The marathon mindset that built a $1.6bn running brand

Driving growth in retail often focuses on expanding categories, adding SKUs, channels, variants - trying to appeal to more people, get more clicks, and sell more stuff. It usually works, for a bit. Before you fall into the discount trap.

By wanting to appeal to more people, you widen your competitor set. And because you are no longer selling on focused resonance, you end up selling on price. You push out discounts to acquire customers. Then, because your increased customer base is price-oriented, you keep taking a hit on margin just to retain them. It takes more effort, and more capital, to generate the same profit as before. Growth stalls.

So what is the alternative?

Specificity. But as a business-wide commercial strategy - not as marketing polish.

Every resource in a brand-led business - product R&D, marketing budget, sponsorship spend, AI investment - either concentrates value with the right customer or dilutes it across the wrong ones. As such, specificity is a capital allocation argument, not a brand preference.

Brooks Running is one of the best case studies for this argument. They learned the cost of dilution the hard way, so they are the before and the after. With 2025 revenue sitting at +16% year-over-year (estimated $1.6 billion), and their 2026 London Marathon campaign in full flow, they are showing exactly what specificity looks like when it is treated as a shared marketing and commercial objective.

Was Brooks always a running brand?

It feels strange to say that Brooks wasn’t always a dedicated running brand - but it wasn’t. The company began in 1914 making ballet slippers and bathing shoes, before moving through baseball cleats, football shoes, and ice skates. It didn’t find running until 1972, when Frank Shorter’s Olympic gold triggered the US jogging boom. They leaned into developing the Villanova - using an Olympic runner to give feedback, ensuring it was wholly focused on giving runners what they wanted, and needed. This focus paid off, and by the late 1970s Brooks had become one of the top three running shoe brands in the US.

But then it started looking sideways again, believing it could become even more successful by replicating Nike’s multi-sport model. In truth, different businesses need different tracks, and what worked for Nike did not work for Brooks. Its Puerto Rico manufacturing facility proved to be an epic failure in quality control and supply chain management, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 1981. The name was bought by Wolverine Worldwide, but the turmoil persisted - the company went through four ownership changes, four CEOs within a two year time period, and it racked up $30 million of debt by 2001.

Gratefully, this is where the plot twist arrives. In the form of Jim Weber.

Who is Jim Weber, and how did he transform Brooks?

Jim Weber joined Brooks as CEO in April 2001 and served for 23 years, leaving in 2024. He’s credited with taking Brooks from near-collapse to being a billion-dollar brand - and for having nerves of steel to ride the commercial rollercoaster that came with it.

On day one of his tenure, Weber wrote a sentence on his whiteboard: “The secret to success is constancy of purpose.” It stayed there for 23 years. What he was describing was specificity - with constancy of purpose being the mindset, and specificity being the execution.

He had absolute conviction that this constancy of purpose - this specificity - would work because he knew where the brand had come unstuck. He’s openly said that, “We were everything to everybody and were sixth, seventh, or eighth at everything. Brooks was like every other athletic footwear company, only a lot smaller. We didn’t have the marketing spend.”

So he stripped everything back, shifting Brooks’ focus solely to performance running shoes, cutting out lower-priced footwear, apparel, and multiple other lines. He also stopped selling through generalist retailers like Dick's and Footlocker, shifting focus on specialty running stores and sports medicine professionals.

With regards to Weber having nerves of steel, revenues got worse before they got better - these cuts meant that annual revenue fell from nearly $70 million to a low of $20 million. But he knew it was the price of becoming a brand of meaning - of saving the business by focusing solely on the runner. A few media wins and competitor opportunities later, this focus was paying off, and revenue had recovered to $69 million.

Now you know quite how bad things had become for Brooks, and why finding focus was such an important part of their business - said holistically, across brand and commercial. This seems like the right moment to introduce the campaign that triggered this article.

What is Brooks’ Head, Legs, Heart campaign?

