Lifestyle
Boston Pride: Conversations with Matt Taylor
The Tracksmith founder gives us the lowdown on Boston running culture
When Tracksmith burst onto the running apparel scene back in mid 2014, some questioned the wisdom of getting into an industry dominated by some of the biggest brands in the world.
But Matt Taylor saw something no one else did, and three and half years later Tracksmith is a flourishing up-and-comer with an appreciation for the history of running in its native New England.
I spent some time with Taylor at Tracksmith’s Trackhouse HQ in Boston, where he had just returned from crewing for the Tracksmith team at The Speed Project. It’s 5 days before the 2018 Boston Marathon and the city is awash with runners.
Here is a lightly edited transcript of my conversation with Matt Taylor.
We’re a couple of weeks post The Speed Project, where of course the Tracksmith team had an amazing battle with the Sunchasers from France, coming in second by about 10 minutes after a nearly 36-hour battle. Whose idea was it to do TSP?
We covered The Speed Project for METER in TSP 2.0, so we kinda knew about the race, and then every year we create a Relay kit. In 2016, an Olympic year, the kits were inspired by track and field, so details like the lines on a track, those type of things, and then in 2017 our Relay kit was inspired by a relay race that used to exist from Plymouth to Provincetown (Ed: the last running of the race was back in 1988). This year we decided to base our relay kits on TSP from a design perspective, evident in the bright colours which are inspired by elements like the water at Santa Monica, the bright sun, the sand, and the other colours of the desert.
The funny thing is we actually barely made it to the start line of TSP! Two of our original 6 runners got injured right before the race, so 2 of our support crew ended up getting called up to race, which is a credit to them for being up for it.
The Speed Project brings together so many different parts of global running community. As a running purist, what did you make of it?
It’s a totally different world for me, and you’re right, I’m a traditionalist. I was a little bit unsure of what it would be like, but the competitive element is what made it amazing for us.
If there hadn’t been this competitive head-to-head element then it would have been a very different experience for us, but the aspect of team competition was appealing for our runners because most of them ran in college or high school and love that camaraderie.
Learning the relay kits are inspired by something like TSP this year, how important is that authentic connection to the sport for you?
It’s critical. Everything we do comes from an authentic point of inspiration in running culture. That’s something we’ve done from the very beginning and I think it’s one of the things that makes us distinct in the industry.
As Tracksmith grows, how hard is it for you to take your hands off things?
It’s getting to the point now where I need to be less hands on in some areas. Some people will say I still get involved in more than I should!
Really it’s just anything that’s public facing I like to at least see. I’m mentally prepared to start letting go of a few areas. My background is in brand marketing, I never had a finance or operations background or anything so it has been rewarding to learn about other areas of a business, but I still love the marketing piece.
How involved are you in the product development side of the business?
Every season I sit down with our head of product, Brian, and together we map out conceptually what we want to do. So we look at the stories we want to tell as a brand, and that then drives the product. So my involvement in product is a lot more conceptual.
Right now we’re looking out to Spring ‘19 and thinking about the stories we want to tell, and then the product team will take that and work with it.
"Everything we do comes from an authentic point of inspiration in running culture.
That’s something we’ve done from the very beginning and I think it’s one of the things that makes us distinct in the industry"
Matt Taylor
Do you ever get the younger guys from the brand giving you feedback on the type of products they want to wear?
The best example is the half tights. I said to the team ‘if you guys really want them, lets do them but not a lot, I’m just not seeing it’ and now we can’t keep them in stock.
There’s a generational gap between us so naturally sometimes they have different reference points or takes on the sport, which is always interesting.
The brand is three and half, nearly four years old. Is this the progress you thought you would make in that space of time, or has the growth surpassed your expectations?
I would say it’s progressing as planned. In the beginning I was looking maybe three years ahead and what things may look like, and then when we became operational I was looking only a few weeks out, it gets a little crazy when you’re into it.
