“It would be very weird to me if I didn’t feel comfortable in a store dripping sweat.”

Tim West says this as though it were obvious, which is perhaps why nobody in running retail had thought it through before him. The founder and creative director of Bandit takes it as a first principle that a space belonging to a running brand should serve a runner before, during and after a run – not merely sell to them. “It’s very intuitive to us,” he says.

In September, at a location just a short jog from the Mediterranean, that principle gets its fullest expression yet. Tempo Journal can exclusively reveal that Bandit’s newest store, in Barcelona, will be fitted with ice baths, a sauna, showers, lockers, an outdoor garden and a co-working listening cafe. There’ll be a refrigerator of free drinks by the door for Bandit Members. In other words, everything a runner might need. Oh yeah, it will also have Bandit gear for sale. But only if you want to buy something; Tim insists you’re just as welcome if you’re not actively shopping. 

It is Bandit’s first permanent store outside the United States, and it is not solely the New York brand’s. The space belongs equally to ODDA, the Madrid specialty retailer that Bandit has spent the better part of two years building a relationship with through a wholesale account, a friendship struck over Zoom, a joint pop-up at the Barcelona Marathon in March. When the Bandit and ODDA teams sat down for lunch in Mexico City during marathon weekend last year, the ODDA team said, “We can get a space just for us, or we can get a bigger space and join forces to build a unique experience together for the local community.” 

A specialty store like ODDA might reasonably see a fast-growing American apparel label as a threat. But Bandit has spent six years making itself the kind of brand another independent outfit rings for help rather than braces against. “We would never want to cannibalise retail specialty,” Tim says. “We see them as the fabric of the sport.”

From Two Socks to Six Continents

When Tempo last sat down with Tim, in February 2022, Bandit was only weeks into relaunching itself as a technical apparel label. The whole thing had started with one man in a basement apartment in Williamsburg and two kinds of socks, run like a streetwear brand on drops rather than seasons. The vision he set out then – to build the next great running apparel brand – was ambitious for a company he wasn’t sure would still exist six months later. “When I was sitting on the phone with you four years ago,” he says, “I didn’t know how the very first launch of our performance product was going to be received.”

Four and a half years on, the answer is emphatic. Bandit now runs stores in Brooklyn, Manhattan, Los Angeles and Chicago, is stocked by dozens of retailers across all six continents and, according to Pitchbook, has raised millions of dollars to fund the climb. The socks are still there. So is almost everything else, layered on top. What hasn’t changed is the framing Tim keeps on the wall at the brand’s headquarters. “The mission is to evolve running,” he says, “and the vision is to be the world’s most community-centric brand.” 

Community Was Never a Tactic

That word, “community”, has since been worn smooth – or run ragged – by every marketing deck in the sport, something Tim is wry about. “When I started the brand and we were talking about community, it didn’t cross my brain as a marketing thing,” he says. “Now when you hear it, that’s all you think about.”

Bandit’s sincerity shows most clearly where the money doesn’t go. Less than 6 per cent of the brand’s marketing spend goes to digital ads, a figure Tim cheerfully calls abnormal. “If we wanted to grow a lot faster, we would not do The Program and the Bandit Grand Prix. We would take all that money, put it into ads and get more customers,” he says. “But that’s not the brand we want to build.” 

The Program is Bandit’s 16-week guided training block for the full and half marathon, run in person and through an app, overseen by Evan Schwartz of Boulder’s The Track Club. The Grand Prix is an F1-styled race festival with 5km heats and a 3km final, staged inside a Brooklyn music venue with a DJ, an afterparty and a spectator pen. This year it drew runners from 21 countries. Neither is the fastest route to a sale. Both, Tim argues, are the point. “The way we grew was really intentional,” he says. “It revolved around how we wanted to bring a running brand into the world.” 

Fictional Worlds and Very Real Mornings

If the community work is the foundation, Bandit’s campaign films are the flourish. And lately they have become extraordinary. Tim splits the brand’s output in two. There are the marathon capsules, where Bandit lets itself get weird: the NYC-inspired Welcome to Run City film that traps a runner inside a dystopian CD-ROM; a Boston campaign built like “a Phil Collins music video” around a suburban gardener; a Chicago capsule launched off a wind simulator because visiting runners fret about the wind. “When your brand is variety, you can try anything,” he says. “Sometimes I want to hit you in the feels, sometimes I want to make you laugh, sometimes I want to hype you up and make you run through a wall.” 

Then there are the seasonal collection films, which over the past two seasons have turned inward and quiet. The spring release, Quiet Miles, followed a groggy early-morning runner and hung on a single line Tim wrote at his desk – “my legs warm up my mind” – voiced by his young nephew to prod at the viewer’s inner child. The summer film, Sin Prisa, was the brand’s first two-parter, a story about friends on a running trip torn between leisure and the pull of home. 

The craft has a lot to do with two people: art director Tatum Dorell, who joined in early 2026 and is a large part of why the seasonal work now looks cinematic, and director Henry Kornaros, who has shot many of Bandit’s most striking recent films, from Welcome to Run City to the Iceland winter campaign.