Brooks’ 2026 London Marathon campaign is called Head, Legs, Heart. It is fronted by Cynthia Erivo - Emmy, Grammy and Tony-winning British actress and star of Wicked. Far from being a superficial, paid-to-appear scenario, Erivo is actually running the race on 26 April. She is being coached by Erika Kemp, a two-time US national road racing champion and Brooks professional athlete. Kemp also happens to hold the record for the fastest marathon by an American-born Black woman.

Erivo has history with this race - she ran the 2022 London Marathon in 3:35:36. This year she is targeting 3:15, so rest assured that the coaching relationship is real and she’s doing the same work as every other runner trying to reach that start line. In a world of performative collaborations and sponsorships, this creates a level of empathy that is hard to replicate as an outsider - or even using AI.

The words she speaks in the campaign video hit hard, purely because she knows what it’s like to be inside a runner’s head. Rather than describe it further, watch it. Listen to her words.

In its video format, this presents as marketing content. But when you look at Brooks’ numbers, you can see that the emotional resonance that comes from this level of deep knowing - of specificity - is being used deliberately to drive commercial consistency.

What has Brooks’ focus on the runner produced commercially?

Brooks closed 2025 with 16% global revenue growth - its ninth consecutive year of gains - on a 14% compound annual growth rate over nearly 25 years. More broadly, the global footwear market grew at roughly 4-5% annually over the same period, meaning Brooks has outpaced it by a factor of three. Even through two recessions and a pandemic. They’ve a got global tailwind too - posting 245% growth in China. But the thing that’s consistent is that everything is wrapped around its focus on running - rather, the runner.

At product level, Brooks has taken an “if it ain’t broke” approach that is itself a form of specificity. By this, I mean it’s famous for leaning into its existing lines - each with its own dedicated customer base - rather than expanding. Case in point is the Adrenaline GTS - a shoe now in its 25th year - which posted double-digit full-price growth in 2025.

Full-price growth in a category known for relying on discounts to move volume says that Brooks is operating off a solid commercial engine. According to Running USA research, Brooks holds the highest brand preference for training and racing among global runners. This might go some way to explaining their success with full-price sales. Based on my own experience of selling products to marathon runners (which I’ll expand on below), I can tell you that their decision making process for their race day shoes isn’t about price - it’s about what’s going to help them perform.

Rosy as this all sounds - lock in a plan and trust the process etc etc - I think it’s worth mentioning that Brooks is in the fortunate position of having an owner that appreciates the value of the long run.

How did Brooks resist the pressure to chase broader volume?

Brooks has been a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary since 2006 - the conglomerate built by Warren Buffett. This means that it doesn’t have to answer to the public market. Weber has previously acknowledged that this afforded them the time to grow steadily - being a publicly traded company adds a certain urgency that can trigger that “we have to appeal to as many people as possible” scenario, as described in this article’s intro.

I do want to point out that Brooks does sell lifestyle kit - and it launched a lifestyle collection as Paris SS26. But the narrative is firmly around it being for runners, making is a deepening - not a dilution - of their focus.

Back to Berkshire Hathaway, and its role of providing patient capital…

Before you think that it makes life easier fro Brooks operationally, it doesn’t - not really. The work required to go from A to B doesn’t change. But it does remove the external pressure that forces most brands off the strategy before the benefits have time to pull through to the numbers. Being frank, Berkshire Hathaway gave Brooks the structural cover for Weber to live-out his “constancy of purpose” approach.

But that’s not to say that executing with this level of specificity only works with Warren Buffett backing you. I’ll explain why, next.

The unit economics of specificity

A reasonable objection from a CMO or CFO at a smaller business is that the Brooks model depends on a level of capital patience that most organisations cannot access. It is a fair point - so here is evidence from a different commercial context entirely, focusing purely on margin mechanics.

This is from my own experience - the context is multi-brand retail, so it’s a different model to a mono-brand, but the financial realities are identical - and it is also built around a London Marathon campaign.

I’ll begin by setting the scene - explaining the customers we were trying to reach/resonate with.

The marathon is notoriously difficult to enter, and runners who have secured a place are committed to making the most of the event. The committed runner in the twelve weeks before race day is among the highest-intent, lowest-discount-dependency customers in consumer retail. They know what they need and they have already decided to spend. As noted before in the Brooks section, for the marathon runner, price is rarely the deciding variable.