We’re doing a better job now of looking further out into the future and planning further out.
The way we approached those first three years were two very distinct phases of the brand. The first 18 months was about establishing the brand as quickly as we could in the right way. So we did things that didn’t make a lot of sense on paper, things that probably looked like over-investment for a brand of our size; things like photography and asset creation, that we knew were super important to be able to establish a brand that felt authentic and real, and maybe that felt like it had been around for longer than it had.
Once we got to a point where we felt good and had some processes in place, and felt like we knew how to do those asset creation and branding pieces, then we focused on the unit economics of the business, like trying to make it a sustainable business model and grow the brand. That’s really been the focus for the last 18 months. Where we are now feels like where we are supposed to be, so now it’s just seeing what the trajectory looks like from here. The last 12 months we’ve had some great momentum, so we want to keep that going but in a sustainable way.
That said, we’re at a point where we can start to get a bit more aggressive.
Right now we’re seeing the rise of a number of smaller brands in running apparel that are choosing to specialise in one particular aspect, be that caps, socks, sunglasses, etc. What’s your take on that and how do you see it playing out?
I think it’s just a product of the era we live in. Entrepreneurship is much more common now, kids go to college wanting to start companies, they don’t go just wanting to become doctors or lawyers. So it has some cultural momentum.
The other big factor is the Internet; it makes the barrier to entry so much lower. You don’t have to convince a wholesaler to carry your stuff, you can do it all yourself online.
It would be really interesting to know if there were these attempts in the 70’s and 80’s that just weren’t documented because we didn’t have the Internet. Maybe they were just really regional and grew to a decent size but we never heard of them.
I think it’s great, I love all these little brands. All the big brands started that way, and some of us are gonna make it.
When will you feel like you’ve made it as a brand?
That’s a good question. I feel a great deal of pride with what we’ve accomplished in this period of time, and the team we have built is incredible, so I feel a lot of accomplishment about that. I don’t know what ‘making it’ would feel like, I don’t think that comes through a revenue target or recognition, I don’t know what that is. But having our own retail store now and having some momentum gives me a sense of accomplishment, but we still have a long long way to go.
What does marathon week in Boston mean to you?
It's crazy, but in a good way. What’s unique about Boston is that the race is on a Monday. It’s a holiday here in Massachusetts. It’s also sometimes the first period of warmer weather, so that all combines to create this great party atmosphere. The build up really starts on the Thursday, you can feel it, and it goes right through to Tuesday, and whether its sunny or raining or snowing, it’s like Christmas for us.
We were in this space last year (The Trackhouse) so we know what to expect. There will be times where our space will have 100+ people shoulder to shoulder, it should be crazy.
Are you running much at the moment?
I actually have a torn labrum in my hip right now. I ran a little bit at TSP in Death Valley when things got intense to just try and help the team. I shouldn’t have but I couldn’t help myself.
I turned 40 last year, so right now I’m looking for some new challenges in running. Last year I actually used Nick Willis’ mile training program and raced a couple of masters mile races which was a lot of fun. Once I get healthy again I’ll stick to those, it suits my schedule a bit better versus marathon training, especially with two kids.
Talk to me about the running culture in this city outside of marathon week. Being out there this morning in 0 degrees celsius, there were a lot of runners out. I feel like you have to be tough to be a runner in Boston.
I think historically Boston feels like the heart and soul of the running community, certainly in the USA but maybe even globally. There are bigger cities, there are cities with more people, but there's something really unique about Boston and its history. The fact that Marathon Monday is a holiday has created a really unique culture for running.
We have harsh winters, but even through December and January you’ll see people out running by the river. We also have a lot of universities so there are a lot of college teams. That’s an element that other big running cities, even somewhere like New York City just doesn’t have.
"Running is an important part of our identity.
