Where is the Satisfy Running for her?
Not another pastel rebrand. Not another soft-power leggings drop. We’re talking about a brand with grit and cultural edge. With purpose. With technical credibility and aesthetic conviction. Built not for him — but for her.
Over the past few weeks, we scanned 44 sports brands, from technical up-starts and cult cycling labels to global sportswear giants, to map the state of play. What we found was telling: technical performance remains male-dominated. Female founders cluster around lifestyle. And brands that succeed in one space, cultural relevance or elite performance, rarely crack both.
But the customer, as always, is on the move.
More women are training for performance events, uploading their training blocks like moodboards, and flexing VO₂ scores as a status symbol. Strava has become a social network. Kudos the new Instagram 'like'. And yet, the brand landscape hasn’t caught up. There’s no UVU, Satisfy or Soar for her. Just a lot of recycled unisex fits, athleisure and borrowed men’s tech.
This piece explores the whitespace. Challenges the assumption that it exists. And lays out the case for a women’s performance brand that’s built with real teeth, not just resized leggings and a community manager.
Mapping the Performance Gap
Brand maps have long been used by marketers to help make sense of the competition. For this research, we scanned 44 sports brands who hold positions ranging from highly technical performance-ware to athleisure, from independent studios to group-owned giants in an attempt to highlight an observed gap in the market: performance-first, independent brands designed for women.
We recorded Instagram follower counts as a proxy for size, noted gender skew, and built scores (out of 10) for each brand based on whether they lean more generalist or specialist, lifestyle or performance. We added price tier, country of origin, years in business, and eight more variables to help surface the shape of the women’s opportunity.
Disclaimer. Perceptual mapping exercises are often the most contentious parts of client meetings and (whilst data backed) always remain somewhat subjective. For example, Nike and the other sportswear giants have hyper-competitive performance products for both men and women, but on our scoring system, rank centrally due to the balance of lifestyle products also available. We also used Hypeauditor data to understand the male:female follower ratio to estimate each brand's position along the gender x-axis, not revenue.
However, they are also useful. They can cut through complexity, revealing patterns and help us observers navigate through crowded environments to see what might be missing.
Looks Like White Space, But Is It?
At first glance, it looks obvious. The upper-right quadrant of this map—high-performance, specialist brands designed for women—is strikingly sparse.
In a market saturated with lifestyle-driven activewear, there appears to be a gap for a new entrant: a performance-first brand built by and for women. Either a fresh independent with a strong creative point of view, or a female-led offshoot from one of the male-oriented specialist labels that dominate the scene.
And the logic tracks: if Satisfy and Pas Normal can cultivate cult status through elevated design and endurance credibility, why hasn’t anyone built their equivalent specifically for women? It feels like a glaring omission.
But that assumption needs pressure testing.
What if the gap isn’t due to lack of innovation—but a lack of demand? What if women in sport aren’t underserved, but are being served differently—by brands that prioritise identity, community, and content over ultra-technical design? In that case, this white space might not be an opportunity but rather a mirage.
We’re also assuming the old binaries still hold: male vs female, lifestyle vs performance. But the most culturally relevant brands today (On, Satisfy, Bandit) blur those lines entirely. They’re mindset-led, not gender-defined. Built for the doers, the obsessives, the aesthetes—regardless of who they are. (*note, Satisfy is men's only but we have observed women wearing small mens sized Satisfy products at the Hackney Half).
So yes, the map reveals a gap. But whether it’s worth chasing depends on how we frame the problem. Maybe the real opportunity isn’t about building for her—it’s about building for now.
The Case for a Satisfy for ‘Her’
But in defence of our whitespace, the lack of stylized, culture-forward technical wear for her is something one can observe at street and brand level.
Women have long been served by sports brands who started life founded by men designed for ‘him’. The womenswear offering is therefore resigned to being a secondary department within a menswear behemoth that has established systems, processes and designs specific to servicing the male body, his taste and his lifestyle. Adapting these, as the sportswear giants know, is no easy task.
It’s true that some of the most followed and commercially successful sports brands populate the bottom right of our matrix in Lulu Lemon, Alo Yoga and Prism. And whilst hugely popular, it can be argued that these brands are higher quality, rather than higher performance.
Whilst it's generally accepted that women shop style-first, performance second we believe that there is a customer shift at play. More women are participating in high performance sporting events like marathons, ultras, or iron man competitions than ever before. Even at amateur level, performance is becoming a status symbol with apps like Strava and Runna providing the foundation for a new kind of social flex; the fastest 5k time.
