Inside the brand proving cultural fluency, community design, and versatility can build new relevance in a crowded running market.
Part of an ongoing sports investigation by edition+partners, this series analyses fast-growing brands in modern sporting culture. It draws on data from 94 brands spanning 127 years, with over 2,400 data points that allow us to cross compare brand growth, social demography and technical credentials, alongside interviews with leading experts and the founders driving change from within the industry. This edition features Nick West and Ardith Singh, co-founders of Bandit Running, interviewed by edition+partners founder, Tom Garland.
The answer isn’t just scale, it’s sensitivity.
Running’s new generation of brands are not trying to out-market or out-engineer the legacy players; they’re finding relevance in the gaps those giants can’t reach fast enough. Touring collaborations, running Grand Prix’s, viral hydration vests, and striking positionings, the world of running has never been more creative, more diverse or more evolutionary than it is today.
Driven by the mass wellness movement on the consumer side and creatively serviced by an ever-growing crop of challenger and community brands, running isn’t reinventing itself through competition but through constant cultural adaptation. It’s less a race for dominance than a contest of responsiveness and brands like Bandit are showing what that evolution looks like in real time.
Bandit, a brand led by brothers Tim and Nick West, alongside Chief Design Officer, Ardith Singh, has seen its Instagram following grow 138% YTD by working directly with their community from the start and designing with style and function as one. In this piece we dive into Nick and Ardith’s takes on community, the relationship between aesthetics and performance as well as what the future of running culture might look like.
On the 7th May, 2025, 1,000+ runners from 32 states, 11 countries, and over 100 running clubs came together under the Brooklyn Storehouse for Bandit’s inaugural Bandit Grand Prix. The event wasn’t just a race but a live experiment in what modern running could look like — part competition, part festival, part cultural gathering. 5k heats ran through the day before the 3k finals under lights at night, creating a new spectator format that felt closer to Formula 1 than a traditional road race.
Fast forward to this past weekend and the Chicago marathon, Bandit pulled off another experiential feat against the backdrop of 50,000 runners attempting the 42km distance. It's ‘Chicago Simulation Research Center’ and accompanying nine-piece “Full Tilt” capsule inspired by Chicago’s windy city identity saw lines lasting up to 5 hours outside Bandit’s temporary home on Michigan Avenue.
Together, these moments show why Bandit stands apart. They use experience as R&D, crafting event concepts based on anecdotes overheard from pervious years. Each touchpoint captures emotional data, feedback and content that feeds back into product and community design. It’s the brand's mission, Evolve Running, in practice: constant iteration through cultural experimentation.
As Nick West puts it, “Evolve Running follows us in every boardroom conversation. It means self-disruption in the name of doing things fresh, new, different, better, improved, iterative over time.”
Bandit’s Backstory
By now the Bandit story is well documented. But here is a quick summary of the recent Puck and Forbes pieces run on the brand for anyone out of the loop.
Founded in 2020 out of Brooklyn, Bandit began with socks and a small New York running crew before expanding into full performance apparel under brothers Nick and Tim West and designer Ardith Singh. As Puck reports, the brand has grown by rooting itself in community and building what it calls “cult economics”: a subscription model that rewards members with discounts, access and belonging, while its lean team executes pop-ups at major marathons and collaborations that feel more like events than retail.
Forbes highlights how Bandit’s “Unsponsored Project” redefined athlete partnerships — funding unsponsored runners to reach championship events without locking them into restrictive contracts. That initiative, alongside a $14 million Series A led by A-Rod Corp and VCP Ventures, signalled a rare combination of heart and momentum in the category: a brand blending culture, credibility and capital to rewrite what a modern running label can be.
Bandit’s Integrated Community Model
In 11 years, I’ve worked with over 100 brands, and there hasn’t been a single meeting where “community” wasn’t mentioned. It’s become this decade’s most overused marketing word; shorthand for closeness, belonging, authenticity. It rarely feels genuine.
But with Bandit, it does.
Their community isn’t a CRM audience or a brand tier. It’s the nucleus of the company. “We invited them in from the very beginning to talk about product, to be really open and honest about what they love, what they don’t love, what they can’t find that they need,” Ardith Singh tells us.
It’s a deceptively simple idea, but one that’s been structurally integrated into how the brand operates from design and product development to storytelling and experience.
