create lasting change, and meeting people at their point of struggle rather than their point of aspiration can build deeper brand relationships.

The Authenticity Crisis Has Reached Fitness

Something broke in 2025. The proliferation of AI-generated imagery, deepfakes, and synthetic content created a cultural hunger for anything provably real. Fitness, with its sweat and physical undeniability, became an unlikely answer.

Equinox understood this most with their “Question Everything But Yourself” campaign. Here they deliberately juxtaposed “AI slop” like the pope in a puffer jacket or pole-dancing Justin Trudeau against stark, sweat-drenched portraits of real athletes. As much as I feel that many of the brand’s campaigns are just Equinox trying to “out-Equinox” itself, this one hit for me. It’s grabby and controversial like Equinox loves to be, while sending the message that when everything digital can be fabricated, the body becomes the last honest medium. Here we’re seeing the brand position itself beyond the overdone and exhausting “place for self-improvement” into a sanctuary for reality. Physical effort becomes a form of protest against digital fabrication.

The strategic choice to launch this as CMO Bindu Shah's first major campaign after joining from Tory Burch signals that Equinox sees its competition less as other gyms and more as the attention economy itself. Brands, take notes.

Almond Breeze brought us a more approachable application of the anti-AI sentiment through their “The Pitch” campaign featuring none other than the Jonas Brothers (millennial women, hold your applause.) The short film directly parodied AI-generated advertising we’re becoming increasingly exhausted by taking Nick, Joe, and Kevin through increasingly unhinged concept pitches from "brand partnership agents" who use AI to create campaigns. Eventually, the brothers settle on a simple, direct message: the almond milk is "Really Good." That's it.

The reason I love this campaign is because it shows us that restraint can outperform hype and absurdity when trust and brand affinity are on the line — which brings me to my next category…

The Anti-Trend is The New Trend

The last era of fitness and wellness could be reduced to the title: “hype-driven wellness optimism.” Running gear positioned as streetwear, hybrid athlete influencers making fitness “cool” again, viral Strava fit checks, brand races, brand activations, brand everything. As the saturation of trend and optimisation has reached critical mass, we’re seeing wellness overwhelm seep in everywhere. Consumers are tired and the once-optimistic culture around fitness and wellness has become meme-ified.

Enter the authority over novelty chapter.

Momentous launched their partnership with none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger with the campaign “Trend Proof.” This campaign promotes The Arnold Stack: protein powder, creatine, vitamin D3 — three foundational supplements with decades of research. Schwarzenegger stated it plainly: "I've seen every fitness trend come and go. Trends don't build greatness. What actually works has never changed: committing to the basics and doing them well and consistently."

When consumer trust is fragile and the market is saturated with innovation claims, "we've done this for decades" becomes its own competitive advantage. Well done, Momentous.

Timeline, the Swiss longevity company behind Mitopure, launched its first U.S. national campaign with a deliberate linguistic flip. The cinematic spot, directed by Ja'Lisa Arnold of Love Song, follows a woman navigating the "uncanny dissonance of midlife" before discovering cellular health science. The key strategic choice: Timeline explicitly rejected "anti-aging" language in favor of "pro-longevity." As the longevity industry has historically positioned itself as both at war with aging and sensationalist through fringe, hyped, “quick fix” expensive tools — the CMO Federico Luna stated “…it's about giving people the real tools to live better for longer."

BPN ran multiple January micro-campaigns including “The Year to Commit,” “Only the Work,” and “Be the 12%,” with a particular focus on process, unsexy hard work, and strength training. Their approach, to me, demonstrated how a challenger brand can maintain presence through consistent smaller activations rather than a single tent-pole campaign.

This brand in particular is one to watch as they’ve been a heavy target for meme pages. When a brand does such a good job at popularizing a trend — in this case, hybrid fitness — it’s adopts the identity of the masses that jump on the trend that can anchor it as “over.” This is a unique challenge that more brands are facing in the era of social media and lightning fast trend cycles. We’ve seen it happen to Bandit Running and Satisfy as well. And if you want a prime example of how to pull your brand out of the memes and set the new standard, I think you should be watching BPN this year.