We’re also seeing female influencers freely sharing their high performance fitness journey’s next to their creative work and fashion-forward lifestyles. Often in the form of Strava screenshots uploaded as Instagram highlights or full posts dedicated to their outfit choices.
Yet, a cursory look at the crowd at the London marathon in April revealed a distinct lack of female founded performance running brands designed for her. Her version of Satisfy Running, if you will. And let’s face it, the now clichéd ‘shrinking and pinking’ strategy particularly prevalent in the footwear market just isn’t going to cut it.
What The Data Shows
Look at the numbers and the gap becomes clearer.
1. Performance is Male Dominated
First, of the 44 brands we mapped, just ten were founded by women and 6 explicitly designed for women. And only the emerging Pruzan scores above 6 on performance. In other words, The most technically credible brands in the data — Soar, Satisfy, Pas Normal, 4T2 — remain male-skewed in both design and audience. Pas Normal’s Instagram following is 74% male, for example.
2. The Unisex Trap
The rest? Mostly unisex — which, in practice, usually means male-default. Very few brands in this space are actually built around female bodies, needs, or performance ambitions. And when you narrow the lens to high-performance running brands, that number drops even further – all male-founded, male-coded, and male-sized.
Brands claiming unisex positioning reveal their true bias through audience demographics. The majority of technical independents from the top-right quadrant skew 70%+ male, while lifestyle brands like Lululemon skew 78% female. This suggests that women are either settling for male-default technical gear or choosing lifestyle brands that prioritize lifestyle aesthetics over performance.
3. Female Founders Cluster Lifestyle
Of the 10+ female-founded brands in the sheet, almost all score between 1 and 5 on the performance axis: Girlfriend Collective, Set Active, Outdoor Voices, Oner Active, TALA and Halara, to name a few. These are smart, scalable businesses — but prioritise comfort, aesthetic, and empowerment, not breathability, pace, or PBs.
The exceptions? New female led brands that are early movers on the female centric performance space: LNDR, Philos and PRUZAN.
The Aesthete Generation
Take a look at the top left quadrant populated by the likes of District Vision, Pas Normal, UVU et al. It could be argued that their competitive advantage comes from a dialled up creative lens driven by culturally savvy founders. Satisfy didn’t re-invent running shorts, but they did find a consumer group hungry for more cultural depth and offered them something that resonates.
Satisfy continuously plays in sub-culture. From recent western inspired campaigns, collaborations with Our Legacy Workshop, and clear references to founder and Creative Director, Brice Partouche’s, love for skate and music. Their palette for storytelling, nuance and sharp eye for an alluring reference sets them apart. To be incredibly reductive, the formula is rather simple: performance fabrics + cultural direction = Satisfy.
But the Aesthete (aesthetic athlete), is not male exclusive. We have noticed an uptick in customers hyper-styling their running fits in the female category. This is a customer with taste. She doesn’t want just another branded crop top. She wants a kit that reflects her intensity, her aesthetic, and her ambition. But right now, it seems she is stitching that story together herself — one unisex short, one resale find, and one DIY run club at a time.
The Opportunity: New and Niche
We don’t need another pair of leggings. And we don’t need another pastel rebrand of performancewear. Right now, there’s an obvious, unclaimed space for a women’s performance brand with rigour. Something built from the ground up and not adapted from menswear or softened for mass appeal. The target market might not be as big as the perception mapping might suggest, but all great things start small.
So imagine a brand with:
- The aesthetic discipline of Pas Normal that is clear, elevated, exacting.
- The cultural literacy of Satisfy that is tapped into the right artists, cities, subcultures.
- The product integrity of Bandit that is built to race, not just pose.
- And the clarity of voice and point of view that only a female founder can bring to the category.
One soon-to-launch brand caught our eye. Aesene started life as an online community led by sisters Megan Davis, a women's performance coach and Lucy Davis, hybrid athlete and former international swimmer. Just over a week ago, Lucy took to Instagram to announce the development of their brand. "taking a massive risk - but like everything we do we in life, we have each other. we believe in one another. sisterhood started our journey in athletics, and now we are bringing this into this brand".
It is unclear when the launch will take place and the Aesene community page recently shared that they are still in the early stages of sampling and testing. But judging by the content we have seen, the pair are creating something distinctively original and well placed to capitalise on the womens performance whitespace.
And so, to close. This is not just for the runner girl on TikTok. But for the woman who trains hard and wants her gear to reflect her taste and pace.
This isn’t about pink-washing an old blueprint. It’s about drawing a new one. One that doesn’t borrow from the men’s side of the locker room.
One that starts with her, her goals, her body, her pace, her taste.