What stands out is not that Bandit listens, but how much they act on what they hear and the extent to which dropping one's ego can unearth real insight from their community. That humility has become a design system. Feedback isn’t a post-purchase survey; it’s a living loop with Singh preferring to describe her community as colleagues, not customers.
One of Bandit’s earliest hires was a Head of Community, Steve Finley, who has helped build a company around conversations, as well as campaigns. It reflects a belief that every meaningful brand decision starts with the people who run with you, not only the people who buy from you.
Nick West puts it simply: “We always say internally, if we continue to do the right thing for the running community, they’ll come along on the ride with us. We’ve made so many decisions in the name of the community before the name of the business.”
That same community logic underpins The Unsponsored Project, Bandit’s initiative to support runners without brand contracts by funding their travel, entry, and training expenses to reach major championships. It’s less a marketing play than a philosophical one: proof that the brand’s definition of “team” extends beyond its payroll. “We always say, if we’re going to build for the running community, we have to support the people who represent it best and many of them don’t have sponsors,” says Nick West. Ardith Singh adds, “These athletes are the soul of the sport. They’re the ones doing it out of pure love, without logos. We wanted to honour that.”
Beyond a Binary: Bandit’s Multi-Occasion Strategy
In She Runs, Brands Walk, we showed how the womenswear landscape remains split between performance and lifestyle and how (pre NikeSKIMS, Satisfy Womens and Aesene came along), the performance-first female quadrant was alarmingly sparse. It seemed that the majority of active brands still forced women to choose between function and expression.
Not Bandit, who record an exceptionally rare 50/50 split of male and female followers on their Instagram page. And in our conversation with Nick and Ardith a new strategy emerged. One where style and performance can live together. Because why can’t credible performance-wear be a lifestyle product rather than basic athleisure?
That ethos, born from Singh’s experience as both an athlete and designer, has become central to Bandit’s success. Their products are designed to move seamlessly across contexts: “Every woman who bought the Adapto Tank has run in it and said, ‘I’d wear this with a baggy wide-leg trouser.’”
That’s not an accident; it’s a real cultural insight. For many women, the day doesn’t divide neatly between “workout” and “life.” The same garment needs to serve both, without compromise. In that sense, Bandit’s “multi-occasion” design philosophy isn’t just about versatility, it’s about respecting the reality of modern athletic life (see our recent wellness anarchist for notes).
And it’s not limited to women. Singh notes how the male customer has evolved too — “the freebie race tee and old shorts” archetype is vanishing. Men now express identity through kit. Aesthetic awareness has entered performance culture for both genders.
By collapsing the wall between fashion and function, Bandit has found the sweet spot others have struggled to reach. They’re not selling performance disguised as lifestyle, or vice versa, they’re building a new product vernacular where performance is lifestyle and vice versa.
Where is running going next?
When I ask where the sport is heading, West prefers not to predict trends but observe evolutions. “Right now, we live in a world of overall endurance specialists,” he says. “Cyclists are starting to run. Distance runners are picking up Hyrox. Everyone’s becoming more well-rounded.”
That observation may hold the key to the next chapter of running. The sport is no longer defined by pace, distance, or surface but by its lifestyle integration. It is becoming a cultural nucleus, a framework for travel, socialising, self-expression and physical identity. “I think we’re in completely new territory as it relates to how big the sport can get, how many new people can get into it and fall in love with it,” says West. (see Wellness Anarchist).
That’s extraordinary. And as this new generation matures, they’ll demand brands that mirror their own evolution: fluid, multifaceted, never singular.
Singh frames it beautifully: “It’s about honouring the full self — everything that goes along with that training block, including mobility and recovery.” That’s not just design philosophy; it’s cultural philosophy.
For Bandit, running isn’t something to sell, it's something to evolve. Their blend of product, experience, and empathy captures what the incumbents can all too often miss: that running’s future won’t be built through style credits and / or performance innovation alone, but through emotional intelligence by knowing when to lead, when to listen, and when to simply run alongside the people who got you there.
Closing Thoughts
Bandit is proof that community fluency and cross-context design can create new forms of relevance; faster, more accessible, and with greater cultural intimacy than the incumbents can replicate.
But in the long game of product, logistics, and scale, culture must eventually meet competence.
The race is not between giants and challengers, but between speed of cultural adaptation and depth of operational execution.