The marathon is something Boston takes a lot of pride in"
Matt Taylor
If you go all the way back to the Bill Rodgers era (Ed: Rodgers famously won 4 Boston Marathons and 4 New York Marathons in the late 70’s), all the best guys were training in Boston.
Now of course with altitude and access to the right facilities and what not, a lot of people want to train on the west coast, but again we’re starting to see this great community of kids straight out of college who live and train in Massachusetts. It’s coming back a little bit.
Do you still get a buzz when you see people wearing the brand out in public?
I do get excited. It took me a long time after launch to see it out in the wild, but now if you go down to the river where people are running you’re much more likely to see it.
Even with the BQ singlets, the first year we did it we had maybe 50 people wearing them in the race. It grows each year, and this year we’ll have several hundred people wearing it, and they’ll all be in the top ¼ of the race because they're all BQ’d. So it’s kind of amazing that for our size we’ve created such strong representation. There's so many other running brands here, but we’ve been able to really tell the story of Boston's history and culture.
We’re really proud that we’re from New England, it’s part of the brand.
Speaking of the BQ singlets and Tracksmith’s involvement on race day, what’s with all the bananas this year?
Rafa, our Creative Director, has this thing about the banana being ‘the humble fruit’. It’s so ingrained in running culture; they hand out bananas at races right around the world.
Coincidentally the BQ singlet this year is white with yellow, and then we had the banana bandana, which came about because we were thinking of the things that are synonymous with running; bagels, bananas, beer, and coffee. Those are our staples.
So we decided to do more with it. We called Ciele (the Canadian running cap brand) very recently, only maybe 6 weeks ago, who we have worked with before and asked if they could do a yellow hat in time for Boston. We also commissioned a writer to produce a feature on the history of bananas in running and how they even came to America. That’s in a broadsheet that we created for the event.
Runners will also get to see the banana print on race day as we’ve tagged part of the course with bananas.
BQ’s that come to the Trackhouse this weekend can pick up a race pack for free that has a banana cap, bandana, the broadsheet, and of course a banana.
We’re hoping to create a sea of yellow out there on Monday.
You’ve been doing limited release gear for the marathon majors now for a little while. How has that been received?
The response has been great, the gear sells out pretty quick and there’s a lot of interest. We were actually in Tokyo this year with NOAH at their store, we had a very small presence there. Unfortunately, we won’t get to London this year with everything we have on in Boston.
Producing limited edition kits is step 1 in thinking about those key moments, step 2 would be thinking about how we establish that physical connection with runners at those events.
Is step 2 a focus for the immediate future? What else can we expect from the brand in the next 6-12 months?
I would say in the next year we’ll be more present physically. I don’t know how that will occur or what it looks like, but it’s something that we’ve identified as being important.
We’ve never had the approach that we would be online only, it just takes time and resources to do physical spaces properly.
Other than that, we’re not going to change too much, because we’re still new to most people, so even though internally sometimes it feels like ‘oh we’re doing this again’, most people are still discovering us. So we just have to have some confidence and patience that over time we’ll reach a broader and broader audience.
The international part of the business is interesting. It’s actually pretty healthy in terms of a percentage of sales, and that’s with zero focus really, except for the Tokyo and London capsule collections. Growing that is obviously something that is of interest to us, and that comes back to that point about running not being constrained by geography.
So we’re looking at how we can reduce those barriers for people shopping overseas. We know that import duties are prohibitive for a lot of customers so we’re looking at how we can fix that without opening up other offices.
Editor's Note: As I've spent more time around Matt Taylor and the wider team over the days I've been in Boston, I'm struck by their deep love for the sport.
Everyone here is a running junkie. Not a running nerd, which is something else all together, but a running junkie.
The people that work here need to run, but it's treated as something that they could take or leave, even though when you ask them they all rattle off meticulous schedules or goals based on hours upon hours of planning.
Wherever the brand ends up in the next 12 months, 2 years, or beyond, I walk away with a new appreciation for the tenacity and commitment of the Boston running community.