Wellness Is Actually About Feeling, Not Function

One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed this January is seeing brands lean heavily into the feeling of participating in wellness more than the result of it. We could attribute this to the rise of optimization-fatigue, but I think even that fatigue stems from our lack of anchor to time. How can we be motivated to optimize ourselves when we can’t even imagine the future? The answer, turns out, is the feeling of the task itself. To quote Jasmine Bina yet again,

“Lifestyle and aspirational branding doesn’t land when people can’t see into tomorrow and have lost their desire to plan for who they may become. Heritage branding doesn’t land when our history is slipping through our fingers and begins to feel alien.”

And here we sit.

Crunch Fitness built their entire January campaign around this insight with their campaign “Feel More.” They brought in Hype Williams, the director behind iconic music videos for Beyoncé, Missy Elliott, and Busta Rhymes, to shoot the campaign set to Montell Jordan's "This Is How We Do It." Big-box gyms can feel isolating, and we’re seeing the big players come out with campaigns that lean into the social and feeling aspect of fitness beyond the actual “results” of working out itself, which I find particularly fascinating. The campaign also showcases Crunch's new 3.0 gym concept, featuring upgraded design and “Relax & Recover” services — something I predicted would happen in this video.

Free A.F., the U.K. nonalcoholic cocktail brand, flipped the traditional script of “Dry January” and isolating abstinence with messages like "Get drunk on reckless ideas" and "Get drunk on sunrise” on guerrilla fly posters across London. The goal here is to reframe sobriety by associating it with expressiveness and cultural participation, anchoring sobriety as in fact, fully experiencing the present moment. We all actually want to party, after all, as Thom Garland says in his piece for Edition Partners on “Wellness Anarchy.” I honestly love the idea of reclaiming the word “drunk” as a NA brand.

Remember Zumba? This might be the brand that grew by marketing the feeling of fitness in the 2000’s while other brands were posting before and after photos. This January, Zumba built their global campaign around the simple premise: it’s actually a ton of fun to move to great music. This spot shows people dropping everything when "Gasolina" by Daddy Yankee plays, rushing to attend class.

Wellness Is, In Fact, Absurd

And finally, the campaigns that generated organic sharing and conversation led with entertainment and absurdity. As fitness and wellness brands grab the investor dollars, we’re seeing more and more highly produced and art directed campaigns. And as the distinction between "content" and "advertising" has collapsed, brands recognize that they are now competing for attention against everything else in the feed.

Perfect Bar created a Broadway-style musical number starring Harvey Guillén (of What We Do in the Shadows) singing an anthem for shorter shoppers who can't reach the brand's products on high refrigerated shelves. The campaign is unapologetically absurd as Guillén performs musical-theater-ready choreography among towering grocery store shelves. I’m obsessed with the idea of turning a genuine retail placement challenge into entertainment.

David Protein leaned into absurdity through provocation with their "Devour" campaign starring Julia Fox. The campaign features Fox in a confessional booth delivering sexual euphemisms about giving in to temptation. The tagline on OOH billboards: "Men disappoint. David satisfies." This campaign generated more debate than perhaps any other fitness-adjacent campaign this month, which I would argue, was the goal. David’s earlier campaigns were so centered in tech-bro minimalism and macro optimization that the pivot to the female gaze makes sense. Some critics call it an "identity crisis," I call it, “getting eyeballs” — which, it got. Personally, I love Julia Fox and I think this campaign is so fun and camp. Whether it wins the female target demo or not, we shall see.

What January 2026 Tells Us About the State of Fitness

We are officially exiting the era of wellness optimism. The industry is consolidating, saturating, and consumers are smarter. There’s something innately absurd about optimizing our bodies while the world burns, yet we long for a future that looks different than our present moment. As brands and consumers sit at this intersection, the conversation has to become either ultra-human, about this present moment, or an absurd escape hatch from reality.

What I tell the brands I work with at my studio is that dichotomy and tension creates brands that resonate in an increasingly saturated marketplace. We as humans carry conflicting personality traits and we resonate with brands that do the same. One-note brand strategy, messaging, and campaigns no longer work as we try to navigate the world while holding two things in one hand: optimization and presence.

You must be interesting.

You must hold tension.

And, most importantly, you must call your senators.

Happy January fit friends,

Tatum Brandt

It’s been… a minute.

Somewhere between the endless Zoom calls, client projects, and the occasional spiral about my own competence (hi, Dunning–Kruger effect), my publishing rhythm here flatlined.

