Brand-discipline is a behaviour, not a statement

Adanola has been on my radar for a while. It’s hard to miss when your social feeds are full of people wearing its “ADA” oversized hoody. But if I’m honest, I scrolled past most of it. I assumed it was just another activewear brand attaching itself to a celebrity name; you don’t often read articles without mention of it being worn by Molly-Mae Hague and Kendall Jenner, and it’s got Lila Moss in its current campaign. It wasn’t until February 2026, when I caught Trinny Woodall on Instagram Stories raving about the quality, that I actually sat up and paid attention. First, because at 62 years old, she’s not their target, influencer-influenced demographic. Second, because when someone with her eye for product — and her standards — is that enthusiastic, it’s worth looking closer.

And look closer I did! What I found wasn’t a superficial brand story with a community glued together by affiliate links and influencer marketing — it was a story of brand discipline that started back in 2015. A £40 legging that went viral during lockdown, a near-collapse in the years before it, and a set of structural decisions — often uncomfortable — that turned it into a $530M business.

In this edition of Strong Brand Strong Business, I examine what those decisions actually were, why they matter, and what you can take from them regardless of your category or scale.

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What is brand discipline — and why do most businesses mistake it for marketing?

“Brand discipline” is one of those phrases that sounds straightforward until you watch most businesses try to live it. A brand purpose workshop, a values document on the careers page, a founder quote in a trade interview — and suddenly you’re disciplined. Except you’re not… you just have a chunky marketing budget and good comms team. However, when it comes to Adanola, it seems that they are cut from a different cloth.

When I was doing my research, I read that Adanola received a significant minority investment from STORY3 Capital Partners in a deal valued the business at approximately $530M. Then I read their CEO — Niran Chana — explaining how they got there: “[We stayed] disciplined as a women’s product-first, active lifestyle brand.”

I’ve read enough same-same statements over the years, so my reaction was, “Sure, but what does that actually mean in practice?” Because discipline is easy to claim. It’s very hard to live.

The answer, when you look closely, isn’t just about brand. It’s about architecture — specifically, what happens when marketing, merchandising, and product teams stop operating as separate departments and start functioning as one cohesive commercial engine. That synchronisation is what separates the brands building something that lasts from the ones white-knuckling their way through every quarter.

Let me show you what it looks like when a brand actually does it.

How did Adanola grow from near-collapse to a $530M valuation?

Hyrum Cook started Adanola in Manchester in 2015. What most people don’t know is how close it came to never existing at all. A falling out with his co-founding brother Josh — a fundamental disagreement about what kind of brand they were building — left Cook running it alone from 2017. For three years, the numbers weren’t great... they had monthly revenue barely touching five figures, increasing debt, and Cook was thinking about closing it completely.

The fact that he didn’t is a big part of their success, and not for the obvious reason that it kept it alive for long enough to keep going. Rather, because the resilience that kept the business going in those years is the same strength that’s shaped every decision that followed.

The turning point for the brand came during the 2020 Covid lockdown, when Cook launched the Ultimate Leggings. They came in at £40 and had been developed around a single insight he’d spent years refining: that women wanted activewear that worked for their actual lives, not just the gym. The leggings went viral.

Now, it’s easy to chalk-up viral success as being an overnight hit based on a short-lived algorithm. And sure, the timing for Adanola was right, but Cook had also earned the timing — five years of near-failure had built the product clarity and brand sensibility that made the moment possible. Over 1.5 million pairs have since been sold.

What followed has been exceptional. Revenue reached £84.5M in net sales for the year to mid-2025, crossing £100M by the end of the year, with a gross profit of £57.6M and net profit just under £16.6M — a margin profile that most brands at this growth rate would sacrifice in pursuit of scale. They didn’t, and that’s the point. Then in August 2025, STORY3 Capital Partners made a minority investment estimated at $75-90M, valuing Adanola at $530M — with the capital being earmarked for US expansion, new categories, and supply chain investment.

That’s the what. Now here’s the part that actually matters.

What is the commercial strategy behind Adanola's 26% profit margin?

A 26% net profit margin while doubling revenue doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t happen because you’ve hired good marketers. It happens when brand discipline is structural — when the decisions made in product inform the assortment plan, when the assortment plan informs the marketing strategy, and when none of those teams are pulling in different directions because they’re measured on different things. Most brands never get there. The siloed version — where marketing chases volume, merch chases margin, and product chases trend — is where discipline erodes quietly, steadily, and at great cost to the business both short term and long term.

Adanola’s structure tells a different story.

How does Adanola's product strategy protect its margins?

Adanola’s core range maps to active, sweats, and knits — three categories, held deliberately tight in an era where most brands expand SKUs to chase revenue. That simplicity is, by my reckoning, a GTM decision. A tighter range means cleaner inventory management, less markdown risk, more focused marketing spend, and a clearer signal to the customer about what you stand for. Chana has been explicit about the intent: “we’re not asking customers to shop with us every week and every drop.” That’s product and commercial strategy speaking the same language — which only happens when they’re built around the same plan.

Why does Adanola keep its wholesale distribution selective?

Adanola’s wholesale network — Selfridges, Harrods, David Jones, Ounass, Equinox, Soho House — is also a brand discipline decision, not so much a revenue decision. Chana has been clear that wholesale is “additive,” designed to drive traffic back to Adanola.com rather than lead the growth strategy. This matters structurally because every additional wholesale door you open is a potential vulnerability — you might get a large order which is good for revenue but it might come with harder trade terms, less control over presentation, and discounting risk at the point of sale. The latter two them impacting brand equity and subsequently undermining their focus on DTC as their retention revenue engine. But by keeping wholesale selective, Adanola protects both its margin and its DTC positioning in a single move.

