Ever notice how the best running brands just “get” you? There’s a reason for that.
The founders aren’t investors who decided running was a profitable niche. They’re runners like you, who couldn’t find what they needed, so they built it themselves. They logged the miles, felt the pain points, and created solutions from within their community.
“Running is hard, and running a business is hard,” says Monica DeVreese, co-founder and CEO of rabbit, a women-led running brand from California. “But hard work prepares you for greatness.” A runner’s grit, consistency, and ability to push through discomfort for a distant goal and delayed rewards nurtures the entrepreneurial spirit and translates perfectly to building a successful business.
Giants like Nike and Adidas no longer corner the space—hundreds of apparel and equipment brands are using Shopify to challenge these incumbents. Some of the most successful running brands on Shopify—rabbit, Bandit, MINTed, Endorphins, and others—win because they’re created by runners who intimately understand what other runners need. They’ve transformed their passion into thriving businesses with built-in customer bases. Many of these brands are less than 10 years old but already carving considerable share in the running apparel space.
If you’ve run a marathon or an ultra, or even just committed to a consistent training schedule, you already have everything you need to join their ranks and build your own thriving business on Shopify. Let’s run through how.
Connect with people first, launch products second
Every founder we spoke to shared one critical insight: their community drives their business—from brand loyalty to product development to customer engagement. Below, you’ll discover how running founders grow a strong community to build a collective sense of belonging and brand affinity.
“Our origin story, it’s almost like the community was more important…It came first. The brand and the products came later,” says Tim West, Bandit’s founder. The most successful running brands don’t start with a product line. They start with people—Bandit, Endorphins, and rabbit all prioritized community building before finalizing their products.
In 2022, Tyler Swartz and friends started training together for a 50-mile run in NYC. A handful of folks showed up to the first few sessions, but, slowly, a small group of ambitious runners created something special. “Our group runs weren’t just training sessions—they were where friendships were formed, goals were set, and the idea of Endorphins was born,” says the Endorphins website. Word about the brand spread via social media. Today, the Endorphins community is more than 25,000 runners strong. What started as a small run group is now a training platform, performance apparel line, and multicity community hosting 1,500-plus free runs each year.
Smart running brands use social media to create in-person connections. They promote pop-ups, organize meetups, and coordinate run clubs or group runs for key events. Tim West, a Brooklyn Track Club member, was inspired by its organic sense of community. He brought this belief—that authentic communities must exist “in and of themselves”—into the Bandit brand’s ethos, aiming to tap into existing ecosystems rather than cultivate one completely from scratch.
This approach flips the traditional business model on its head—instead of creating products and then searching for customers, these founders first built and drew from existing communities of like-minded runners. Next, they created products specifically for them. By doing this, running founders are creating a next-generation playbook for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands by focusing on building alongside the community from the very beginning, rather than chasing customers with paid ads after the product is made. Prioritizing building a community can lead to unexpected benefits, too, including crowdfunding opportunities. Rabbit initially launched through Kickstarter, using the platform to gauge community interest and validate their vision—funding their campaign in less than a day.
What you can do today:
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Start a local running group, get involved with your local club, create valuable content for runners online, or organize virtual challenges.
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Build relationships first, then listen carefully to your community’s needs.
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Be visible at local races and create value through activations and conversations with race attendees.
Consider runner’s unmet needs and innovate
The running market might seem saturated on the surface, but passionate runners still face unmet needs. The founders we interviewed all identified gaps based on their own experiences.
Feeling isolated, Toni Carey and Ashley Hicks-Rochathey started Black Girls RUN!, a running blog for women of color that grew into a large organization. Using Shopify, they scaled it into a thriving merch store selling apparel, playlists, and accessories. By generating 90% of their revenue from these sales, they were able to work on the business full time. Similarly, rabbit’s founders saw a huge opportunity to create better-fitting running gear, especially for women, identifying a market gap for form-fitting but high performance apparel.
Bandit’s founders also addressed a product gap by launching a drop featuring comfortable and stylish winter running gear, such as windproof, water-resistant jackets, fitted long sleeves with shaped hoods, and aesthetic balaclavas.
Whether it’s better-fitting apparel for women, gear designed with sustainable materials, or apparel engineered for specific running conditions, there’s always room for innovation that solves real runners’ problems.
What you can do today:
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Reflect on your own running pain points. What products do you wish existed? What could be improved? Your frustrations might be your business opportunity.
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Conduct market research with runners in your community, whether it’s chatting 1:1 or sending out surveys. You may discover some common pain points.
Create meaningful in-person touchpoints
Digital connections matter, but nothing beats face-to-face interaction. In-person events, pop-ups, and community rituals foster deeper connections while providing crucial product insights. These touchpoints create emotional bonds that transform customers into advocates.
For the New York City Marathon, Endorphins hosted an in-person pop-up at Shopify New York, featuring panels, medal portraits, group dinners and a one-stop shop for essential running gear. “The weekend brought Endorphins to life in ways we’d only dreamed of,” said Endorphins founder Tyler.” “Thanks to Shopify, we turned the world’s biggest race into a celebration of everything we stand for as a community.”
Creating unique touchpoints to celebrate your community on race day is a technique also leveraged by rabbit. The brand engages its community through sponsoring running events, making uniforms, and hosting activations like its annual pop-up shop on Newbury Street during the Boston Marathon.
Beyond race day, consider ways to support your local run community in their day-to-day training. Bandit takes a unique approach with its physical store in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Strategically located on a popular running route rather than a traditional shopping street, it serves as a community hub, with a water jug outside for passing runners and a weekly run club that draws more than 100 attendees.