While I’ve been in my Zoom-call stupor, I’ve had some genuinely great conversations, mostly with folks orbiting the fitness and wellness industry. In these conversations I’ve realized it feels like a miss to talk about branding so much without acknowledging the role of the personal brand.

So many of you building businesses are likely well aware of this as you might have tried yourself to create “founder-led content” or develop a personal “brand” to accomplish your next career goal - whether that be launching a startup or climbing the corporate ranks.

It’s really cringe, isn’t it?

It’s also a ton of fun.

And you tend to sit somewhere between those two emotional states at any given point.

I often think about this in the context of the creative process model. The process of creating anything starts with that familiar excitement of the blank page. Quickly, however, the more you work, research, learn, execute - you enter the dip. The work looks messy and unfinished, and it’s hard to imagine that it’ll turn into anything of value.

You see a very similar pattern in the Dunning-Kruger effect. The more you know, the more you execute, the more work you realize you have to do in order to execute at the level you think you should. This is the position in which so many of us who are deeply obsessed with our work find ourselves.

Let’s now take a look at the SRA curve or “Stimulus-Recovery-Adaptation model” often referenced in exercise science (exercise science friends, suspend your opinions on the validity of the model below for a minute while I make my point here. 😂)

The SRA curve is often referenced to demonstrate the role of training stimulus, recovery, and that adaptation we equate to “getting in shape.”

You can’t bypass a phase to jump to the end result. When you train effectively, you enter the dip into fatigue. You have to prioritize recovery to experience adaptation, and then you repeat the process.

I firmly believe that sport and art share the same skeleton: discipline, process, repetition, and work that feels invisible until it doesn’t. While you’re in the messy dip of the curve, you’re deep in the work - research, creating. The once blank page in front of you that used to represent possibility and excitement is now filled with your drafts and attempts at work that you know isn’t up to the standard that you can visualize.

But you have to keep creating.

One of my favorite reads on this platform is written by brand strategist, Jasmine Bina. In a recent essay on personal brands she writes,

“…your life will have its winter seasons when you seem to amble alone through hibernating landscapes where nothing grows. Then you will have spring seasons when the world is alive, ideas blossom, and you interact with everyone you see.

Both seasons matter. Every winter and spring season of life has its purpose. The key is to not get stuck in one or the other. Keep cycling between them.”

We so intuitively know the process for growth in our fitness. You can look at your program for next 12 weeks / 12 months and know there will be a point where you hit a plateau if you don’t integrate deloads. You know you’ll feel fatigued at first, but with more reps and rest you’ll adapt and it’ll get easier.

Yet in the fields of our work and creation we don’t hold the same space. There will be times to retreat and refill, and times to keep pushing. There will also be times when the performance we put out into the world doesn’t measure up to what we would like to be doing.

That dip is where I’ve found myself for the past six months. If you’ve been here, welcome. It’s easy to stop pushing once you’ve hit it, isn’t it? Especially if you’re putting in the reps in a public forum as so many of us are.

But that’s what the reps are for.

The best in the world at their crafts have grown comfortable with the uncomfortable cycle of creation. Not every day is game day. Even the best don’t play at peak performance every time. They practice. They shoot, they miss, they adjust, they repeat.

That’s why there’s endless footage of Michael Jordan at the free-throw line.

The tantalizing promise about showing up at the free throw line day in and day out is that you may reach that unquantifiable magic that is “game day.”

That moment where human instinct takes over and magic happens - whether that’s the art that seems to flow out of you like water or an athletic performance you didn’t think was possible (the magic that many refer to as “the flow state.”)

That’s the true connective tissue between art and sport.

I think that’s why, for centuries, societies have gathered around both.

If you’ve found yourself in the dip, join me in continuing to show up at the free-throw line.

Be like Mike, if you will.

Here’s to those who keep showing up to put in the reps,

Tatum Brandt

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Closing note:

My favorite conversations are most often with other creatives who are obsessed with sport. One of those conversations was with the photographer and creative-in-sport, Carl Nard. I was telling him about the feeling of being deep inside the “dip” (see again those oversimplified graphs I kicked off this article with) He referenced the concept of reps in public and using these articles as my free-throw practice.

Some of it might hit. Some of it might just be a decent warm-up.

But the point is, I’ll keep showing up to the free-throw line.

Thanks, Carl.

Check out Carl’s incredible work here and also at his role as creative lead and head of creative and community at Freaks of Nature.

