Brand-First Marketing, Community & Omni-Channel Growth with Massimo

Thanks, Stephen, I’m excited to be here. I head MarComs at Tracksmith. We’re a running brand. We started out as an e-commerce brand and moved into brick-and-mortar over time. I’ve had a long career in the active lifestyle and outdoor industry, working with a range of legacy brands, most of them historically e-commerce, so I have a rich history of building brands from the bottom up.

Tracksmith.com is where you can always find us, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Beyond that, we have two Track Houses, which is what we call our flagship stores. The first is in Boston, where our brand is based, that’s our HQ from a business and brand standpoint, as well as our flagship retail. We opened a second store in Brooklyn, New York in 2023, so we’ve been in New York for three years now, and we’re looking at expanding as we continue to grow here in the US.

From a logistical standpoint, one is fulfillment, and our logistics team is fantastic and has continued to optimize it. We’re a small-to-medium-sized e-commerce brand with busy periods and slower periods throughout the year, and we’ve continued to find ways to fulfill and get orders out on time, keep everyone happy, and keep runners running. We’ve had to make some difficult decisions, and the climate around tariffs hasn’t made it easy. We previously had warehouses in both Canada and the US, and we decided to consolidate everything into the US to keep optimizing. That’s worked really well for us from a delivery and customer service standpoint.

A second part is dealing with fraud and bots. Unfortunately that’s a big part of e-commerce, especially if you run a vibrant affiliate program like we do with a lot of our partners. It requires a lot of oversight, which is probably my biggest piece of advice, stay on top of it weekly. It’s not fun or easy, it’s tedious, but we have great affiliate partners who help us manage it. I used to review it monthly or even bimonthly, and we’ve since moved to weekly because fraud and bots come in so frequently.
The third piece is something we talk about a lot, shifting our digital strategy to optimize around AI. We live in a new world that keeps evolving, and we’re optimizing our strategies and tactics around visibility so people, and runners, continue to find us.

Historically, and still today, our brand has grown through word of mouth. That’s fairly unique, I’ve worked for much larger brands where search is often the first way someone discovers the brand. But our brand is deeply personal, and running itself is a deeply personal sport, so word of mouth is usually how runners find out about Tracksmith. That’s why our community marketing initiatives on the ground are so important.

That doesn’t mean the other touchpoints aren’t important. Most of our customer journey starts with word of mouth, and then we compound that by investing in digital strategies that amplify it. For example, a runner goes to a run club, someone mentions Tracksmith or is wearing it, and they ask, “what’s that brand?” They might not convert right away, they might go home, check out tracksmith.com, and not come back for four or five months. That’s where compounding on the digital side can speed up the journey, and a lot of that is investment in social, particularly Instagram and TikTok, which is our second-biggest discovery channel, along with paid search.

I use it a lot for our workflows and optimizing them, and customer service has begun incorporating it into their workflow too, which has helped speed up response times. When it comes to marketing, we haven’t incorporated much AI. We try to keep things a bit more humanistic. That’s not to say we won’t find the right balance of using AI where it helps, but we probably won’t use it for creative or campaigns. Running is very personal and humanistic, so we want to stay true to that.

We’re very different from the mass-market brands in the space. You can go to our big-box competitors and get a different experience, and they make great product too, but they have mass-market appeal and cater to the active lifestyle across every spectrum. When you walk into a Nike store, for instance, you’ll find football, soccer, basketball, running, and every other sport. Tracksmith stays true to who we are, we’re a running brand. We’re not looking to be a lifestyle brand or a yoga brand. There’s a gift in that, because we’re laser-focused on who we serve and what our message is. When you come to Tracksmith, you identify as a runner, and you know you’ll get exactly what you need to support your runs.

That focus extends to our product. A lot of what we do centers on natural materials. Many competitors rely heavily on synthetics, and we use them too, but we take pride in using natural fibers and textiles that bring real craft to what we make, which takes time to design and produce. That’s something special.

Our best-seller is a base layer called the Brighton Base Layer, one of my favorites because I wear it all year round. It’s made of Merino wool, and most of our Merino wool products, including the Harrier long sleeve and tee, are among our best-sellers. Because it’s Merino wool, you can wear that base layer or shirt three or four times on a run, I’ve worn it five times without washing it, because Merino wool doesn’t hold on to bacteria and odor the way synthetic fabric does.

We also sell a lot of cotton tees. It’s a bit unconventional, people wonder, “am I going to run in cotton? Will it dry quickly? Will it feel heavy?” But I ran in cotton growing up, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s a natural fiber, it lasts a long time, and it’s a really great way to run. So our three best products are the Brighton, the Harrier, and the Grayboy.

We talk about this internally a lot, and it goes back to what sets us apart. There are so many pros to being laser-focused, but there are challenges too. When you’re focused on a specific audience, you’re catering to a niche of the mass market, so scalability doesn’t happen as quickly as it does for a brand with 20 different segments across the active lifestyle space. The challenge to crack is continuing to scale while staying laser-focused on who we are and who we serve, and staying inventive in how we show up for them.

The other piece is that we were traditionally e-commerce for 10 years and then moved into brick-and-mortar, so it’s about balancing both. We built a community through e-commerce and then started showing up on the ground, so the challenge is growing the brick-and-mortar side while making sure it’s an omni-channel experience, the same experience whether you walk through the door of a Tracksmith store or visit tracksmith.com.

I’m a brand marketer at heart. All the digital tactics on the performance side, paid search, Meta, Google, social, are so important. But if you haven’t built your brand, your message, and your positioning, all of that gets lost. Time and again, especially with e-commerce brands, I’ve seen teams start with the performance side and put the brand side to the wayside to worry about later, and then the brand ultimately fails or underperforms. That’s why you see so many startup brands come and go in the active lifestyle space.

My biggest advice is to build your brand first, and build a community and a message around it. Understand what it stands for just as deeply as you’d understand yourself as an individual. Then you can put dollars behind it with really amazing digital strategies, which have become even more interesting with AI, and I guarantee that will compound everything you do and lead you to scalability as you grow.

Thank you, I appreciate it.