Why doesn't Adanola discount — and what does that signal to the market?

At £40, the Ultimate Leggings sit at what Chana calls “price accessible — not the cheapest, but certainly not the most expensive.” More importantly, I haven’t seen anything telling me that they discount to clear stock. As in, discounting doesn’t appear to have much of a role in their business-as-usual (BAU) trading. In a category where seasonal sales seem to be always-on, bucking the trend takes conviction — because the short-term pressure to match competitor discount messaging, and to move more and more units, is always there.

However, chronic discounting is a symptom of a structural problem, usually a product, planning, or alignment failure that the business is choosing not to solve. Every time you reach for the discount lever, you’re telling your customer what you’re actually worth. But Adanola’s commitment to full price at fair price points means it doesn’t have to have this conversation.

What tech infrastructure did Adanola build to support its growth?

This is the detail most brand analyses miss entirely. Growth at speed creates operational debt, and operational debt is where commercial engines seize up. When Adanola’s growth started accelerating, they brought in HighCohesion to rebuild their integration architecture — fixing stock data flowing into their warehouse management system, properly integrating AfterShip to regain control of returns entering back into inventory, and enabling reliable currency conversion across their global Shopify stores.

It’s important to recognise these tech efforts as part of the brand discipline conversation. After all, having accurate, real-time data flowing cleanly across the business is how a scaling brand protects its bottom line. It stops it from haemorrhaging margin through returns mismanagement, stock inaccuracies, and order errors — the operational friction that compounds quietly until it becomes a serious commercial problem.

Why did Adanola's founder step back from the CEO role?

In June 2024, Cook appointed Niran Chana as CEO — formerly Chief Commercial Officer at Gymshark, where he played a central role in taking that brand from a standing start to global recognition. Cook moved into the CBO role, focusing on brand, product, and community. The structure matters because Cook retained ownership of brand integrity and product direction, while Chana took accountability for the commercial engine. That’s a deliberate division of responsibility that keeps brand and business in alignment rather than in tension — the thing that so many founder-led businesses get wrong when they scale.

What can eCommerce brands learn from Adanola's commercial model?

Every brand’s story is unique, and Adanola is no different. You can’t replicate the exact conditions — the product timing, the Covid “everyone’s at home staring at their phones” tailwind, the TikTok cycle, or the specific cultural moment the Ultimate Leggings landed in. But the structural logic transcends moments in time, and it’s worth interrogating your own commercial engine against it.

One: Are your marketing, merchandising, and product teams operating off one cohesive plan? If marketing is optimising for acquisition, merch is optimising for margin, and product is optimising for newness — with no shared commercial framework connecting them — you don’t have an engine. You have three departments pulling in different directions and wondering why growth feels like a grind. The un-siloing of those functions is where brand discipline lives.

Two: Is your distribution strategy a brand decision or a revenue decision? Every channel you add sends a signal to the market and creates an operational dependency. If you can’t articulate clearly why each distribution decision serves both the brand and the margin — not just the top line — that’s worth examining.

Three: Does your most recent senior hire reflect what the business structurally needs, or what was easiest to find? Chana’s appointment was about having a specific commercial operator with a specific track record for a specific phase of growth. Most senior hiring is reactive, not deliberate. The brands that last actively hire for the company they’re becoming, not the one they currently are.

It’s fair to say that Adanola is not a finished story. The US chapter is still being written, and scaling into a new market with PE capital and a $530M valuation creates its own pressures — not least the expectation of returns that comes with institutional money on the cap table. The real test of whether Adanola’s brand discipline is structural rather than situational will play out over the next three to five years as the pressure to invest that capital intensifies and the temptation to trade long-term integrity for short-term volume multiplies.

But the foundation is solid, and we’ve already seen that it isn’t a brand that takes the easier option just because it’s right in front of them. They haven’t abandoned their brand to win more wholesale accounts, drive more SKUs, spam everyone with more discounting and more influencer volume. They stayed true to their vision — and the margin shows it.

Is Adanola ready for the age of agentic commerce?

There’s one question this piece hasn’t answered, because the honest answer is that nobody knows for sure until agentic commerce actually happens. But what we do know is that Chana and Cook were both in the room at BoF VOICES 2025 in December — a roundtable on the future of the online customer journey that put Adanola alongside Nike, H&M, and McKinsey to discuss AI personalisation and agentic commerce. In my mind, the fact that they were there is a signal in itself that they’ll be ready when it lands.

Because agentic commerce — where an AI agent makes purchasing decisions on behalf of a consumer, optimising for price, availability, and preference — poses a structural question for every brand built on controlled desire and selective distribution. In my view, the brands most exposed to that disruption aren’t necessarily the ones with the weakest equity. Instead, they’re the ones with the most fractured data. So if your inventory, customer, and product information sits in siloed systems that don’t communicate, an AI agent can’t accurately represent you — and in a world where the agent is making the purchase decision, that invisibility is a commercial risk that no amount of brand investment can offset.

Adanola’s infrastructure rebuild — clean, unified, real-time data flowing across an integrated commercial architecture — is, in my assessment, a stronger foundation for that future than most brands their size currently have. Whether that was a deliberate strategic choice or a consequence of operational necessity, the outcome is the same. I’ll be exploring the agentic commerce question in detail in a future edition.