Hey fit friends,
This month’s roundup is jam-packed — a little PR mess, a big week of athlete content, and the sale of a fitness empire. Let’s dive in.

OH and PS - you can expect these roundups monthly moving forward in addition to my weekly drops over on the ‘gram - provided I’m not out of cell service for two weeks climbing a mountain. Annnnd now let’s dive in.

🧪 Campaigns I’m loving

Puresport’s Creatine Campaign
What started as a total disaster… might’ve been marketing genius in disguise? Puresport launched a PR box to hype their new creatine line — and got a little too clever with it. Instead of a standard product send, they filled the box with loose powder, forcing recipients to dig through the mess to find the sachet. The idea was to show how much easier their single-serve packets are. The reality, however, was that creatine exploded everywhere in the mail, leaving creators opening what looked like a biohazard.

But then they fully owned it. The brand made a follow-up post admitted it was a fail, made fun of themselves, and somehow turned it into one of the most entertaining product reveals I’ve seen in a while. Honest, self-aware, and weirdly charming — it’s enough to make me wonder if this entire thing was a stunt.

See it here →

BPN’s Athlete Week + Lucy Davis Campaign
Honestly, I can’t pick just one move from BPN lately — they’ve been on fire. Last week, they hosted an Athlete Week that brought all 18 of their athletes together for workouts, team bonding, and a whole lot of content. But what stood out? It didn’t feel like a polished marketing stunt — it felt like real investment in their people. Some brands know how to keep the soul of their mission intact while still delivering great marketing, and BPN nails it.

They’ve also been running a mini-campaign spotlighting Lucy Davis as she preps for a HYROX world record attempt in DC. It’s athlete storytelling done right — tapping into their hybrid training ethos and amplifying someone outside of founder Nick Bare. Total fan-to-athlete connection vibes, and a great move to deepen community beyond the core.

See more here →

Ladder’s “Severance” Style Campaign
The Ladder team does it again with a campaign centered around the tagline: Turn your brain off. What they did here was took real user reviews and pulled keywords around turning your brain off, and then built an ad script entirely from customer data. The finished video was truly solid — but the BTS content ended up getting even more views.

See it here →

Bandit Running x Renegade LA
Bandit’s teaser ad for their new LA store launch? Chef’s kiss. Their content has traditionally been a bit more artful and serious, so seeing a bit of humor and whismy incorporated is just FUN. Are we having fun with creative again? Bandit and Ladder are telling us, yeah. Yeah we are.

See it here →

Cadence Cola
I’ll be so real I’m just obsessed with the creative behind this one. The branding is retro. The positioning is fun. And the product is… cola? On the heels of Poppi being acquired by Pepsi, it feels timely. An electrolyte soda feels like the kind of functional weird beverage I can get into.

See it here →

🗞 In the news

• CrossFit is officially for sale. The drama continues.

• F45 launched “FIT”, a new parent brand focused on holistic wellness, not just workouts.

• Poppi was acquired. Not fitness, but a wellness branding juggernaut worth watching.

• Life Time announced a wellness “super app.” Apple Health, but make it luxury gym-core.

• HYROX x Centr (Chris Hemsworth) teamed up for a high-performance turf drop.

• Garmin added a paid AI subscription. Yep, even your watch wants your money now. (But we knew that.)

• Adidas hosted a CrossFit athlete summit. A big signal they’re taking functional fitness seriously.

WHEW what a month — if you spot a campaign worth featuring or want to nerd out on fitness branding, reply and let’s chat.

See ya next month,
Tatum
Founder, Brandt Creative Co. The brand studio for the fitness industry.

Intro

Welcome back, friends and fans of fitness branding and marketing. Shortly after this publication launched, I ran off to climb a mountain in Tanzania and let these essays rot in my drafts. In a thank you for your patience or, better yet, an apology for leaving your inbox high and dry, I’m opening the newsletter back up with a meatier exploration of rebranding in the electric and often fraught world of sport. Call this an ode to March Madness, or an elaborate response to the question I get frequently asked at my branding studio day job, “what kind of ROI can I expect to see from this rebrand?”

Let’s dig in.

