“[No One] Does Exactly What We Do”: Why Everyone Copies “the Satisfy Silhouette”

You know you’re onto something good when others start following your lead. It’s famously the highest form of flattery. And Satisfy, in its journey from small countercultural running label to the face of running-fashion hype, witnessed its fair share of imitation. 

Just last year, Nike released a hole-ridden T-shirt that looked suspiciously like one of Satisfy’s signature MothTech tops ("By ripping us off, Nike is making a lazy move that feels like an acknowledgment of the shift we’ve sparked in the running world," Tommy Hubert, Satisfy's head of PR and communications, told us in response). A few months ago, Satisfy founder Brice Partouche posted on Instagram about his beef with a sportswear upstart that he purported was “ripping off our products.” But every Satisfy dupe merely confirms Satisfy as the most vital name in sportswear, and inadvertently helped land it €11 million (around $12.5 million) in Series B funding led by a Chanel heir.

“When Brice started running more than 10 years ago, running gear was tight-fitting, very neon,” Daniel Groh, Satisfy’s chief brand officer, told Anna Burzlaff, Highsnobiety’s insights expert. “He didn't see himself culturally in that space, so he decided to build Satisfy. To this day, our mission has been to reflect the cultural influences of the team within.” As Groh explained in a longer conversation, included in our new Guide to Good Sports Marketing report, it’s this internal culture that keeps Satisfy a step ahead of the pack. 

Anna Burzlaff: What is Satisfy’s main mission?

Daniel Groh: For the longest time, [running has] always been focused on competition, it's about achieving something and it's tied to someone winning and someone losing. For Satisfy, it's more explorative. What we've been trying to do over the past 10 years is introduce another type of relationship with running. It can be competitive — we have athletes doing some of the craziest races in the world — but it can also be quite personal, you can create your own identity and relationship to what running can be. There are so many more signal points that can help form that runner's identity, where previously it was linked to very numerical values. Right now it's where you're running, how you're running, what you look like, when you're running, who you're running with. 

What you’re wearing has become a vital part of that identity. How has Satisfy shaped the uniforms of today’s runners?

15 years ago, the bandana around the neck didn’t really existed in running, Now, people love it. It’s crept into cycling and other sports. The crop fringe shirt, that's something we introduced maybe 5 years ago that has also infiltrated the space. Obviously, not everyone can afford our products but it's nice to see that what we call “the Satisfy silhouette” is infiltrating culture. Whether or not the individual understands where it came from is not really the point. It's just nice that it sparked this new wave of how people are showing up to run.

There are complementary brands from the fashion world and then directly competitive brands. I don't think anyone does exactly what we do. There are attempts to do what we do, but there's no direct competition in the world that we've built.

Why would someone running 5km in the city splash out on a pair of Satisfy shorts?

We look a lot at fashion because all of us are one foot in, one foot out of the fashion world. You could find everything from AURALEE to UNIQLO, but it's the ability to talk about it and have that cultural knowledge that matters. The Satisfy guest [how Satisfy refers to its consumers] is someone who wants to be able to talk about the piece, to be able to say “This is Satisfy, this shirt is made in Japan.”

We've strategically pivoted into true storytelling this year. All of our authentic moments, a race report or a recap of an event or UTMB [Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc], those posts have overindexed in performance and engagement. We're doubling down on that.

If we tell the story of [Satisfy pro athlete] Stian Dahl Sommerseth not finishing his race because he's gotten cramps two kilometers from the finish line, there's empathy. Or if we share that after not finishing the race last year, Max wins the race this year, there's triumph. If we say that we took our athlete team to the Atacama Desert and they were there exploring and seeing how far they could go, there's curiosity and excitement. What we found is that true emotional response comes from true storytelling, it unlocks that true feeling of “Wow, this is cool” or “I'm learning something.” We want to create that deeper sense of emotional connection.

What is the Satisfy perspective on sport?

It's really been our personal response to running. We don’t have a traditional creative brief when we talk about campaigns. We look at stories that we've heard or books that we're reading at the moment, whereas at a bigger corporate entity, it's like “Here's the product truth, what's the story behind it?” We find stories of runners and then make sure that our products do justice to those stories versus the other way around. 

Some of the stories come to us and some of the stories we go find, but that's the beauty of it because then we really can shape and create the narrative around it. And then some of the stuff is inspired by the past, like with some work that we're gonna be doing with Levi's and adidas this year. 

Levi’s is an especially interesting partnership because it’s a brand that exists in a completely different world. How did you approach that?

Any brand can own any space in a matter of 18 months, right? It's about knowing how to then seed that idea over 18 months. So then when you drop that big bang, it feels credible.

We knew that we wanted to own the digital denim space because it was something that hadn't really been done in trail running. The Easter egg is that Brice previously came from denim at his previous brand [April 77]. His family has a whole legacy in denim, but then for the end guest that wasn't obvious, right? And we can’t just say we're dropping it because our founder used to work in denim, that’s a cheap cop-out.

Levi's came up as a natural conversation to expand the early beginnings of our climbing line in an unconventional way but still anchored in product truth. Not many people know, but in the ‘70s there was this group [of style-conscious rock climbers] called the Stonemasters who wore Levi's, so we used that product history to make credible both the Levi's project and Satisfy in the denim space. 

We did a climbing line, and then it was on pause, but it comes back with Levi's this year.

A couple of years ago we wanted to do climbing capsules, they were just sporadic. But basically what we had spent the last 10 years doing in running, encouraging people to spend more, spend better, and create that kind of universe, we realised we had to do again for climbing. So we decided to pull back, pause, and really focus on running. But climbing will come back.

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