A Store You Can Sweat In

The Barcelona fit-out is the latest iteration of a rollout that has been sharpening store by store. The West Village flagship was built to be a cafe-and-hangout at the front with retail at the back, and hosts The Program twice a week. Chicago, which opened in December, took it further: wipe-clean concrete poured to hide sweat, stadium seating, a giant garage door. In the launch caption, retail was the last thing mentioned. “Somebody commented, ‘I love that retail is the last thing you guys say about this store,’” Tim says. “If you lead with ‘buy this, and also you’re allowed to hang out’, it’s a weird vibe.” 

Each new opening is a chance to try something new with this running-first approach: “Store after store, we’re making improvements,” Tim says. The shared-space model, meanwhile, was one Bandit first trialled in Los Angeles, when its wholesale partner Renegade Running offered the unit next door. More stores are coming in key cities, he says, each intentionally sited along running routes and designed as third spaces for runners. 

The Unsponsored Project

For all the retail and moving-image content, the initiative Tim is proudest of costs Bandit money and returns no direct profit. The Unsponsored Project, launched in 2023, part-funds unsponsored track and field athletes to reach the USA Track & Field Championships. It backed 10 athletes in its first year, 36 the next and 50 in 2025, several of whom parlayed the exposure into deals with the majors. 

“The first year we did it, it was kind of crickets,” Tim says. “The second year it gained a ton of attention, and I remember this overwhelming feeling of pride, because Bandit had become synonymous with being good for the sport.” 

When this year’s US Championships were staged on home turf at Icahn Stadium in late July, Bandit supported 80 athletes and bought 150 tickets to bus its community out to watch. The dream for 2027 is to spin the project off into a standalone non-profit.

The Unsponsored Project is also where Bandit’s investors quietly earn their keep, though Tim would rather not discuss them. “People can be skeptical when brands take on investors. Ours are fantastic and aligned on how we want to build the brand,” he says. Backers include former pro baseball player Alex “A-Rod” Rodriguez and Tim’s first boss at his previous companies, Marc Lore. Bandit meets its investors four times a year to tell them what is going on, never the reverse. “I always joke that I’ll gladly take money and give it to unsponsored athletes,” he says. “I think if they read that, they would laugh.” 

The Michael Jordan of Performance Design

Bandit’s other engine is its product, and here Tim borderline chokes up. Co-founder and chief design officer Ardith Singh is, in his words, “the Michael Jordan of performance design” – a line he first floated in these pages four years ago. “That was me calling my shot, and I think that shot went in,” he says.

Her Nova Crop, with gel pockets built into the back of a women’s top for the first time, won a place on Time’s Best Inventions of 2024; the idea has since been copied across the industry. Her latest, a compression fabric called Vanisher, is engineered not to show sweat stains. “It’s changing people’s confidence,” Tim says. “It’s one less thing to be self-conscious about.” 

Partly, Ardith’s keen instincts reflect who Bandit is for. The design team is entirely women, most of HQ is women, and the brand sells more women’s products than men’s. “Women have been underserved forever,” Tim says. “We’re extremely proud to support them with product that is both flattering and high-performing.” 

It has been said of the three founders that one bleeds brand, one bleeds business and one bleeds design: Tim, his CEO brother Nick and Ardith, respectively. Tim concedes there is some truth to this but feels it sells Nick short. “Nick also bleeds brand. I collaborate with him on just about anything that I create on the brand side, and he makes it better. He has incredible taste and really good instincts.”

Behind the founders sit a bench of lifers – including friend-of-Tempo Tim Rossi on experiential marketing and Steve Finley on community – who, West says, keep the brand balanced between selling and giving back. These two lead Bandit’s GFTS (good for the sport) initiatives, which spawned The Program, the Unsponsored Project, their OTQ Program and, as a regular donor, being the presenting sponsor of the Brooklyn chapter of Fast Feet NYC, a nonprofit working with children with developmental differences and physical disabilities to provide them with adaptive running programs. 

Knowing Who You Are

Running is littered lately with formerly untouchable brands that tripped into corniness or a tone-deaf slogan and got dragged for it. Asked whether he sees the same trap ahead, Tim doesn’t pretend he is immune. “It would be naive to say we’re going to be perfect,” he says. “Every brand missteps eventually. From the wrong billboard message to an event that doesn’t resonate, at a certain scale you won’t make everyone happy all the time.” 

His hedge against it is to imagine the worst. At the start of every year the team writes Bandit’s obituary: Here lies Bandit. It died because … Tim’s answer is always the same: the team fell apart and people left, taking their passion with them. “You can’t hire that back,” he says. The counter is to keep everyone in the room. “We know who we are. We’re not trying to discover ourselves, and we’re not trying to reinvent ourselves.” 

Bandit is not immune to another risk of scale, either. “Eventually you get so big that not everybody knows you intimately,” he concedes. Tim’s bet is that the community he built extends enough grace to weather it. “But our community knows we care, and gives us a lot of grace.” 

As for the next five years, the ambition is almost anticlimactic. “More of the same, but better,” Tim says. “Our product is going to continue to evolve. Our experiences will evolve, our stories, our stores.

“When I’m thinking about blue-sky vision, all I can ever say is that we have the people, we have the product. I think we have a brand that can continue to grow and be as great as we want it to be. Everyone here is really ambitious. We all want to fulfill our individual potential, but also the potential of the brand, and we do not see a ceiling.”