Section one: life imitates art sport

As a chronically online graphic designer who moonlights as a sports fan (with a decent record too: I can now pin the badge of honor of being both the commissioner and WINNER of my all-women fantasy football league: Betches and Balls), my eyes are glued to the screen anytime I see a team tackle a rebrand. A rebrand in the world of sport is always electrifying - quite simply because people care. Deeply. A team is often a core piece of an individual’s identity - and the reaction to change is often so extreme because fans see the change to their team’s identity as a change to their own.

I personally believe that any great brand closely mirrors that of a sports team. Consumers are fans: intensely loyal beyond a single product, deeply invested in and critical of changes made, and, ultimately, ride or die.

Because of this, I see obvious parallels in what makes the success and failure of rebrands from sports directly to business. The extreme emotion of sports can illuminate branding principles so brightly and so obviously that we wonder how we missed them in the first place. So - let’s analyze them, shall we?

Section two: defining success, and more importantly, defining failure

One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to a rebrand, IMHO, lies in what makes it successful. When I work with founders on a rebrand effort, nine times out of ten the initial question asked is “what’s the ROI we’re going to see from this project.” Often the trap we find ourselves in is to echo the overall consumer sentiment after a brand rollout about how the logo looks after and calling it a day. But when a team is investing millions in a rebrand effort (typical spend for a team rebrand ranges from $3M for slight aesthetic updates to $15M+ for complete renaming,) we suddenly realize that “loving the logo” doesn’t quite justify the spend.

To make the juice worth the squeeze, a rebrand's success or failure can be evaluated based on several key metrics that fall into two buckets: quantitative (measurable) and qualitative (subjective).

If your eyes are glazing over, stick with me—because now we get to the juicy part. Let’s break down some real-world winners and losers in the rebrand game.

Enter the success story that is NBA’s Charlotte Hornets. In 2014, they ditched the Bobcats name (which, let’s be honest, never quite landed) and reclaimed their original identity. And they were rewarded with a 77% spike in merch sales and attendance numbers that shot up six spots in the NBA rankings - fans practically threw their money at the team. I also dole out bonus points for rolling out the brand with an experiential marketing campaign that went directly to their fans —they sent their mascot, Hugo the Hornet, out into the community like a tiny, buzzy evangelist for the rebrand. Smart, effective, and anchoring back to the community.

Now if you want a case study in how not to rebrand a team, look no further than Cardiff City FC’s 2012 identity crisis. In a bid to attract international markets, ownership swapped their beloved blue kit for red. The local fans were not consulted, not happy, and not buying into the corporate logic. Even though the team reached the Premier League, the soul of the club had been shaken—and eventually, they had to backtrack. This backtrack ended up costing the team more money in damage control. The whole ordeal proved that tradition isn’t something you can just edit away for the sake of market expansion.

These two examples of wildly different reactions to a major change in brand should serve as both encouragement that change can work and caution that it needs to be approached delicately. A simple rebrand decision can cost millions.

So, how does a team avoid the Cardiff City fiasco and ensure their rebrand lands with fans? Let’s dig into the pre-brand work that works.

Section three: beyond the numbers and into sentiment

My personal thesis, if you will, is that the hack to seeing an actual quantitative ROI from a rebrand is to focus in the beginning not on the numbers, but on fan sentiment. It feels right to take the Cardiff City approach and say, hey, we want to expand into international markets, the right chess move is to recolor the team to a luckier, more marketable color in Asia. But if they had come at the rebrand from a fan-sentiment-centered approach, the solution might have avoided the expensive fallout the team experienced.

Let’s pull in a rebrand example that I think really illustrates this point - The Washington Commanders. In July 2020 the Washington Football Team retired its previous name, the "Redskins," which had been rightfully criticized for its offensive connotations towards Native Americans. After a period as the "Washington Football Team," the franchise announced its new identity as the "Washington Commanders" on February 2, 2022.

Now, I love this example because not all rebrands are as fraught as ones that rebrand for cultural sensitivity. Navigating the minefield of public opinion in the mental pressure cooker that was the pandemic is truly an athletic endeavor. What I think the Commanders did beautifully was all the work leading up to and in the rollout of the rebrand with their fan base. The way the team attacked this challenge was by launching a fan engagement campaign where supporters could submit ideas, provide feedback, and weigh in on potential names. Again, we’re focused on keeping things fan-centered here. They ran surveys, held focus groups, and monitored socials to gauge which name resonated most with their community. The key themes they uncovered in this process were military history, D.C. heritage, and strength.