Knowing we had a specific, captive audience, my team ran a targeted email campaign to confirmed runners using marathon-specific copy. The send list was 88% smaller than our general email list - yet it outperformed a comparable general campaign on absolute revenue, gross profit, and conversion.

Conversion rate for marathon-targeted visitors lifted by 0.63% against the general audience. Even better, because these were high-intent buyers, they converted on full-price products, yielding a 34% gross margin.

Based on other campaigns, we knew that if we’d targeted a broader, lower-intent audience, we would have likely had to rely on a standard 25% promotional discount to trigger a conversion.

You have to consider that irrespective of whether you’re selling at full RRP or discount, the cost of goods does not move. At which point every discount applied at the top, squeezes margin in the middle. In this instance, we’d have dropped from 34% to 12% gross margin. And then you have to factor in that to generate the exact same gross cash profit from discounted sales as from full-price sales, you have to move 2.8 times the volume. That means taking on nearly three times the logistics cost, three times the inventory exposure, and three times the acquisition spend - just to stand still.

We dodged this simply by having a clear picture of who our highest-intent customer was - and being disciplined about being in the right place, at the right time, with the right products. Old school marketing, backed by current commercial objectives, in service of real-time customer needs.

This level of clarity is something that should also extend to how you choose and deploy technology. In 2026, that means data and AI.

What role does specificity play in an age of AI?

Staying with Brooks - because they have handled this well - every tool in their tech stack has to earn its place by serving their core purpose. To qualify, it has to help them know the runner more precisely and reach them more efficiently. In a world where technology is synonymous with shortcuts, Brooks treats speed as a by-product, not the objective.

This is visible in the sequence of their infrastructure decisions. Rather than present you with War and Peace on their tech stack, I’ve simply shown how they nailed data organisation before pushing into customer service, and most recently, campaign tools. I’ve also show how they used results at each layer to unlock the next step:

• In 2018, Brooks implemented Amperity’s customer data platform to unify siloed records from loyalty, email and e-commerce into a single view of each runner. The result was a 128% return on advertising spend and a 260% improvement in paid search click-through rates. With that foundation confirmed, they moved forward.

• They added Assembled’s workforce platform, and by 2022 they had reduced average phone wait times by 66% - from 1 minute 6 seconds to 22 seconds in the first three months - freeing the customer experience team to focus on the interactions that actually required human judgement.

• Then in 2025, as a founding customer of Adora’s performance marketing engine, Brooks was delivering double the return on ad spend with 40% lower acquisition costs. The Ghost 17 launch via Reddit’s Max Campaigns produced a 37% decrease in cost per click and 27% more clicks over 21 days - without manual intervention.

I should point out that these metrics were taken from the parent platforms’ sites, so we should factor in that there might be some framing here. However, I say this with acknowledgement Brooks’ own results support the uplift.

I also want to lean into the Reddit campaign. As we’ve seen, Brooks is a brand that wins on empathy - on creating emotional connection with its customers. If it can reduce manual intervention by using AI for distribution (not the campaign/creative ideation), the team can apply themselves to the connection points that deepen that focus further.

What is the single lesson any commercial leader can take from this?

At a macro level, Brooks shows what specificity produces at scale, over time. At a micro level, a campaign sent to a list 88% smaller than the general audience - generating higher gross profit without BH capital - shows what the same principle produces on an individual-tactic basis. Both share the same mechanism.

If you are facing a growth decision, the question to ask before “where else should we push” or “which tools do we need” is this:

Is every resource - product, campaign, tool, sponsorship - concentrating value with the right customer? Or is it diluting value across the wrong ones?

Being all things to all people might lift top-line numbers in the short term. But the true cost will show up later - as eroding margins, bloated inventory, and/or rising acquisition costs.

Strong Brand Strong Business is published for founders, CMOs, and senior operators in brand-led businesses. Every edition examines a brand building something that lasts - and what the rest of us can learn from how they do it.