Bandit’s approach to events is to “jog before it sprints,” using events to test ideas in simple, cost-effective ways first. It sets clear goals for revenue and leads, measures the halo effect on ecommerce sales, and negotiates heavily for spaces. It also uses data from event sign-ups to track participation and gain insights. With Shopify POS, running brands like Bandit can instantly see how in-person events boost their overall business, tracking both immediate sales and the long-tail effect on their online store.
Having all sales channels connected through Shopify provides a complete picture of community engagement—from pop-up purchases to online orders, run club newsletter subscriptions, social metrics, and beyond.
What you can do today:
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Use your social platforms to organize and promote in-person meetups that bring your community together IRL (Sponsor a run, organize a meet-up or a workshop).
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Partner with local health food brands or retailers to offset event costs and broaden your community reach.
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Use Shopify POS to hold a pop-up at a race in your region.
Tap into community to train and test
Founders embedded in the running community have a competitive advantage—they’ve personally experienced the problems they’re solving. But the innovation doesn’t stop there. The community is where rabbit gets all of its insights. Testing products at local races and talking to people at clubs provides essential feedback.
These brands actively engage with their community for crucial feedback. The founders of Bandit emphasize how community “interactions have quite literally driven our decision-making for the next collection.” Similarly, the rabbit founders constantly seek feedback from the clubs they sponsor and their RADrabbit team. Founders even make daily visits to their physical store to interact directly with customers. This constant cycle of real-time feedback with an engaged audience creates products that truly resonate. It helps to address genuine pain points rather than just reacting to a trend or conform to a marketing plan.
What you can do today:
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Create prototypes and get them into the hands of trusted running friends and community members. Their feedback is gold.
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Interact with your customers in real life as they review products to get real-time feedback.
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Leverage social for product feedback.
Do product development in public
Social media isn’t just for marketing—it’s a testing ground for new ideas and a powerful tool for building genuine connections.
MINTed’s founder, Marcus, shared a prototype tote bag on a video on social media, and received a lot of feedback via comments about desired features like adjustability. This direct input led to product improvements that increased customer satisfaction.
Building in public means opening yourself up to criticism. While straight-up hate comments can be ignored, constructive criticism is invaluable. “Bringing your customer along on the journey helps them kind of buy into the product at the end of the day, even more,” because they become part of the entire process.
What you can do today:
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Share your product ideas on social media and ask for genuine feedback. Then actually implement the suggestions that resonate and let your audience know how you’re applying their input.
Deepen your community on social
Social media platforms can also amplify a brand’s community connections beyond geographical limitations and act as a powerful marketing tool. These niche brands excel at using digital platforms to engage their community with authentic content.
The most successful running brands don’t just showcase elite athletes breaking records; they celebrate the everyday moments that make up a runner’s life. Bandit explains its approach: “We’re really good at taking the mundane moments of running and showing you how special and lovely and elegant and fun they are.”
This strategy resonates because it reflects the reality of running. Showing the ugly side of running, the messiness, and the"realness often is more relatable than only showcasing the perfect version or elite athletes. This realness builds trust and shows runners that the brand really gets them.
What you can do today:
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Share authentic content that celebrates all aspects of running, not just the highlight reel. Show the early mornings, the tough workouts, and the small victories in between.
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Focus on your community’s stories, rather than hiding behind a brand persona.
Create long-term customers through social-first customer service
For running brands, customer service isn’t just about solving problems—it’s about strengthening credibility amongst runners. Social media has, in many ways, become the most high-stakes customer service platform, with feedback posted for public consumption. Engaging regularly and rapidly with messages and comments from your community not only resolves concerns, it builds loyalty and enhances the overall experience.
Turn passionate customers into brand evangelists by nurturing their loyalty. These evangelists organically promote your brand and support local events through ambassador programs, such as RADrabbit by rabbit and Bandit’s various initiatives. When runners feel heard and valued, they become lifelong supporters.
What you can do today:
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Respond personally to comments and messages. Show the humans behind your brand and treat every interaction as an opportunity to build community.
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Share how you have implemented customer feedback and even give a shoutout on social media to the customers whose ideas you’ve implemented.
Compound consistency: Show up for yourself and start today
Scaling a business is akin to training, and challenges are inevitable. Think about the discipline it takes to wake up early, push through discomfort for miles, and train consistently—that’s the type of grit that makes runners entrepreneurs.
It’s about “grinding day in and day out. … Eventually the hard work is going to pay off,” says Monica of rabbit. Entrepreneurship, much like training for a race, takes time, resilience, and discipline. Business success isn’t overnight; it comes from enduring the process. It demands patience, consistency, and long-term commitment. It’s about compounding consistency—showing up and putting in the work consistently over time.
You don’t have to know it all to start a business. You can train your entrepreneurial muscle over time. Many of the founders we interviewed were first-time founders who lacked formal education but leveraged Shopify, social media, and their communities to launch. Take for instance Marcus of MINTed, who had no formal design training but was able to teach himself how to bring his ideas to life through YouTube and Google.
Ready to channel the same dedication you bring to the starting line to launching your own business? Your journey from passionate runner to successful entrepreneur is waiting. Explore how the discipline, resilience, and community focus you’ve honed mile after mile are your greatest assets for starting and growing a business on Shopify.
This article is part of our Fan to Founder series on community-driven businesses. Check out more articles featuring runners like the founders of rabbit, and watch for future installments in the Fan to Founder series.
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