The next smart play they made was not to rip the Band-Aid off all at once. They kept running with “Washington Football Team” for two seasons, letting fans get comfortable with change before fully committing. After the two seasons, the name Washington Commanders was officially announced on NBC’s Today Show in a controlled, media-heavy rollout featuring lineups of players, former legends, and branding experts to reinforce the messaging. They also didn’t ignore the black box that is social media and directly responded to fans, hyping up the change. Another important key here - the new logos, uniforms, and merch dropped immediately, ensuring that fans could buy in— quite literally—right away.

Now here’s the deal - this rebrand wasn’t without its fair share of criticism and poor reception. Some criticized the name as being generic, while others felt the tie to military really wasn’t a strong enough diversion from the original racist identity. What I think was done pretty excellently is choosing relatively neutral name with a strong thematic tie to D.C. that actually incorporated fan input. The other real win here - they kept an anchoring element the same: the color palette. To many, this felt that the team was still the team they grew up being a fan of while moving past the racist name. To me, it’s a great lesson in how retaining an element of brand recognition can help consumer sentiment in a rebrand.

Section four: executing the rebrand playbook beyond sport

Alright, let’s get down to literal application here with my main takeaways. As I was analyzing sport rebrands for this deep-dive, there seemed to be five key themes surface. Some may seem intuitive, but I find it’s often the most obvious strategies that get overlooked. Maybe because we’re less intentional about the things we assume are obvious? Regardless, let’s get into it.

I believe a successful rebrand…

1. is customer-driven, not leadership-driven. Use the example of Angel City FC, one of the most profitable teams in the NWSL. They brought in fans early in their branding decisions and thereby created deep emotional buy-in. TLDR here is that companies who involve customers, employees, and stakeholders in their rebranding process build that loyalty and trust needed for a true success. Taken into the real world, look at Airbnb’s logo and visual identity revamp in 2014. Airbnb tested the visual assets with users before launch to ensure a positive reception. Again, seems intuitive, but rarely executed.

2. is anchored to story and meaning. So many great success stories in sport branding build their brands on the back of local and historical significance - like the Seattle Kraken and New Orleans Pelicans. Brands truly should align with a company’s mission, values, and industry trends all while feeling authentic to the core of why the company was started in the first place. Dunkin’ removed “Donuts” from its name to better align with expanding beverage and food options without stripping brand recognition. When looking at a rebrand, the goal should be to elevate a company’s positioning without alienating core customers.

3. is only as good as its launch. Rebrands are won and lost in rollout. Angel City FC dominated media channels with influencer-drive campaigns, celebrity investors, and strong “movement, not just a team” narrative during their rollout. In stark contrast, BOS Nation FC (Boston’s NWSL team) failed wildly due to poor messaging in the rollout campaign (quite literally referencing “balls” a LOT.) Poorly executed rollouts (like Tropicana’s 2009 logo change) can lead to confusion and backlash.

4. won’t fix a broken product or experience. The Cleveland Guardians rebrand didn’t stop their attendance decline. Why? On-field performance and fan experience hadn’t improved alongside the rebrand. No amount of rebrand love can fix a bad product or experience. Often, companies will improve what they offer alongside rebrand efforts to ensure success. A prime example of this outside of sport is Domino’s pizza. When Domino’s rebranded, their primary focus was on better pizza, not just their new logo in order to elevate brand image. TLDR: your rebrand efforts have got to be a part of a larger strategy that includes real improvements to really ensure success.

5. can turn a struggling company into an industry leader. Businesses that successfully rebrand can attract higher valuation, better talent, and stronger investor interest. To reuse the example of Angel City FC (because they’re a huge success story), their strong brand helped them secure record sponsorship deals. For a great example of this, beyond sport, look to Burberry. This luxury brand transformed from a declining, outdated brand into a luxury powerhouse with their rebrand that focused on heritage and high fashion.

As with any deep dive, there are so many topics dripping with nuance that I can’t possibly cover within the contexts of this essay. You may look at some of the brand examples I marked as a win and disagree - that’s the precarious beauty about the subjective world of branding. The cool thing about any one brand—whether it’s a company, a sports team, or an individual such as yourself—is that it’s a living, breathing organism. An unremarkable brand today can rocket into the cultural zeitgeist tomorrow. And vice versa as brands fall out of favor as fast as they’ve attained it.

