I have a prized Nike T-shirt in my wardrobe. In a big, bold Futura-type face, it reads ‘Man Up’. A relic from the past. It was a time when sports advertising was primarily focused on selling to men – type A men.
Largely product was ‘for men, by men’. Product and merchandising for women had a ‘pink it and shrink it’ filter. In the late 2010s, the industry realised this was a mistake. Women could see and feel the surface-level tweaks to colours and materials on men’s products that were being repackaged for them. That’s when disrupter brand, Lululemon, came to the fore.
Founded in Canada in the late 90s, the brand pioneered an early category for a performance apparel brand: Yoga. Its presence was the reason other sportswear brands started to pay attention to women in the market. Suddenly, everyone started shifting to a ‘women-first’ strategy. Some of it translated into high performance categories like running and basketball, but there was a broader category that had just as much potential. Training. Yoga, HIIT, Pilates, CrossFit. It wasn’t about winning, that wasn’t the objective. It was about conditioning for...life. A much more attainable goal for a broader population.
Fast forward to 2025, wellbeing has evolved. Wellness has been marketed so heavily to us that it feels like a sport we need to win. At least with competition, there’s a start, middle and end. Not with wellness, wellness is on your mind when you get up in the morning feeling tired, when you look at your empty fridge of last night’s take-out dinner, when you doom scroll on your phone thinking you shouldn’t be doom scrolling on your screen. There’s no end. It's just a long loop of trying, but never quite reaching the peak of wellness. That’s a lot.
Couple that with the weight of the world. It's overwhelming and never-ending. So, outside of this wellness loop, there’s a broader context – a dark cloud of uncertainty. With so much going on in the world, and in our lives, people are losing interest in the pursuit of perfectionism. We are seeking antidotes to anxiety, a breath in the overwhelm, and moments that break the monotonous and mundane. The bar is lower, and some brands are reading the room. If we can’t win wellbeing, what’s a brand to sell?
In a way, sportswear brands’ biggest competitor is time – or at least the concept of it. Doing any exercise to benefit your wellbeing is first about intention – not what you’re wearing to do it. Asics captured this in a social creative ‘Think about anything but your shoes’ depicting a woman walking through city streets, immersed in her phone and the tangential thoughts that spiral around her head. The shoes are featured, but they’re not the focus. They’re the backdrop. The insight? People don’t care about the product – they’ve got too much else to worry about.
Other sports brands are responding to our fragmented cultural environment in different ways. Nike pivoted from their controversial ‘Winning Isn’t For Everyone’ message during the Olympics, to giving a big middle finger to the noise in our heads and around us. The ick factor about the 'Winning isn’t for Everyone’ message, is that it feels like it’s from another time- a time my t-shirt came from. Nike’s glory days for sure, but not a campaign that read the room. Enter, ‘You can’t win, so win.’ A simple but brilliant campaign that centres women but applies to anyone. Those voices external voices are so loud. So, there’s nothing else to do, but block them out.
If you’re a millennial or Gen Z, you’ve needed some love and compassion recently. Three years ago, Steve from Blue’s Clues came back to check in with those kids – a reflection on just how hard things can feel. “It started with clues, and now it’s... student loans, and jobs and families. And some of it has been kind of hard.” This hit hard amongst Gen Z and millennials – the first generations that grew up with a ‘you can be anything you want’, but somehow life now doesn’t feel like that.
That’s why reading the room and tapping an Elmo as a new ambassador with the message of ‘soft wins’ works. Being told ‘hey, get up off the couch and run’ isn’t motivating for a generation that feels like they were set up for a lie. They can’t have it all, and this life doesn’t feel like ‘winning’.
Movement is the ultimate medicine for our tired brains, and brands that read how tired we all are getting it right.
Take it easy.
Laura Mulcahy, Head of Cultural Practice at TRA