If I were to leave you with one, very cheesy, lesson on rebrands it’s this: you can’t just change the jersey and expect people to show up. You have to make your fans believe in the team again.

Until next time,

Tatum Brandt

Let’s dig in.

Take a trip with me to 2010

when fitness branding was… uninspired, to say the least. Picture stark, functional spaces with logos that could’ve been whipped up on Microsoft Paint. Globo gyms dominated like Gold's Gym and Planet Fitness—cookie-cutter establishments that screamed “get in, get out, check that box.” Their focus was on mass appeal and standardized aesthetics: rows of treadmills, fluorescent lights, and a business model banking on people signing up but never showing up. A well-designed experience was an afterthought unless you were splurging on an Equinox membership.

Fast forward to today, and the game has changed entirely. Good design is common, and even common place. Even your neighborhood pilates studio probably has its own branded matcha bar.

So, what happened?

1. The boutique fitness boom

CrossFit, SoulCycle, and OrangeTheory started to surge in popularity in the 2010’s. These studios built tight-knit communities and reframed exercise as an emotional experience. Their branding mirrored this ethos—sleek, intentional, and magnetic. Their members started to adopt the fitness method as an identity piece - remember the “a vegan and a crossfitter walked into a bar” jokes? You can’t buy that kind of brand affinity.

2. The rise of the influencer

The golden age of Instagram for fitness, in my humble opinion, was 2015. If you got in then, you could amass a huge following by sharing content from your daily life, algorithm be damned. This boom was also the Bodybuilding.com glory days, when spokesmodels popped up and niche fitness became more mainstream. The real kicker - gen pop started to become obsessed with the lifestyle of fitness more than just the function.

This was when branding took a sharp turn into lifestyle territory. Influencers weren’t just selling products; they were selling the dream of a fitter, cooler, more aspirational identity.

3. The pandemic-driven innovation

Remember 2020? Of course you do, most of us are out here trying to forget. Brick-and-mortar gyms shut down overnight, and suddenly the industry had to pivot—fast. Virtual classes, live-streamed workouts, and hybrid models emerged to fill the gap.

As someone running a branding studio during this time, I can personally attest to the influence of the pandemic on the wellness industry. People had to move out of their brick and mortars and figure out a way to take their practice online. As we were building creative solutions to stream a pilates workout series live, for example, I saw software boom to meet the demand. This created new and creative ways people began to interact with fitness brands in their daily lives. Fitness and wellness expanded beyond the gym and into an individual’s living room and thus the lines blurred.

4. The Wearable Takeover and the Rise of Wellness IQ

While software boomed to meet coaching demands, wearable tech did the same. All of a sudden gen pop is not only tracking their steps, but their sleep, stress levels, heart rate, and more. Recovery-focused wearables like Whoop and Oura have heightened our “wellness IQ” to a point that has created demand for new and hyper-personalized services and product. Suddenly, fitness brands weren’t just competing on performance; they had to integrate recovery, stress management, and lifestyle into their messaging.

This decade in design: what I’m seeing now

• Subculture brand boom
  The fitness market today is crowded, and brands are carving out niches to stay relevant from crunchy LA wellness girlies to marathon-running Boston bros. These micro-targeted identities drive design choices, from muted, earthy tones to bold, high-energy graphics.

• Lifestyle-driven design
  Forget selling products; brands are now selling lifestyles. Running shoes aren’t just about improving your mile time. The creative now focuses on the full experience of what it means TO BE a runner and sells the lifestyle and the camaraderie of a shared identity. It’s not what the product does—it’s what it represents.

• Hyper-Personalized, Hyper-Targeted Design
  Hyper-targeted-marketing jumpscare here - but this is an effect I’ve labeled “niche at scale.” Brands like Nobull started with CrossFit and have since expanded to cater to golf, football, and beyond—without diluting their identity. The key? Making every customer feel like the brand was made just for them.

• Holistic Messaging
  With the rise of recovery tech, performance isn’t the only narrative anymore. Recovery, mental health, and overall well-being have entered the chat. The best brands now speak to the whole person, weaving sleep, stress, and recovery into their story.

Fitness is design-driven. And I’m stoked about that. In the coming articles, you can expect deep dives on trends I’m noticing, hot takes, lukewarm takes, and occasionally quick bits of inspo I’m consuming. Come along for the ride:

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Chat soon,

Tatum Brandt